Category: news

snrk.de

About this site:
Snrk.de mostly is about Henry Holiday‘s illustrations (engraved by Joseph Swain) to Lewis Carroll‘s tragicomical ballad The Hunting of the Snark.
        If – and the thing is wildly possible – the charge of writing nonsense were ever brought against the author of this great blog, I will not (as I might) point to the fact that throughout my Snark hunt, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart; and that the crooked Boojum also played its cards very hard and, as everyone knows, failed to stop me – which would qualify me as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!
        As promised, I will not point to that – even though it would be true if I would state it three times. Very true. Very, very true. Rather, I point to those (like John Tufail and Mahendra Singh) who really helped and encouraged me and, last not least, to those many people who turned the Internet into a humongous museum through which I could stroll while loafing on my sofa. That was the place where my Snark hunt started in December 2008, and snrk.de is place for presenting my trophies since 2012.
        On 2017-10-09, snrk.de underwent a major change. I added a blog to the site and rearranged it completely. If you previously used links to snrk.de and your browser now doesn’t find them anymore: Some of these links still may work if you replace snrk.de by old.snrk.de.

In snrk.de you’ll find a few assumptions:
※ The Beaver‘s lace making is “wrong” (in Carroll’s view) if lace making stands for vivisection.
※ Lewis Carroll liked to create “portmanteau words”. I suggest that the Boots is the maker of Bonnets and Hoods.
※ Last not least, since 2010 I think that the most important assumption is that Thomas Cranmer could be among the historical persons to whom the Baker (with four nicknames related to something which was heated or burned) might be related. As a protestant, Cranmer wrote the Forty-Two Articles. Under threat, he left those articles behind like the Forty-Two Boxes, which the Baker left behind on the beach. Then Carroll associated the Baker with pets of catholic saints: Macarius’ hyenas and Corbinian’s bear. (See also: Angus MacIntyre’s suggestion “The Baker’s 42 Boxes are the original Protestant Articles of 1553, with Thomas Cranmer’s name on each.” in The Reverend Snark, Jabberwocky 23(1994), p. 51~52.)

About me:
I am an electronics and mechatronics engineer, not a scholar in arts and literature. I know how to work scientifically, but as for arts and literature, I am an amateur. Therefore I don’t have to protect any reputation in Snarkology. Nevertheless, if you publish papers about, for example, references from The Hunting of the Snark to Thomas Cranmer, please give credit to those, who addressed that topic already. That’s me (2014, after first attempts in 2010), but also Karen Gardiner (2018), Mary Hibbs (2017, pen names: Mary Hammond and Sandra Mann) and Angus MacIntyre (1994).

Contact:
In order to avoid collecting personal user data and to minimize spam, I disabled blog registration.

You can write to me by email.

You also can write to me in social networks.

Sometimes I also look into these sites:

Privacy policy and data protection:
This site complies with the European General Data Protection Regulation and obeys to the Do Not Track (DNT) header. In order to make things easy to me, nobody can register with snrk.de and leave personal data in the blog database. Therefore no such data are collected.

Licenses:
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 is the license for images in this blog if not indicated otherwise.


Götz Kluge, Munich 2018-07-07, update: 2018-12-09

Mike Batt’s Snark Relaunch

Mike Batt’s latest Snark project is to make the first-ever recording of the FULL-LENGTH version of his musical The Hunting Of The Snark, based on Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem. He invites you in his PledgeMusic campain to support to finance this ambitious recording.

Links:
※ 2018: PledgeMusic campaign | Facebook | Twitter
※ 1987: Twitter | The Hunting Of The Snark – Royal Albert Hall

 
2018-10-15, update: 2018-11-26

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 Gardener 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.

Knight Letter № 100

In July 2018, the members of the LCSNA (Lewis Carroll Society of North America) received the 100th Knight Letter.

A friend told me that the caterpillar (here without hookah) on the front page is a Hickory Horned Devil.

 
On pages 55~56 you find a few lines which I wrote about the Baker and Thomas Cranmer in The Hunting of the Snark.

There also is an accompanying web page.

Incidentally, in parallel to my little note in the Knight Letter № 100 on the Baker’s “hot” names and on Henry Holiday’s pictorial reference to Thomas Cranmer’s burning, a paper suggesting textual references from The Hunting of the Snark to Thomas Cranmer’s Forty-Two Articles has been published in The Carrollian (July 2018, № 31, p.25~41), a journal of the Lewis Carroll Society in the UK. The author, Karen Gardiner, is an Anglican priest. So Karen Gardiner (2018) and I (2014, as well as Angus MacIntyre in 1994 and Mary Hibbs in 2017) all were lead by Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and the Baker’s forty-two boxes to Thomas Cranmer – coming from different starting points and different backgrounds.

 
(MG064)

Being Unwise

According to Karen Gardiner, “it would be unwise for anyone to imply that they have found the answer to the book’s mystery.” The book is Lewis Carroll’s and Henry Holiday’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876).

I started my Snark hunt in December 2008. Initially I probably had been quite unwise. That might explain the title The real story behind “The Hunting of the Snark” of an early post in The Lewis Carroll Forum. I am sorry for that botched exercise in self-irony.

Gardiner gave her warning to Snark hunters in her paper Life, Eternity, and Everything: Hidden Eschatology in the Works of Lewis Carroll, published on p.25~41 in THE CARROLLIAN, No. 31, mailed by the UK Lewis Carroll Society to me in June 2018 (yet not listed in http://thecarrollian.org.uk/).

As for “Article 42” in Thomas Cranmer’s 42 Articles and “Rule 42” in The Hunting of the Snark, the main argument of Gardiner’s June 2018 paper is “that Carroll’s frequent and unexplained use of the number 42, and in particular his development of Role 42 in the preface of The Hunting of the Snark and Rule 42 in Alice’s trial scene highlight the doctrine of eternal punishment that Carroll was so concerned about.” The issue was addressed in this Blog in December 2017: Eternal Disconnect.

As for Thomas Cranmer’s 42 Articles and the Baker’s 42 boxes in The Hunting of the Snark, Gardiner made me aware of Angus MacIntyre‘s comment (1994) “The Baker’s 42 Boxes are the original Protestant Articles of 1553, with Thomas Cranmer’s name on each.” Since 2010 I believe that too. Thanks to Karen Gardiner’s 2018 paper in THE CARROLLIAN and to Angus MacIntire’s suggestion I now know that linking the Baker in The Hunting of the Snark to Thomas Cranmer (among other references) is not such a weird idea after all.

Also Mary Hammond (a pen name of Mary Hibbs) recognized in 2017 that eternal damnation (Article 42 in the 42 Articles) was an issue which Carroll/Dodgson might have addressed in The Hunting of the Snark.

The Article 42 in the 42 Articles was of special interest to Carroll/Dodgson, who objected to the belief in an eternal punishment. But I don’t think that this explains why in The Hunting of the Snark Carroll came up with 42 boxes rather than 39 boxes as a reference to one of the most important foundations of the Anglican church. I suggest that Carroll chose the “42” as among several references to Thomas Cranmer, the author of the 42 Articles.

I started in December 2008 to be unwise with a single finding. But soon I understood, that there are many answers to Lewis Carroll’s and Henry Holiday’s textual and pictorial puzzles in The Hunting of the Snark. There are no references in Gardiner’s papers to my findings related to Thomas Cranmer and his 42 Articles, but it is good to learn that also theologists write about religious aspects of The Hunting of the Snark. Reverend Karen Gardiner is a Priest in the Church of England.

more

Snark in the Woods

Update 2018-02-22: https://www.forestry.gov.uk/snarkhunter

2017-09-17

Forestry Commission of England:

NEWS RELEASE No: 16687
14 SEPTEMBER 2017

Arts Council England grant awarded for exciting forest theatre experiences

The Arts Council has awarded £139,000 to the Forestry Commission and theatre partner Burn the Curtain to develop their outdoor theatre experiences. The substantial grant will enable Burn the Curtain to tour their sell-out evening theatre show, The Company of Wolves, based on the stories by Angela Carter, to three more forest locations this autumn.

In addition, a new theatre show will be developed around the nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. The experience will tour across seven forests in 2018 and will be accompanied by ‘Snark Hunter’, an innovative app which will bring the poem to life for forest visitors across the country. […]

(Thanks to Doug Howick for drawing my attention to this.)

Links:

Nose is a Nose is a Nose

2018-02-09:

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


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

read more

Update 2018-02-12:
My article is 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. Also four additional images have been attached to the article.