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Pigs and a Tuba

Help! I am seeing pigs!

In some of his illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, Henry Holiday alluded to The Image Breakers, a 16th century print made by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder. I see at least one of Holiday’s pigs in that print (spoiler) and also something which Henry Holiday could have turned into a Moritz bass tuba.

2019 is the year of the pig. Does that make me see pigs everywhere, or did Henry Holiday see that pig in Gheeraert’s print too?

Actually, I have to confess that I saw the pig already in 2009. But I didn’t mark it then:

 
2019-02-14

Happy Chinese New Year

Wishing everyone a Happy Chinese New Year with this misericord of a pig playing the bagpipes in @riponcathedral! #YearOfThePig pic.twitter.com/cBqHUCWXoE

— National Churches Trust (@NatChurchTrust) February 5, 2019

More fun to be found with pigs in Lewis Carroll’s (whose dad was a resident canon at Ripon) “Hunting of the Snark” poem. Original book drawing included pigs playing musical instruments. A coincidence that they are fashioned similar to the Cathedral’s misericords? pic.twitter.com/oh7cqSuc5T

— Gail McMillan (@ww_gail) February 5, 2019


What was that? You wanted a pig sitting on a barrel playing a lyre while three of his companions dance to the music? OK, here you go… pic.twitter.com/Cey0RM08c2

— Ian Groves 🇪🇺 (@LandscapeIan) August 24, 2017

his hopeful relative joined a band in the early 13th century – what is his/her instrument of choice?
(Psalter – BL, Lansdowne MS 420, f. 12v)https://t.co/bNM4GOE0nK#PolonskyPre1200 pic.twitter.com/U4vecl8LY4

— Tuija Ainonen (@AinonenT) February 5, 2019


 

Update 2019-06-11

pic.twitter.com/2Twe0mS8N3

— JulesGirlGuiding (@JulesRPardoe) June 11, 2019

Know your Bard

You find many renderings of John Martin‘s The Bard in the Internet. I think that in this comparison the left one is the right one and that the right one is not John Martin’s.

In Henry Holiday’s illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark there are several references to John Martin’s original painting. Some are funny, some are spooky.

 
2018-10-24, update: 2019-02-09

Nose is a Nose is a Nose

A Snark article in the Knight Letter
(with lots of help from the editors Chris Morgan and Mark Burstein)


Source: Knight Letter (ISSN 0193-886X), Fall 2017, Number 99

When I wrote this article, I failed to mention that already in 1973 Elizabeth Sewell pointed out in The Field of Nonsense that a line in Carroll’s poem has a similarity to a line in a limerick by Edward Lear (MG058). I am sorry for not having mentioned that.

I posted my article online with permission of the Knight Letter editors. In the online copy, I fixed the wrong URL kl.snr.de. It’s kl.snrk.de. Furthermore, four additional images have been attached to my online version.

read more

 


2009


2018-02-09, update: 2018-12-30: Reference to Elizabeth Sewell

 
2018-12-30, updated: 2022-08-01

Carroll Tackles Vivisection

It’s National Poetry Month? Nonsense!
[…] April 9, 2018
[Author: Matt Dilworth] mdilwort

[…] Yet nonsense poems, and Carroll’s in particular, often carry significant political undertones. For example, in Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark”, he tackles vivisection and the role of anthrocentrist activities in scientific pursuit. […]

Yes, I thought so.

 
MG019, MG050

 
2018-04-29, shifted to the top 2018 posts: 2018-12-21

Brexit, Hunting a Fantastical Beast

May government’s Brexit aims were never achievable – we’ve been hunting a fantastical beast all along
File 20181116 194519 67tlr3.png?ixlib=rb 1.1
The Snark – the beastly figment of imagination created by Lewis Carroll.
Image: Segment of an assemblage by G. Kluge of illustrations by C. Martens & T. Landseer, H. Holiday & J. Swain

Michael Keating, University of Aberdeen

 
The Brexit process started in March 2017 with the triggering of Article 50, allowing two years to complete the process. The main story since then has been of postponing difficult decisions in the hope that something would turn up. Ministers have insisted they have a mandate from the people but have struggled to agree on what it entails in practice. Negotiations within the UK government have been as difficult as those with the EU.

full article

Martin Gardner’s Snark Annotations

Today I start to refer to Martin Gardner’s annotations to The Hunting of the Snark in a more systematical way. Admittedly, I should have done that much earlier. I didn’t read the annotations carefully enough. As an example, Martin Gardner annotated (MG058) to The Hunting of the Snark that Elizabeth Sewell pointed out in The Field of Nonsense (1973) that a line in Carroll’s poem has a similarity to a line in a limerick by Edward Lear. I found that in Google.

I should have mentioned Elizabeth Sewell in my article Nose is a Nose is a Nose in the LCSNA Kight Letter № 99, Fall 2017, p. 30~31.

MG058” stands for the 58th annotation in the annotated Snark and links to articles and blog entries which contain issues to which Gardner had referred. In this case it is about Lewis Carroll’s and Edward Lear’s waistcoat poetry.

MG0” leads you to all entries in snrk.de which refer to issues addressed by Martin Gardner.

Hunting Snarks is innocent and wise!

Even while the blinding bandage lies,
Daughter of a Judge, upon thine eyes,
If the scales thou wield with care
Truth and Justice will declare
Hunting Snarks is innocent and wise!

Inscribed (1876-09-02) with an allusion to Justicia by Lewis Carroll into an edition (now owned by NYU) of The Hunting of the Snark owned by Charlotte Edith Denman, daughter of George Denman.

Source of the acrostic poem:
Rare, Uncollected, Unpublished & Nonexistent Verse of Lewis Carroll, Collected and Annoted by August A. Imholz, Jr. & Edward Wakeling, p. 30, LCSNA 2018, ISBN 978-0-930326-11-1.
The book is available to LCSNA members only.

Snark Explanations

by Mary Hammond, published on Nov 7, 2017. There also is an essay: Mary Hammond, Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark Explained.

Mary Hammond’s interpretation of course is not the first Snark interpretation. First hints on what the Snark could be about had been given to us by Henry Holiday and Philo M. Buck. And there is an excellent chapter on Carroll’s tragicomedy in Louise Schweitzer’s One Wild Flower. Oliver Sturm’s Die Jagd nach dem Schnatz is a German translation, which also contains an attempt to explain the Snark. And there is a Snark chapter in Klaus Reichert’s Lewis Carroll: Studien zum literarischen Unsinn. Reichert is another German Snark translator.

Among the interpretations known to me, Mary Hammond’s interpretation is the first one where Eternal Damnation is seen as one of the more important issues to which Lewis Carroll might have taken reference in The Hunting of the Snark. In Carroll’s poem, the Baker‘s Forty-Two Boxes led me to the same conclusion earlier.

In my correspondence with Mary Hammond (a pen ame of Mary Hibbs) she also told me about what in her view “…jum” in Boojum could stand for: Search for jumble in the chapter Of Reason in John Locke‘s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

I too associate Boojum with the vanishing of reason – which too often is the beginning of violence. Yet, I’ll probably never know, whether my association is similar to what the Boojum meant to Carroll.

549    “It’s a Snark!” was the sound that first came to their ears,
550        And seemed almost too good to be true.
551    Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
552        Then the ominous words “It’s a Boo-”

553    Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air
554        A weary and wandering sigh
555    That sounded like “-jum!” but the others declare
556        It was only a breeze that went by.

 


My publications:
Knight Letter № 99: Nose is a Nose is a Nose
Knight Letter № 100: Burning the Baker

 


There now is a new paperback edition of Untangling the Knot: An Analysis of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, 2019-10-06, by Sandra Mann (besides Mary Hammond another pen name of Mary Hibbs). She also sent me an additional article about a possible reference to Bishop Reginal Heber (1783-1826). See also: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lewiscarrollresources/permalink/2241199999492366/

2020-02-12: Untangling the Knot in PDF, 2018

 


2017-11-17, updated: 2018-12-02.

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