Creature of the Week: Jabberwock
Name: The Jabberwock; originally a griffin?
You may know it from: Danganronpa 2, most of the darker adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Tim Burton film & American McGee’s video game).
Dear Reader,
This Creature of the Week is a bit unconventional compared to previous creatures. It is fully fictive, appearing in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Charles Dodgson, an author better known as Lewis Carroll. Jabberwocky is a poem made up of mostly undefined words in which a boy ventures out to kill the beast his father is afraid of, called the Jabberwock. He defeats it, beheads it, and shows its head to his father, who congratulates him. The poem was written in two segments, the first stanza appearing in his magazine Mischmasch as a pastiche of old Anglo-Saxon poetry. The rest of the poem, from where the Jabberwock first appears, was written at the home of a cousin of Dodgson’s during a “game of verse-making.” Some argue that the poem was a parody of The Shepherd of The Giant Mountains, a German poem with a similar story. In it, a shepherd named Gottschalk slays a fearsome griffin and when he returns, he is embraced by his father.
From here, the story spread to the public, finding an audience consisting mostly of children. The popular understanding was that it was made up of nonsense words, a style reflective of the book’s mirror world, created from the dreams of Alice and the Red King. If the poem is read in isolation, this argument makes sense, but it becomes clear that the words are not fully nonsense when observed in the context of the work it originates from. In both Through the Looking Glass and Mischmasch, the words used in the first stanza are defined, and each word's definitions are consistent across both texts. The etymologies provided in both indicate that many of the terms are derived from English words, for example, “slithe” is derived from “slimy” and “lithe,” and “gyre” is derived from “gyroscope.” Dodgson says this much: “Dumpty’s theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all.” The Jabberwock’s name itself is also a portmanteau, being a combination of the word “jabber,” meaning excited discussion (or speaking incoherently), and woc, the Anglo-Saxon word for fruit. Dodgson himself does not treat them as fully nonsensical in his work, as in Through the Looking Glass, where the White King says “you might as well try to catch a Bandersnatch!” This is a reference to The Hunting of the Snark, a novel set in the isle where the Jabberwock was slain. In this novel, a creature called the Bandersnatch also appears alongside the Jubjub bird, and both play significant roles. Dodgson himself believed that “any writer of a book is fully authorized in attaching any meaning he likes to any word.” The Jabberwocky is representative of that idea, although some of the words may need to be deconstructed.
Jabberwocky, perfectly fits the Alice series’ themes of the weak boundary between childhood and adulthood, despite not originally being included in the series. Reading the poem feels similar to reading above your level as a child: you as the reader are surrounded by odd, unknown words with just a trace of meaning. The Jabberwock’s name being constructed from the words “babbling” and “fruit” affirms this duality. Knowledge is a fruit that needs to be pursued, and to find it, you must sort through mysterious incoherences. The slaying of the Jabberwock is the symbolic killing of that mystery, and after he defeats the Jabberwock, the boy is embraced by his father, the adult in the poem. The last stanza mirrors the first, and the whimsy of those mysterious words continue to live on, indicating that the boy will return and slay the Jabberwock once again.