Down through the years, I've documented here on ShukerNature, and subsequently in various of my books, a number of mysterious creatures featured in certain famous works of literary fiction, investigating their possible origins, in particular the real-life animals that may have inspired their creation.
Such book-dwelling beasts chronicled by me include (but are by no means limited to): the Cheshire cat and the mock turtle from Lewis Carroll's classic children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (click here and here to read my respective accounts of them); the tiny but deadly snakeling Karait from Rudyard Kipling's stand-alone short story 'Rikki-Tikki-Tavi' (click here); the rather larger but no less lethal Indian swamp adder (aka the Speckled Band) and the giant rat of Sumatra confronted by the great detective Sherlock Holmes (click here and here); the dream-like hound of the hedges from Charles G. Finney's celebrated fantasy novel The Circus of Dr Lao (click here); the wild were-worms of the Last Desert as referred to by Bilbo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (click here); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's huge Brazilian black cat (click here); Ron Weasley's giant spider nemesis in a Harry Potter novel (click here); plus a veritable menagerie of scientifically-unrecognised fauna, from a purple bird of paradise and gigantic luna moths that really are from the moon to some shy living dinosaurs, a giant pink sea snail, and the incredible bicranial pushmi-pullyu, all inhabiting the delightful Doctor Dolittle novels written by Hugh Lofting (click here, here, and here).
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As it's been a quite while since I last wrote about any such literary cryptids, however, I feel that it's high time I did so again – and what better source to choose from than Lewis Carroll's second Alice book, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (to give it its full title), which was published in 1871, six years after Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. As a child I enjoyed this sequel novel even more than the original, afore-mentioned Alice book, because its storyline and characters were far less familiar to me.
In particular, I was fascinated by the poem 'Jabberwocky', one of the world's best known nonsense poems. Alice encounters it quite early in Through the Looking-Glass, but as it is written in mirror-image format, she initially finds its verses difficult to read. Moreover, even when she is able to read their reflection in the titular looking-glass, she still cannot understand them because she discovers that they are packed with bizarre made-up words – words that confused but captivated me just as much as they did with Alice, until she encountered the nursery-rhyme character Humpty Dumpty, a self-proclaimed etymological expert, who explained many of them to her.
Moreover, the latent cryptozoologist stirring within me even as a youngster meant that I was additionally fascinated by this poem's tantalizingly brief, ambiguous references to a number of strange-sounding beasts that seemed endemic to Looking-Glass Land – creatures like the slithy toves, for instance, or the bandersnatch, the borogoves, the mome raths, and, needles to say, the eponymous monster itself, the jabberwock. Some of these were succinctly described by Humpty Dumpty, but others were not, thereby remaining enigmatic and elusive. Consequently, down through the years my childhood memories of this poem have inspired me to seek out further information concerning its fabulous if fictitious fauna in the hope of determining what kinds of creatures they were – and here is what I've found out.
As Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice, many of those weird words in 'Jabberwocky' are portmanteaus, i.e. they have been formed by combining two or more separate, well-known words together to yield a totally new albeit far less familiar one. 'Slithy', for instance, arises from the combination of 'slimy' and 'lithe', 'frumious' from 'fuming' and 'furious', 'mimsy' from 'flimsy' and 'miserable', 'chortled' from 'chuckled' and 'snorted', and so forth (Humpty Dumpty elucidating most of these for Alice). Then there are some that are simply extrapolations from existing words, such as 'beamish', defined by Carroll as beaming radiantly with joy or happiness (though, interestingly, scholars have subsequently discovered that this is one peculiar-sounding word in 'Jabberwocky' that Carroll did not invent, its usage having been traced back as far as 1530).
For the most part, however, such forms of word derivation do not assist in revealing the respective natures of the various anomalous animals mentioned in 'Jabberwocky'. Consequently, it is fortunate that between Humpty Dumpty's in-book revelations, the accompanying illustrations prepared by Sir John Tenniel (who had previously prepared those that had illustrated the first Alice book), and various explanatory notes made by Carroll in a publication that preceded Through the Looking-Glass's first printing by almost 20 years, much of the mystery surrounding them can be dissipated.
The publication preceding Through the Looking-Glass was a periodical entitled Mischmasch, written and illustrated by Carroll himself, which was published in 1855. It was here in which the original, significantly shorter version of 'Jabberwocky' first appeared, consisting of just the first verse of what would subsequently become the full multi-verse version in Through the Looking-Glass, published 16 years later. Needless to say, therefore, as the jabberwock itself is not actually mentioned in the first verse, that original single-verse version was not titled 'Jabberwocky'. Instead, Caroll dubbed it 'Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry'. And as will be seen, it is very intriguing how Carroll's concept of what some of his fictional creatures look like changed quite dramatically from his descriptions of them in this periodical to his descriptions of them (as verbalized via Humpty Dumpty) in the novel.
So let's begin our annotated checklist of the 'Jabberwocky' wildlife. The creatures first mentioned in it are the slithy toves, which as noted earlier are apparently slimy and lithe, and are the subjects of the most detailed description of any creature name-checked in the poem. According to Humpty Dumpty:
Toves are something like badgers, they're something like lizards, and they're something like corkscrews...Also they make their nests under sun-dials, also they live on cheese.
And that is still not all. For as noted in the poem, they "gyre and gimble in the wabe", which as defined by Humpty Dumpty means that they go round and round like a gyroscope, and bore holes like a gimlet. As for the wabe, he states that this is the grass plot around a sundial (where the toves make their nests) and is so named because it "goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it".
Conversely, back in 1855 Carroll described the toves quite differently in Mischmasch, stating that they were "a species of Badger [which] had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag [and] lived chiefly on cheese". Moreover, rather than defining the wabe as the grass plot around a sundial, he claimed that it was the side of a hill.
Moving on to the borogoves, they are described merely as mimsy in the poem itself, which as we have seen earlier indicates that they are flimsy and miserable. However, Humpty Dumpty expands upon this briefest of accounts by stating that a "borogove is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round, something like a live mop". Tenniel's picture illustrates them as vaguely stork-like, with very long legs (one of them is kneeling, so its lengthy legs are largely concealed beneath its body). Conversely, again, in his Mischmasch periodical Carroll had described this species as: "An extinct kind of Parrot. They had no wings, beaks turned up, and made their nests under sun-dials: lived on veal". Interestingly, therefore, it would appear that when writing Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll transferred to the toves the distinctive habit of making their nests under sundials that he had originally attributed in Mischmasch to the borogoves.
Now we come to my favourite members of the 'Jabberwocky' zoo (though you've probably already guessed that, by virtue of their pictorial preponderance in this blog article!). Namely, the mome raths. Humpty Dumpty merely describes them as "a sort of green pig", whereas in perhaps his single most dramatic change of identity for any animal referred to in this poem, Carroll stated in Mischmasch:
'Rath' is "a species of land turtle. Head erect, mouth like a shark, the front forelegs curved out so that the animal walked on its knees, smooth green body, lived on swallows and oysters.
Transforming from a green land turtle to a green pig in just 16 years is quite a metamorphosis, that's for sure! Having said that, I personally consider a small long-snouted green pig to be a much more delightful concept than a shark-mouthed, knee-walking land turtle, green-coloured or otherwise. And speaking of long-snouted: Tenniel appears to have been wholly responsible for giving that particular characteristic to the quartet of mome raths depicted by him, an example of artistic licence, perhaps, as it certainly does not feature in either of the verbal portraits quoted above for this porcine species.
Perhaps the most unexpected of all portrayals of the mome raths, however, appears in Walt Disney's classic 1951 animated feature film Alice in Wonderland. One rather sad, downbeat scene features a tearful Alice having inadvertently become lost in the dark, forbidding Tulgey Wood, home of the jabberwock (but never seen in this movie version). Suddenly, a voice breaks the somber stillness, warning Alice somewhat peremptorily not to step on the mome raths. Shocked, she looks down, and there all around her are small entities resembling flowers but walking on two tiny legs. These very atypical mome raths duly assemble themselves in various shapes, culminating in a large arrow that points to the route leading out of Tulgey Wood, which a very thankful Alice swiftly follows. Although these floral mome raths are certainly endearing (albeit inexplicable!), I feel that some animated green pigs would have been more appealing to this movie's viewers, as well as being far more in-keeping with its somewhat psychedelic visuals.
But now to the descriptive component of this creature's name – from where is the 'mome' in 'mome rath' derived? Here, for the first time, we find little (if any) satisfactory explanations. Even the etymological egomaniac that is Humpty Dumpty confesses to Alice that he is uncertain regarding the derivation of 'mome' – an admission indeed! – offering only this vaguely hopeful suggestion: "I think it's short for 'from home', meaning that they'd lost their way, you know". Rather like Little Bo Peep's sheep, then? As for 'rath': whenever I read 'Jabberwocky' as a child, 'rath' always reminded me of the word 'rasher' – who knows, perhaps I was onto something!
And with regard to this poem's claim that "the mome raths outgrabe", Humpty Dumpty reveals that "'outgribing' is something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle" (with 'outgrabe' being the past tense of 'outgribe'). So now we know!
Moving now into the second verse of 'Jabberwocky', it includes three more mystery beasts, the first, and also the foremost, of these being this poem's eponymous beast itself – the jabberwock. Yet in spite of its being the title character, very little descriptive information is provided for this monster. It is said to have "jaws that bite" and "claws that catch", which apart from confirming that it does indeed possess these particular anatomical accoutrements is of very little use, bearing in mind that their respective, exceedingly succinct one-verb descriptions fit the activity of the jaws and claws of most animals thus equipped.
The only other details provided are the statements in the fourth verse that the jabberwock has "eyes of flame", that it "came whiffling through the tulgey wood", and that it "burbled". The first statement is self-explanatory, and so, in a sense, is "whiffling" – for instead of being a Carrollian invention, this is a real word whose usage can be traced back as far as 1568, and is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as emitting or producing a light whistling or puffing sound. As for "burbled", Carroll stated in a letter dating from 1877 (six years after Through the Looking-Glass was published) that he didn't remember creating it, but surmised that it may be a composite of 'bleat', 'murmur', and 'warble'. Interestingly, 'burble' subsequently entered the English language as an accepted word, and today is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a verb that means to make a bubbling sound, and also to babble or prattle, plus a noun that means prattle. So, surprisingly, it looks like when pondering the origin of 'burble', Carroll didn't consider two words that seem much more likely to have been bona fide components of it, namely 'bubble' and 'babble', than either 'bleat' or 'murmur' (though his third proposed component, 'warble', does still seems promising as a contender in this capacity).
Due to the scarcity of morphological details provided in thje poem, Tenniel was evidently given free rein when preparing his detailed full-page illustration of the jabberwock, which is reproduced in vintage colorized form below. As can be seen, Tenniel's terror is a most curious creature – combining a very lengthy elongate neck and tail, a pair of insect-like antennae, and a pair of catfish-like mouth barbels with huge bat-like wings, long bushy side-whiskers, and the incisors of a rabbit, plus, just for good monstrous measure, no doubt, it is wearing a very natty waistcoat!
The other two mystery beasts name-checked in the second verse are the jubjub bird and the frumious bandersnatch. No details whatsoever are given in it regarding the jubjub bird, but as the father in the poem tells his son to beware both of these entities, we must assume that they were dangerous ones. The only additional clue regarding the bandersnatch is Carroll's use of the portmanteau adjective 'frumious' to describe it. This is a word that Carroll deferred from defining until a few years later, in the preface to his lengthy stand-alone nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark, published in 1876, and in which both the jubjub bird and the bandersnatch reappear. Two of this latter poem's main characters hear the jubjub bird's very scary cry (described as a shrill and high scream), whereas a third main character is attacked by the bandersnatch and is driven insane after trying to bribe it. In this composition's preface, Carroll states that 'frumious' is a composite of 'fuming' and 'furious', so clearly the bandersnatch is a beast best avoided!
Meanwhile, here is a very charming but somewhat idiosyncratic illustration from 1902 depicting the jubjub bird and the bandersnatch, prepared by Peter Newell (1862-1924), an American artist and writer of children's books, in which neither of these creatures seems even remotely belligerent, let alone frumious:
No further creatures appear in 'Jabberwocky', but those that are present there have frustrated and fascinated generations of readers eager to learn more about them, and no doubt will continue to so for the foreseeable future.
Except for this ShukerNature blog article's opening photograph of a mome rath, which I created by digitally manipulating a public-domain stock photo of a typical shorter-snouted pink porker, all mome rath illustrations included here (as well as the first jabberwock illustration) were created by MagicStudio.
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