“‘It seems very pretty,’ she said when she had finished it, ‘but it’s rather hard to understand!’” — Alice’s reaction on reading, in mirror writing, “Jabberwocky” in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
So begins the epic tale of the slaying of the fearsome Jabberwock, found in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which had been published six years earlier in 1865. The Rev. Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, was hardly the first writer to indulge in nonsense poetry — William Shakespeare wasn’t above a bit of playful verse — but in “Jabberwocky,” Carroll does something unique: It’s nonsense, except it isn’t. Read “Jabberwocky,” and you know, in your mind’s eye, exactly what’s going on, even if you don’t understand it!
That’s partly because the poem observes standard syntax and form (the first three lines are in iambic tetrameter, the last in iambic trimeter), and the nonsense words are like, well, something. You know that the “frumious Bandersnatch” is a creature not to be trifled with. And when the Jabberwock comes whiffling and burbling with eyes of flame through the tulgey wood, do you really need to have each word carefully explained? (If it all seems a bit ethereal, remember Alice’s adventure all takes place in her dream.)
Charles Dodgson originally had something far more modest in mind than what may be the greatest nonsense verse in the English language (not to mention other languages — see below). When he was a kid, his large family — he was third of 11 siblings — entertained each other with songs and poetry. In his early 20s, while staying at his parents’ home in the north of England, he wrote what would become the first stanza of “Jabberwocky” for the family magazine Mischmasch. Titled “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” it’s in pseudo-Old English: “Twas bryllyg, and þe slythy toves ….” The final poem may have been inspired by local legends of enormous worms supposedly feared by villagers in northeast England. Or perhaps his cousin’s translation of “The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains,” an old German ballad about a monster, was equally inspirational.
At a time when the political cartoonist John Tenniel agreed (somewhat reluctantly, apparently, since Dodgson was a perfectionist) to repeat the visual magic he’d brought to the original Wonderland book, newly discovered dinosaurs were all the rage. Reconstructed from fossilized remains, they could be seen in numerous exhibitions and in London’s Crystal Palace Park, so it’s no wonder Tenniel’s scaly Jabberwock was a cross between a pterodactyl and a sauropod. Being a proper Victorian creature,
s/he does, of course, wear a vest. Tenniel, long-time chief cartoonist for the satirical magazine Punch, was knighted in 1893, the first time an illustrator was so honored.
The poem has been translated into more than 60 languages, a “pathologically difficult” task, according to polyglot author Douglas Hofstadter. In Russian, for instance, “Jabberwock” becomes “Barmaglot” and “Bandersnatch” is “Brandashmyg,” while “mimsy” is “myumski” — all nonsense words in Russian, of course, but understandable to native speakers. Somehow there’s a Chinese “Jabberwocky,” complete with invented written characters. Film director Satyajit Ray did a Bengali version, and there are translations in Arabic and Ancient Greek. Not to mention a famous 1872 German version of “Der Jammerwoch,” which begins, “Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven/Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben,” with “Bandersnatch” being lovingly rendered as “Banderschnätzchen.”
Several of Carroll’s neologisms have made it into standard English. I know a “chortle” when I hear one (there’s laughing and there’s chortling), and how else can you describe running crazily down a hill, completely out of control, other than “galumphing?” l
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com) thinks the world would be a poorer place without “Jabberwocky” (in one’s native language, of course).
This article appears in Taco Week 2026.