|
"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll and included in his 1871 novel ''Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There'', a sequel to ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''. The book tells of Alice's adventures within the back-to-front world of a looking glass. In an early scene in which she first encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen, Alice finds a book written in a seemingly unintelligible language. Realising that she is travelling through an inverted world, she recognises that the verses on the pages are written in mirror-writing. She holds a mirror to one of the poems, and reads the reflected verse of "Jabberwocky". She finds the nonsense verse as puzzling as the odd land she has passed into, later revealed as a dreamscape.〔 "Jabberwocky" is considered one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English. Its playful, whimsical language has given English nonsense words and neologisms such as "galumphing" and "chortle". ==Origin and publication== A decade before the publication of ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' and the sequel ''Through the Looking-Glass'', Carroll wrote the first stanza to what would become "Jabberwocky" while in Croft on Tees, close to Darlington, where he lived as a child, and printed it in 1855 in ''Mischmasch'', a periodical he wrote and illustrated for the amusement of his family. The piece was titled "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry" and read: :Twas bryllyg, and ''ye'' slythy toves :Did gyre and gymble in ''ye'' wabe: :All mimsy were ''ye'' borogoves; :And ''ye'' mome raths outgrabe. Carroll wrote the letter-combination ''ye'' throughout the poem instead of the word ''the'', using the letter Y in place of the letter þ (Thorn) in combination with the superscript E, as in ''þe'',〔http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/lewis-carroll-juvenilia-stanza-of-anglo-saxon-poetry〕 a common abbreviation for the word ''the'' in middle and early modern English, presumably to create a pseudo-archaic impression. The rest of the poem was written during Carroll's stay with relatives at Whitburn, near Sunderland. The story may have been partly inspired by the local Sunderland area legend of the Lambton Worm.〔''A Town Like Alice's'' (1997) Michael Bute Heritage Publications, Sunderland〕〔''Alice in Sunderland'' (2007) Brian Talbot Dark Horse publications.〕 The concept of nonsense verse was not original to Carroll, who would have known of chapbooks such as ''The World Turned Upside Down'' and stories such as "The Great Panjundrum". Nonsense existed in Shakespeare's work and was well-known in the Brothers Grimm's fairytales, some of which are called lying tales or ''lügenmärchen''.〔Carpenter (1985), 55–56〕 Roger Lancelyn Green suggests that "Jabberwocky" is a parody of the old German ballad "The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains" in which a shepherd kills a griffin that is attacking his sheep.〔"Jabberwocky back to Old English: Nonsense, Anglo-Saxon and Oxford" by Lucas, Peter J. in ''Language History and Linguistic Modelling'' (1997) p503-520 ISBN 978-3-11-014504-5〕〔Hudson, Derek (1977) ''Lewis Carroll: an illustrated biography''. Crown Publishers, 76〕 The ballad had been translated into English in blank verse by Carroll's cousin Menella Bute Smedley in 1846, many years before the appearance of the Alice books.〔〔Martin Gardner (2000) ''The Annotated Alice''. New York: Norton p 154, n. 42.〕 Historian Sean B. Palmer suggests that Carroll was inspired by a section from Shakespeare's ''Hamlet'', citing the lines: "The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead/Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets" from Act I, Scene i.〔("Hamlet and Jabberwocky" ''Essays by Sean Palmer'' 21 Aug 2005 )〕〔Carroll makes later reference to the same lines from ''Hamlet'' Act I, Scene i in the 1869 poem "Phantasmagoria". He wrote: "Shakspeare I think it is who treats/Of Ghosts, in days of old,/Who 'gibbered in the Roman streets".〕 John Tenniel reluctantly agreed to illustrate the book in 1871,〔 and his illustrations are still the defining images of the poem. The illustration of the Jabberwock may reflect the contemporary Victorian obsession with natural history and the fast-evolving sciences of palaeontology and geology. Stephen Prickett notes that in the context of Darwin and Mantell's publications and vast exhibitions of dinosaurs, such as those at the Crystal Palace from 1854, it is unsurprising that Tenniel gave the Jabberwock "the leathery wings of a pterodactyl and the long scaly neck and tail of a sauropod."〔Prickett, Stephen (2005) ''Victorian Fantasy'' Baylor University Press p80 ISBN 1-932792-30-9〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jabberwocky」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|