Jabberwocky

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The Jabberwock, by John Tenniel

Jabberwocky is a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, supposedly written deliberately for the purpose of mocking poorly-written nonsensical poems. Of course, since it's Lewis Carroll, it is considered an excellent poem despite this nonsensicality.

It is said to have been inspired by a tree. Make of that what you will. The Other Wiki says the poem "may have been partly inspired by the legend of the Lambton Worm."

It inspired a Terry Gilliam film of the same name.

Tropes used in Jabberwocky include:

• 24-Hour Trope Clock: Brillig is four o'clock in the afternoon, just when you start to broil things for dinner.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: The Vorpal Sword.
• Achilles in His Tent: Briefly. The Hero stops to rest by a tree, and then stands there for a while in "uffish thought" (basically, sulking).
• All There in the Manual: Carroll created definitions for his nonsense words.
• Audible Sharpness: "The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!"
• Big Bad: The Jabberwock.
• Book Ends: The first and last stanzas are identical.
• Fictional Document: Sort of. While Carroll originally wrote it as a standalone work, it appears in Through the Looking Glass as a poem Alice finds in a book.
• Losing Your Head: How the Jabberwock dies.
• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: Unless you've read Carroll's definitions...
• Minimalist Cast: Just the Jabberwock, the hero who slays it, and the hero's father, only the third having any lines.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Humpty Dumpty claims "toves" are a cross between a lizards, badgers, and corkscrews. They live under sundials and eat cheese.
• No Name Given: Neither The Hero nor his father are mentioned by name.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Carroll filled his poem with words that did not exist at the time (burbled, vorpal, tulgy...)
  • Defictionalization: Some of these words, such as "chortled", are now in the Oxford English Dictionary.
• Portmanteau: Humpty Dumpty uses this word specifically to define "slithy" ("lithe" plus "slimy") and "mimsy" ("flimsy" plus "miserable").
• Short Story: A poem with only seven stanzas, each stanza having only four lines.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy!"

Elements of this poem appear in:

Film

• In the 2010 film Alice in Wonderland the Jabberwock is an important antagonist, the most valuable ally of Big Bad; his voice is done by Christopher Lee. The Jubjub Bird and Bandersnatch also appear, as does the Vorpal Sword, a weapon forged specifically to slay the Jabberwock.

Literature

• In the short story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (writing under the joint pseudonym of Lewis Padgett), the poem turns out to have been dictated to Lewis Carroll by the then-teenage Alice Liddell (a child-friend whom he based the protagonist of the book on) after she received some Sufficiently Advanced toys from the far future, and is a secretly-coded instruction manual for how to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
• Larry Niven's Known Space universe has an alien species called the frumious bandersnatch.^[context?]

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons and Dragons: The sword +5, vorpal weapon derives its name from the poem's vorpal sword. In D&D, such a weapon automatically decapitates its target on a critical hit/natural 20.
  • The Jabberwock itself was adapted into a monster in 2nd Edition.

Video Games

• The Jabbewock is a kind of monster -- one of the most powerful in the game -- found in the original Rogue.
• The Jabberwock is a Boss in American McGee's Alice; the Bandersnatch also appears in the game as Mooks.

Western Animation

• The Jabberwock was a ghost haunting a copy of Carroll's book in an episode The Real Ghostbusters. It recited lines from the poem as they confronted it.