Posted March 27, 2018 by Svitlana Blog

How the Jabberwock got his name

A well-known fact is that the work of human brain has been of interest not only to scientists but to ordinary people as well. And mind is of even higher interest. Really, it’s astonishing how your mind chooses all those associations, connections, interactions, reactions and feelings for you. Especially, when you are trying to make something up. While thinking on the name for my future language website, my mind made one of such unexpected moves and offered a solution: Jabberwocky. Later, trying to analyse the mind’s choice, I concluded that the idea wasn’t totally sudden after all. Jabberwocky written by L.Carroll is believed to be the most famous, bright, original and captivating nonsense poem, a fine example of what you can do to the language (or what the language can do to you).

What’s in a name?

Carroll included the poem in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There¹ though the idea of the poem alongside with the first stanza appeared far before the publication of Alice’s adventures. In the poem the author uses nonsense words, neologisms and portmanteaus. Many of them are of his own invention which results in creating a vivid, playful language. Moreover, portmanteaus are now widely used in linguistics as a term for blended words.

‘It seems very pretty,’ she [Alice] said when she had finished it, ‘but it’s rather hard to understand!’ (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself that she couldn’t make it out at all.) ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate – ‘²

Carroll explains meanings of words of the poem either himself or through his characters. In chapter 6 Humpty Dumpty gives Alice explanations of words she’s found difficult to understand. But not only Carroll, Alice and Humpty Dumpty tried to interpret the poem. Critics gave their own interpretations, sometimes with no regard to Carroll’s comments.

The poem is about killing of a giant monster, the Jubjub bird named the Jabberwock. As once Carroll explained, the Jabberwock is a combination of two words: the Anglo-Saxon word ‘wocer’ or ‘wocor’ meaning ‘offspring’ or ‘fruit’ and ‘jabber’ – excited and voluble discussion. So, one may conclude Jabberwocky to be the ‘result/fruit of an excited and voluble discussion. ‘

Some critics claim Jabberwocky to be a parody of Beowulf with direct correspondence between scenes. Though, Carroll didn’t confirm such similarity. Others suggest Jabberwocky parodies the old German ballad ‘The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains’. (These suggestions lead me to assumption that Jabberwocky is no parody at all, but just an author’s attempt to write something similar to folk epic. Of course, only Carroll knew the truth.)

Jabberwocky translations

To my mind, when we talk about literature the rate of popularity and recognition can be defined by the number of languages this work has been translated into. According to Wikipedia, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There has been translated into 65 languages. Consequently, Jabberwocky has been rendered into the same number of languages (or even more). If we look at the translation process of the poem, we’ll see that it’s quite a hard thing to do – translators had to use various tricks and literary devices when creating equivalent words in their languages.

Click the links to browse Jabberwocky translations in different languages.

Bulgarian Finnish Spanish

Danish German Ukrainian

Turkish Russian Czech

Nonsense

It should be mentioned that Carroll was not the first author to use nonsense in his work. There’s a long tradition of nonsense verse in English with Anglo-Saxon riddles being an early form, though nursery rhymes are probably the most known. As to the definition of literary nonsense (or nonsense literature), keep in mind that there’s no single one which just proves one more time that no two minds think alike. Nonsense verse is present in Shakespear’s works as well as in the Brothers Grimm’s fairy-tales (some of them are called ‘Lügenmärchen’ – lying tales). Another example of nonsense verse is limerick, a form of verse that appeared in England in the 18th century and was popularized by Edward Lear in the 19th century.

In conclusion I’d like to repeat the passage found in ‘A Companion to Victorian Poetry’ by Ciaran Cronin:

‘It’s naive to believe that nonsense verse does not ‘make sense’;

much of it does in its own way. ‘³