Refudiate the Jabberwock!

The flavor we are rhapsodizing over is the flavor of a Jubjub Bird and the rhapsodizer is the Butcher, the rhapsodee is his comrade-in-arms, the Beaver, and the rhapsodius is Fit the Fifth of The Hunting of the Snark.

This word, rhapsodius, denoting a place within which rhapsodic activities are occurring, is a word I’ve just invented. I rather like it, it has an exquisite flavor and far better than mutton, which in my experience, keeps best when it is served far away from me.

In any case, this business of rhapsodic portmanteaus, (which was once the speciality of that notorious firm of Victorian wordwrights, Messers Dodgson, Carroll & Co, LLC) is trickier than it looks.

But please pay careful attention when crafting your latest rhapsody, lest you drop a stitch and incur the wrath of certain linguistic prudes who simply cannot bear to think that someone, somewhere, is actually having a bit of a giggle with a living, breathing, bit-of-a-giggly language … the kind of language certain linguists would never take home to their mothers.

NB. The management & staff of THOTS feel that Mrs. Palin deserves a (rare) tip o’ the ink-stained turban for her recent and rather clever portmanteau. Alas, when politicos speak Nonsense, all the land is in an uproar yet when they do Nonsense, no one dares pipe up …

Fit the Fourth, Page 28, Panel 3 … I was a modest, good-humoured snark, it is Oxford that has made me insufferable

The Beaver went simply galumphing about,
At seeing the Butcher so shy:
And even the Baker, though stupid and stout,
Made an effort to wink with one eye.

The story so far … a darkness has fallen upon the land and there are B-Boyz abroad … they search for the one snark, the Baker’s-Bane of eldritch lore … the one snark to rule them all, the one snark to find them, the one snark to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Both Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien were Oxford men and both had full-blown language manias. We’ve already seen how the Forks and Hope refrain of the Snark (if not the entire poem) was begat by the Old Norse galdors, those pagan charms from the same realm of verse which Tolkien plundered so fruitfully. We can also classify Carroll’s Snark (Snarquus boojum) in the same genus as Tolkien’s Ring (Annulus horribilis), the genus of all imaginary, highly sought-after and utterly annihilating thingamabobs or such-like fritter-my-wigs.

In addition, both men’s œuvres sternly eschewed romance except in the most cursory way. Hence, it is with a bit of a naughty giggle that I’ll let you have a quick peek at this picture of the Beaver showing off a bit of ankle! Hubba hubba, these Carrollians know how to live it up! The Beaver is obviously inebriated with her vampish power over the stupid and stout Baker, who has also succumbed to the heady bacchanals of this metamorphic circus! His wink (poorly rendered here, I admit, the result of using second-grade fresh india ink instead of the real, silken-smooth article) suggests to us his Houyhnhnmic approval of the Carrollian portmanteau which tops off this sinnful stanza : gallumph!

All of which begs the question — what on earth has this to do with J.R.R. Tolkien? What on earth possessed me to follow this discombobulated line of addled thinking comparable to the meanderings of a slightly concussed bee?

To which I must reply, in the words of yet another celebrated Oxford man: ignorance, madam, pure ignorance!