Jabberwocky Explained
Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”
‘Twas Brillig
The ice is out - almost. The snow is gone - almost. The sun is out – completely. The sky is blue, and the air is clear. The birds are singing, and a light breeze is blowing. What a wonderful day!
April 24-30, 2018, 62 degrees and sunny at 10am! The ice was a third out at 8am on the 24th, but it was rapidly dissolving, turning from pure white to grey to translucent to nothing. We took advantage of this unusually warm and beautiful day to have breakfast on the patio. While sitting there, we heard the first faint calls of wood frogs from the other side of Pearl Lake Road.
Spring is here! Or, as Lewis Carroll put it, “’Twas Brillig!”
Jabberwocky
“’Twas brillig” is the start to Jabberwocky, a poem that Lewis Carroll published in 1872 and one that has enchanted generations of kids of all ages ever since. Carroll invented dozens of words for use in this poem, some of which have come into accepted usage, including chortled and galumphed, but most of them seem to most people to be as fantastical as the Jabberwock is supposed to be. However, I believe that this poem, at least the beginning, is an accurate description of what anyone might see around a pond in the beginning of spring, not only in Old England a hundred and fifty years ago, but right now in April in New England. Here are the first two stanzas:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
I’ll explain what this means in the remainder of this essay. For the complete poem see:
Jabberwocky | The Poetry Foundation
The Wabe
Before the ice has completely disappeared, a few wood frogs have awakened from their frozen slumber and headed toward the pond. Their “first faint calls” are just the beginning of a party that will last several days. Soon, hundreds of males will have gathered at the pond waiting for the females, who come a day or two later. Some of them wait at the shoreline, while others spread out ten or twenty feet from the shore, as if they were sentries guarding against an invasion.
April 20, 2003. I went out to the pond this morning at about 10:30, because the wood frogs had started their croaking. As long as I sat motionless, they ignored me, but any quick movement would cause them to duck under. On the other hand, a “Martland Sneeze” had no effect! From where I sat, I could see 55 frogs without even moving my head. While I sat there, four hopped in on my right and two on my left; I could hear the rustling in the dead grass, then watch them take two or three wild leaps into the pond. One frog was so anxious that he landed on his back, rolled over and hit the water. Two others came in simultaneously and each immediately tried to hop on the other – no dice – so they swam out into the cacophony.
As more and more females arrive, the frogs get ever more excited, creating a crescendo of croaking that sounds like a dozen drunken ducks and lasts into the wee hours. The females are larger than the males, which enables her to keep her head above water even if two or more males are on her back hoping for a chance to fertilize her eggs.
April 20, 2008. At 2pm, Nancy and I took the canoe out to watch the party animals. There were 160 wood frogs in west bay, 200 by the point, and 160 in east bay. Nearly all of the frogs were males, as we only saw about a dozen “clumps of sex-crazed frogs”, all of them at or east of the point. I call them “clumps”, because as many as eight males clung or tried to cling to a single female, forming a single writhing mass of frogs that churned the water.
Eventually, hundreds of females turn up, and everyone finds a partner. When the party is over, the frogs all go back to the woods, but they have left hundreds of gooey clumps, each clump composed of a hundred or more individual eggs. In a couple of openings between the shore and the cattails, dozens pf these clumps will be mashed together in a glutinous mass several feet across and a foot deep. To me, that mass is what Lewis Carroll named the “wabe”.
April 17, 2024. The party is over, and the wood frogs have gone back to the woods, but they have left dozens of egg masses.
The Slithy Toves
It wasn’t until our first spring in Sugar Hill that I ever heard a chorus of wood frogs or saw any of their egg masses. In 2001, when I heard the chorus, I went out for a closer look and noticed something slipping through the eggs. “What’s that? A newt? No, a dozen newts! What on earth are they doing?” Then I wrote the following note in my journal:
May 6, 2001: I watched a dozen newts gamble in and around the 150 wood frog egg masses I’d noticed a couple of days earlier. … The newts seemed to be looking for mates, but perhaps they just enjoyed rubbing up against the slimy eggs. In any case, they would search through the egg masses, tangle with each other for a few seconds, hold still for about a minute, and then one would slide under the belly of the other and go back along the egg masses.
May 6, 2019. Tadpoles are emerging from the disintegrating clumps of wood frog eggs, but they aren’t straying more than a few inches away. One intact clump is at the lower left of this photo. A curious newt is visible in the upper right.
It was a couple of years later that it occurred to me that the newts might have been cleaning themselves after a long winter spent buried somewhere in the mud. Whatever the newts were up to, my observations documented the fact that a bunch of slimy newts slithered and squirmed over and under dozens of clumps of wood frog eggs. However, I believe that Lewis Carroll portrayed this same activity with poetic simplicity and eloquent mystery:
“the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”
All Mimsy Were the Borogoves
Painted turtles emerge from their winter retreats about the same time that wood frogs gather by the pond. At first, they are sluggish, presumably stiff, aching, and hungry as a result of their months of inactivity. If you look closely at the turtle in the photo below, you can see it still has mud around its eyes.
April 21, 2019, 1130am, 66 degrees: A painted turtle sat on a mossy root about five feet from the SW corner of the pond. It was so sluggish that I not only took many pictures, I was able to pick it up and measure it. Its shell was an inch shorter than my notebook, i.e. 4.5 inches
The largest turtles emerge first, and all they want is a bath, something to eat, and a place to rest in the sun. A week or two after ice out, a half dozen or more turtles will be seen basking in the sun on Rock Island, the bit of bedrock sticking out at the end of the Point.
May 5, 2019. Two weeks after the first painted turtle showed up, I found eight of them basking in the sun on Rock Island.
I believe these turtles, or their British counterparts, are in fact Carroll’s “mimsy borogoves. Mimsy seems to be a perfect word to describe that feeling when all you want to do is to bask in the sun, and borogove sounds suspiciously like “burrow groves” – and turtles do indeed burrow in groves of trees somewhere close to the Pond.
The Mome Raths Outgrabe
“Mome raths” must be creatures that show up around the same time as the slithy toves and the borogoves. Hooded mergansers, like the wood frogs, show up as soon as the ice is out or almost out. A couple of males and females will be together in the pond for a couple of weeks, flirting with each other, listening to the frogs, and watching the turtles. So what does “outgrabe” mean? This word seems suspiciously close to “out grab,” which is a concise description of what these ducks do just after the long migratory journey that brought them to the Pond.
April 19, 2029. The ice was still covering most of the Pond when this pair of hooded mergansers arrived. After breaking a somewhat larger opening in the ice, they twisted their necks, poked their bills into their feathers, and cleaned themselves up.
Beware the Jabberwock
Some might say that the Jabberwock is a mythical creature, but why would Carroll describe newts, turtles and mergansers in the first stanza and then descend into fantasy in the second? No, the Jabberwock must be a real creature, and it must be found near the same ponds where the other creatures are found. We also know that this poem tells us what a man said to his son who has taken his vorpal blade and is about to set off to find the Jabberwock. Now, a son could be a grown man, but it seems to me that this son is a boy with a vivid imagination who is heading off on an adventure with the approval of his father. Thus, the jabberwock could not be a bear; even though a bear certainly has jaws that bite and claws that snatch. No father would send his sun out to hunt a bear with a little blade, no matter how vorpal.
My belief is that the Jabberwock is a snapping turtle, which also has jaws and claws with the required abilities. Although a dangerous beast, a snapping turtle will stick its neck out a little too far for its own good, as shown in this photo of one that crossed my path below the dam.
June 18, 2017, 90 degrees, sunny. I went out to the solar array, planning to sit for a while in the shade simply enjoying the lupine. Imagine my surprise when a large snapping turtle stepped out onto the flat rock that is just about where I was planning to place my chair. Its shell was about 1 to 1 ½ feet long, its neck was thick, and its attitude toward me was somewhere between indifference and mild scorn. … It slowly advanced along the edge of the clearing and eventually found a suitable place to climb up the dam. For obvious reasons, I made no attempt to follow it!
As is evident in this photo, the long neck of a snapping turtle does provide an obvious target for someone armed with a vorpal blade. Furthermore, I know for a fact that boys have been known to hunt snapping turtles near ponds in New England, so presumably they have done so in Old England. My father grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island, and he told me that he used to capture snapping turtles in potato sacks and then sell them for fifty cents apiece to a neighbor who made turtle soup and marketed patent medicines with allegedly astounding – but unproven - benefits. My father had to use skill and great care to catch the turtles in a sack, because neither he, his brother, nor his father had a vorpal blade.
Beware the Jubjub Bird
You might think that the Jubjub bird would be an eagle, a ferocious hawk or maybe an owl. Not so. A fish or a squirrel should beware such birds of prey, but those birds are not a threat to a boy walking by the pond or into the woods. The boy is told to “beware” the Jubjub bird, which clearly indicates that this bird is likely to be seen nearby, that it might well attack a person, and that care must be taken not to get too close to it. I have two reasons to believe that the Jubjub bird is a swan. First, this is a large and beautiful bird that is commonly seen along the shores of ponds in England. Second, another family tale has shown us that swans can be very fearsome. Nancy and I came upon a family of swans at the edge of a lagoon on Point Judith in Rhode Island. When Nancy was about to sit down on a rock to enjoy the view, the nearest swan stretched to its full height, squawked loudly, and came toward her. Frightened nearly out of her wits, Nancy escaped unharmed, but now we both know to beware swans.
April 17, 2016. Swans were nesting along the marshes behind the sand dunes at the wildlife sanctuary near the famous Cape May lighthouse. Best to use a high-power zoom to get this photo, as we have learned that it is dangerous to approach swans, especially in mating season.
Shun the Frumious Bandersnatch
This sounds like another warning about some sort of ferocious beast. But once again, I don’t believe that the father would let his son go anywhere where he would be apt to see – and therefore be able to shun – such an animal. I prefer to think of this as a phrase respecting the well-known anger of a common resident of any pond, namely the red-winged blackbird. At our pond, we typically have a half-dozen or more nesting pairs, and they do not like anyone – man, woman, child, or Canada Goose – to walk or swim too close to their nests. You quickly learn to move a little further away after being dive-bombed by an angry redwing.
May 9, 2015. A red-winged blackbird chastised me when I walked too close to its nest.
‘Twill Oft be Brillig
To enjoy a brillig day, just keep your eyes open, for such days can come at any time of the spring or summer. I’ll close with an original painting by a budding Sugar Hill artist, Arlo Burtnick. I happened to sit behind him at Town Meeting, where he was working on a drawing of birds while the adults droned on. I introduced myself to the family, described my blog, and suggested that I could use some of his drawings. Arlo’s painting of a swan swimming along by some flowers shows what you might see on a brillig summer day!
The Swan, by Arlo Burtnick
