Why Jabberwocky

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogroves
And the mome raths outgrabe


This is, of course, the poem Jabberwocky from Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass.". And so, it becomes the first working part of our web site. (It has a spelling mistake, too, but that is what I type.

Here are ten useless facts about Jabberwocky.

1. Through The Looking Glass was published in 1872.
2. It is a book whose chapters are based on the moves of a chess game, though someone does have to cheat.
3. This was not the first appearance of Jabberwocky. It first appeared as a satire on Old English poetry in a learned journal, complete with lengthy footnotes.
4. In Through The Looking Glass, it is left to Humpty Dumpty to explain a few of the words in the poem. We rather suspect he is making it up.
5. Lewis Carroll's real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and he lived from 1832 to 1898. He was an academic at Oxford and published mathematical works.
6. Queen Victoria enjoyed the Alice books so much that she asked for a copy of his next book. She was not amused when she found out that it was a mathematical treatise.
7. The film Jabberwocky, made in 1977 by Terry Gilliam, didn't follow the plot of the poem very well, but it did have a good monster.
8. Jabberwocky might never have been made if Terry Gilliam had been able to use a dragon, as he'd wanted, when making Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Instead he had to settle for killer rabbits.
9. The film Night of the Lepus, made in 1972, also featured killer rabbits. The use of miniature sets (to make them look larger) and bloodstained corpses did little to boost the reputation of rabbits as fierce carnivores.
10. In Night of the Lepus, one key part of the plot hinges on trapping the giant rabbits in their adopted burrow, an abandoned mine. Using dynamite, the exits will be blocked trapping them forever. Clearly a four foot tall rabbit wouldn't be much of a digger.
11. In the CDROM game of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the killer rabbit is one of the more difficult puzzles. To get past the rabbit - what's that, only allowed ten?

Some more references

This page has some of Charles Dodgson's (aka Lewis Carroll) photographs. There is interesting stuff there, including a photo of the real Alice.

Find out why a raven is like a writing desk.

There is a Terry Gilliam Fanzine devoted to...who was it again? There's also an alt.movies.terry-gilliam usenet group.

For more Jabberwocky, the last page you should look at is the Ultimate Jabberwocky Page. So best to look at Jabberwocky Variations first, a collection of parodies and useful translations into 26 languages.