Author: Goetz Kluge

Maurice Saylor’s Snark

Naxos: «SAYLOR, M.: Hunting of the Snark (The) / New Music for Vintage Silent Film Comedies (Cantate Chamber Singers, Snark Pit-band, Snark Ensemble, Becker)

Maurice Saylor’s setting of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark is written for a chorus and ‘Snarkestra’, Saylor’s word for his quirky, misfit pit-band. This includes all manner of percussion and woodwinds, as well as such exotica as harmonica, bass accordion and washtub, instruments “reviled by society at large”, in Saylor’s words. To the nonsense text he brings a riot of colour and wit as well as a series of traditional devices such as refrains, sea chanties, and a chorale. The result is music of vibrancy, excitement, and even dangerous volatility. The three silent film scores are pacey, dapper and splendidly jazzy.»

(Thank you, Magnus, for your comment.)

2025-03-13

Lists of Snark illustrators

Herbjørn Andresen allowed me to mirror his list of illustrators of Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark”. It had been published in 2008. Therefore many URLs are not valid anymore. Herbjørn’s page has been removed from the server of the Oslo university in 2020 (and cannot be found in archive.org).

More lists:
※ Lewis Carroll Resources:
    ※ Henry Holiday
    ※ others than Holiday
※ Steve and Geoff
※ Lewis Carroll Society (UK): Carroll’s illustrators.

2020-12-12, updated: 2025-03-13/small>

Face Change

In an early draft to the illustration The Crew on Deck in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, the illustrator Henry Holiday gave the Bellman a different face than the one which the Bellman had in the final illustration. Henry Holiday didn’t discard the original face. He moved that round faced character (an Oxford colleague?) to the illustration to the chapter The Barrister’s Dream and then turned the Bellman in the illustration The Crew on Deck into a Darwin look-alike.

I think that Dodgson addressed conflicts within the Curch of England and the related legal battles (see Essays and Reviews) in The Hunting of the Snark. One of the results of that conflict was the The Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 introduced (in the year when Carroll started to write his Snark tragicomedy) as a Private Member’s Bill by the Archbishop of Canterbury Archibald Campbell Tait. So I dug a bit into the history of this. When I saw the round features of the bishop’s face in the Wikipedia, it reminded me of the face which Holiday gave the Bellman in his first draft. Interestingly, during the young Dodgson was a pupil at Rugby School, the bishop was the headmaster of of that school. Rugby seems to have been a traumatizing experience for Dodgson.

As for the looks, Richard Bethell, 1st Baron Westbury could be another candidate for Holiday’s reference. The Wikipedia says: “Perhaps the best known of his decisions was the judgment delivering the opinion [see excerpt] of the judicial committee of the privy council in 1863 against the heretical character of certain extracts from the well-known publication Essays and Reviews.”

But also Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Wine of St. Martin’s Day (dated to the 1560s) could have provided some inspiration. However, in the 19th century the Italian(?) owner of the painting still might not have known that Bruegel made it. And I am not sure whether Henry Holiday ever saw the painting or an reproduction thereof.

 
2018-03-31, updated: 2025-03-03

Blur

Blurring images works almost like low pass filtering images. An artist’s blunted sight can have the same effects like blurring with computerized image processing. Sometimes you need to get rid of distracting details in order to get the whole picture.


Jay Clause‘s what Salvador Dalí taught me about creative work will help you to (perhaps) get the whole picture. However, keep in mind that artists like to play with what the beholders of their work might want (or might not want) to percieve. Even without blurring, artists can deny anything you “see” in an ambiguous creation: They play with their own pareidolia as well as with the pareidolia of their audience.

Before computerized image processing was available, artists use simple techniques to blur images. For example, looking at an image through a feather did the trick.

Blurring might help you to see things which you wouldn’t see with clear sight. It’s fine to try that with artwork which might have been intentionally created for such an exercise. But better make sure that it was an artist who created the face that is looking at you. I don’t know whether Mars ever has been inhabited by artists.

 
Rather than suffering from pareidolia, artists get inspired by it.

 
Sometimes blurring helps to reveal structures hidden in the hatching.

 

See also: Susana Martinez-Conde, Dave Conley, Hank Hine, Joan Kropf, Peter Tush, Andrea Ayala and Stephen L. Macknik: Marvels of illusion: illusion and perception in the art of Salvador Dali

 

2017-12-28, updated: 2025-02-07

Eschatological Snark


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 and thought that I had found the answer. 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. There is not just one single “real story” behind Carroll’s Snark poem. There are many answers.

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.
    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 Rule 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.”«But if Rule 42 is not just a random number, preferred by some inexplicable reason by Carroll, but is actually a theological nod to a discarded article of faith, then the riddle may be solved. The rule may indeed be the oldest (that is, from 1553 rather than 1571) and so the King, in some senses, is correct. But Alice is also correct. This rule has already been rejected as unnecessary and flawed and therefore cannot be used by the court to justify ejecting her. It is therefore this paper’s argument that Carroll’s frequent and unexplained use of the number 42, and in particular his development of Rule 42 in the preface of the

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. I suggest that Carroll chose the “42” as one 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. When Reverend Karin Gardiner wrote her paper, she did not refer to my findings related to Thomas Cranmer and his 42 Articles. (She did that later in her Ph.D. thesis.) It is good to learn that also theologists write about religious aspects of The Hunting of the Snark.

more

 
2018-07-06, update: 2025-02-05

Mental Troubles

Geometry is a kind of toy rattle that nature has thrown to us to console and entertain us in the darkness.

(Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert to Frederick II, King of Prussia, 1764)
 

Perhaps I may venture for a moment to use a more serious tone, and to point out that there are mental troubles, much worse than mere worry, for which an absorbing object of thought may serve as a remedy.

  • There are sceptical thoughts, which seem for the moment to uproot the firmest faith;
  • there are blasphemous thoughts, which dart unbidden into the most reverent souls;
  • there are unholy thoughts, which torture with their hateful presence the fancy that would fain be pure.

Against all these some real mental work is a most helpful ally. That “unclean spirit” of the parable, who brought back with him seven others more wicked than himself, only did so because he found the chamber “swept and garnished,” and its owner sitting with folded hands. Had he found it all alive with the “busy hum” of active work, there would have been scant welcome for him and his seven!

(Charles Lutwidge Dodgson: Pillow Problems and A Tangled Tale, 1885, p. XV;
see also: Life & Letters. Bulletpoints not by Dodgson.)
 

As any human, Carroll/Dodgson was battling with all kind of temptations. As we know, speculations about temptations in his private life keep feeding the pop culture Carroll debate since the 1930s. The controversy is marginalizing the religious conflicts which Dodgson, the Deacon, was struggling with. I think that one of these serious conflicts was Charles Darwin’s challenge to fundamental religious beliefs. The discoveries of Darwin and other researchers surely had (and still have) the potential to uproot the firmest faith in various religions.

In the title of the book [Pillow-Problems, 2nd edition], the words “sleepless nights” have been replaced by “wakefull hours”.
        This last change has been made in order to allay the anxiety of friends, who have written to me to express their sympathy in my broken-down state of health, believing that I am a sufferer of chronic “insomnia”, and that it is a remedy for that exhausting malady that I have recommended mathematical calculation.
        The title was not, I fear, wisely chosen; and it certainly was liable to suggest a meaning I did not intend to convey, viz. that my “nights” are often wholly “sleepless”. This is by no means the case: I have never suffered from “insomnia”: and the over-wakeful hours, that I have had to spend at night, have often been simply the result of the over-sleepy hours I have spent during the preceding evening! Nor is it as a remedy for wakefulness that I have suggested mathematical calculation: but as a remedy for the harassing thoughts that are apt to invade a wholly-unoccupied mind.

I believe that an hour of calculation is much better for me than half-an-hour of worry.

(Charles Lutwidge Dodgson: Pillow Problems, preface to the second edition, 1893)

Carroll openly described how he used mental mathematical work to find distraction from “harassing thoughts”.

I don’t know to which degree the illustrator Henry Holiday discussed and aligned with Carroll his choice of pictorial references in his illustrations to Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, but there is a pictorial reference to mental troubles: St. Anthony’s temptations (painting by Matthias Grünewald). In one of Holiday’s illustrations you see Colenso’s arithmetic textbook. Like Anthony, also Carroll needed lots of mental work as an distraction from sceptical, blasphemous and unholy thoughts. Anthony probably found help in the scriptures which were sacred to him. Interestingly, the Reverend Dodgson used mathematics to resist the temptations.

I saw Colenso’s math textbook in Holiday’s illustration since many years. Only recently that led me to the assumption (which probably always will be just an assumption) that Holiday might have placed that book into his illustration as a hint to how Carroll used math to keep his brain busy with “some real mental work” as a “most helpful ally” in his battle against the temptations which haunted him.

By the way: Possible references in “The Hunting of the Snark” to St. Anthony and to Darwin had been addressed by Mahendra Singh before I thought about that. Mahendra (who alluded to Matthias Grünewald’s painting himself) and John Tufail were among my most helpful scouts during my own Snark hunt.
 

2020-06-11, update: 2025-01-17

Snark Hunting with Charles Darwin

369 "The method employed I would gladly explain, 370 While I have it so clear in my head, 371 If I had but the time and you had but the brain — 372 But much yet remains to be said. 373 "In one moment I’ve seen what has hitherto been 374 Enveloped in absolute mystery, 375 And without extra charge I will give you at large 376 A Lesson in Natural History." 377 In his genial way he proceeded to say 378 (Forgetting all laws of propriety, 379 And that giving instruction, without introduction, 380 Would have caused quite a thrill in Society), Is this about the introduction to evolution by Charles Darwin?

HMS Beagle | Snark Assemblage
Carroll and Science by Mark R. Richards
Contextualising Carroll by Darien Graham-Smith
Henry Holiday’s Boojum
Vivisection
Breakfast at five-o’clock tea | Charles Darwin in Tahiti
Forks
Tree of Life
Crossing the Line
Darwin’s Study
One of the Beagle‘s Chronometers
The Expression of Emotions
 
Literature:
Darien Graham-Smith
Laura White

 
2022-10-31, updated: 2024-10-30

Bowsprit

Gemini came up (after I introduced https://snrk.de/page_boots-bonnetmaker/ in an earlier prompt) with a quite interesting answer to the question “Are ‘the maker of Bonnets and Hoods’ and the ‘Boots’ the same person in Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Hunting of the Snark'”?

Q: Are “the maker of Bonnets and Hoods” and the “Boots” the same person in Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark”?

A: The document says that there is ambiguity about whether the maker of Bonnets and Hoods and the Boots are the same person. Some argue that the fact that the maker of Bonnets and Hoods is not pictured in any illustrations and the Boots’ job description includes unshipping the bowsprit, which requires some knowledge of ship parts, suggests they are the same person. Others argue that the description of the Boots’ incompetence makes it unlikely that they would be entrusted with such a task. Ultimately, the author leaves it up to the reader to decide.

Websites reviewed
1. snrk.de/page_boots-bonnetmaker

I already knew that ‘bonnets’ and ‘hoods’ can be understood not only as hats, but also as ship parts. (Carroll liked to use words with more than one meaning.) However, I didn’t make the link to the third ship part, the ‘bowsprit’. Thus, Gemini can generate new ideas (e.g. by checking which words belong to the same category).

It was quite probably Henry Holiday’s illustration (left image) of the Bonnetmaker holding a hat, which gave almost all Snark readers the idea that the Bonnetmaker just made hats. I think that Carroll associated some of his Snark characters with his Oxford colleagues, and the Bonnetmaker could have be a professor who graduated students to doctors and gave them their Tudor bonnet.

But on a ship, a maker of the bonnets and hoods (you see both ship parts together behind the Butcher and the Beaver in the right illustration) might be more helpful to repair these ship parts (and the bowsprit) than a hat maker.

(By the way: I don’t know any “others” who argue that the description of the Boots’ incompetence makes it unlikely that he would be entrusted with unshipping the bowsprit.)

 
2024-03-12, update: 2024-09-08

Time

Here the Bellman is Father Time ringing his bell.


The image on the lower right side is an allegorical English School painting (ca. 1610, by an unknown painter) of Queen Elizabeth I at old age together with the allegories of Death and of Father Time.

The upper left side is a depiction of the Bellman from Henry Holiday’s front cover illustration to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876).

A few years after I had found this painting, I recognized, that not only Henry Holiday’s Bellman looks like that unknown painter’s Father Time, But also the postures of the old queen and the old man have some similarities.

 

 
2018-10-11, updated: 2024-09-05

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 not as 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 gathered 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 think that the Boots is the maker of Bonnets and Hoods and that the Snark hunting party consists of nine members only, not ten.
  • 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.
            Already in 1994, Angus MacIntyre suggested: “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. Henry Holiday’s pictorial reference to Thomas Cranmer’s burning confirms the link between The Hunting of the Snark and Thomas Cranmer.

    I already experienced some plagiarism. So far, I take it as a compliment.😁

About me:
I am Götz Kluge, a retired electronics and mechatronics engineer living near Munich in Germany. As an engineer, I know how to work scientifically, but not in the field of arts and literature. In that field of research I am an amateur. However, one of my Snark hunt findings even is mentioned in the curator’s comment to a print owned by the British Museum.

As an amateur I don’t have to protect any reputation in academic 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 could be me (2010, 2010, 2015), but also Karen Gardiner (2018), Mary Hibbs (2017, pen names: Mary Hammond and Sandra Mann) and Angus MacIntyre (1994).

Blog:
※ Posts and Pages: I use WordPress to run snrk.de. WordPress offers to publish “posts” and “pages”. In this blog you will often find pairs of articles where one of them is a post and the other one is a page. In such a pair of articles, both have the same title where the post is a brief blog article and the associated page then goes into more detail.
※ Comments: I disabled the commenting function for almost all articles. Sorry, there is too much bot spam. You are welcome to use BlueSky or Mastodon (see below) for comments.

Contact:

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

Privacy policy and data protection:
This site attempts to comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation. The blog snrk.de itself does not collect your private data. But some pages have embedded third-party content (Instagram, Soundcloud, 𝕏witter, YouTube etc.) which might not respect your privacy sufficiently.

If you don’t like that, don’t use snrk.de!

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: 2024-09-03

Sir Nicholas Soames’ Speech

But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,
　And the Bellman​, perplexed and distressed​,
Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,
　That the ship would not travel due West!

※ www.nicholassoames.org.uk (2018-12-06): Full speech
※ Youtube: The Snark reference starts at 00:09:03.
※ e𝕏 twitter: [1] [2]

2018-12-30, update: 2024-07-08

Loop

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A Starry Map

Source of the map: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MODIS_-_Great_Britain_-_2012-06-04_during_heat_wave_(cropped).jpg Source of Henry Holiday's front cover illustration to Lewis Carroll's 'The Hunting of the Snark': https://snrk.de/snarkhunt/

John Tufail’s “The Illuminated Snark” (p. 15) lead me to this comparison. In 2004 he interpreted the starry night sky in Henry Holiday’s front cover illustration to Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” (1876) as a map, where the white clouds represented land with rivers. I liked the suggestion, but did not find any real-world map to which Holiday might have alluded. Holiday engraved that illustration himself.

I discovered John Tufail’s paper in 2009. Only today, after 15 years, I got the idea to compress and flip a large segment of a map of the British isles vertically. That’s my “slowness in taking a jest”. You see the result. Sadly, I can’t tell John that anymore. I appreciated his guidance a lot. The white clouds weren’t the land, but as for a map having been hidden in the illustration, John was right.

 
For comments: reddit: r/LewisCarroll, r/Maps, r/MapPorn

 
2024-05-12, update: 2024-06-25

Lookout

Who was first?
※ Gustave Doré’s illustration to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”,
※ Henry Holiday’s book cover design to Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark”.

 
2024-06-17 (Henry Holiday’s 185th birthday)

Carroll’s Honest Lie

Louis Zukofsky, “Review of Lewis Carroll, Russian Journal,” The New Masses (1935-10-08)Louis Zukofsky, “Review of Lewis Carroll, Russian Journal,” The New Masses (1935-10-08)

Authors, who say that they “don’t not know” whether their book is satire, might just tell an honest lie. Explaining that satire is satire is boring.

Of course “The Hunting of the Snark” contains satire. Dodgson wasn’t stupid. Satirists who explain their work would kill their work. E.g. in case of the “bathing machines“, “The Hunting of the Snark” took a reference to one of Carroll’s obvious satires.

By the way: I thought that Carroll’s Snark creation story “I was walking on a hillside, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly there came into my head one line of verse — one solitary line — ‘For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.'” was another honest lie, a “lime twig for critics“. But after checking the weather of that day I am not so sure anymore. It was a bright summer day.

ex Twitter | contextualising Carroll

 
2019-06-23, update: 2024-06-11

Contextualising Carroll

Contextualising Carroll

The contradiction of science and religion
in the life and works of Lewis Carroll

PhD Thesis by Darien Graham-Smith
University of Wales, Bangor, 2005

 
Summary

This work presents a theory that Lewis Carroll’s life and works were profoundly affected by a conflict between his logical world view and his religious beliefs. Three examinations are presented – the first of convention and logic in Carroll’s life, the second of the nature of his religion and the third of his response to contemporary science. The thesis concludes that Victorian science brought Carroll’s beliefs into contradiction, causing him to experience religious and existential doubts. It is suggested that an understanding of these doubts can inform an understanding of Carroll’s relationships with Alice Liddell and other young girls, and indeed has repercussions for his entire life and works beyond the scope of this thesis.

Two brief appendices expand upon issues mentioned in the text: the first considers the artefacts at Ripon Cathedral which are supposed by some to have influenced Carroll; and the second discusses Effie’s Dream-Garden, a children’s book which bears some resemblance to the Alice story but which was published several years before that story was first told.

 
Contents

   3  Summary
   4  Contents
   7  Acknowledgements
   8  Author’s Declarations
   9  Definitions

  10  Chapter 1: Introduction
  23  Chapter 2: Convention
  46  Chapter 3: Religion
  64  Chapter 4: Science
  88  Chapter 5: Darwin and the Dodo
 114  Chapter 6: Dreams and Doubts
 135  Chapter 7: Conclusion

 139  Appendix A: Ripon Cathedral
 142  Appendix B: Effie’s Dream Garden
 147  Works cited

 
Amazon (Kindle): B010Y2T5GS

 

If you want to use Darien Graham-Smith‘ thesis for your own research, I recommend to discuss it with the author and with Simon Davison, the maker of the British 2023 Snark film.

 
2024-06-02, update: 2024-06-11

Lime Twig

On 1875-11-06 Carroll wrote in his diary about his Snark poem:

The first stanza was composed in July 22. 1874. “In the midst of the word…” which stands as the last verse of the poem. But the very last line, “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see” came into my head while out on a walk at Guildford, July 18[.]

Source: Edward Wakeling (Ed.), Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, Vol. 6, 2001, p. 432
 

I was walking on a hillside, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly there came into my head one line of verse — one solitary line — “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.” I knew not what it meant, then: I know not what it means, now; but I wrote it down: and, some time afterwards, the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that being its last line: and so by degrees, at odd moments during the next year or two, the rest of the poem pieced itself together, that being its last stanza.

Source: From Lewis Carroll’s notes, found in Alice on Stage, The Theatre, April 1887.
See also: https://web.archive.org/web/20240504231527/https://kellyrfineman.livejournal.com/173027.html
 

I think that leaving such a nice origination story to his readers is part of Carroll’s skillful marketing of his Snark ballade. Oliver Sturm, who translated The Hunting of the Snark into German (Die Jagd nach dem Schnatz. 1996, ISBN 978-3-15-009433-4, p. 85) called that a “Leimrute für Kritiker” (“lime twig for critics”). Sturm might be wrong. At least, Carroll didn’t make up the bright summer day: “The sky was clear and the weather was very fine.”

I don’t think that Carroll dishonestly misleads his readers when he said “I know not what it means“. Of course he knows. He just made his poem as ambiguous as possible. The motive: Widening the interpretation space of his Snark poem. With that wider space, a book makes more readers happy (and therefore sells better, which is a nice side effect).

In case his readers (like me) think they have discovered some obfuscated meaning, it is the reader (again like me) who can be hold responsible for her or his interpretation, not the author. So, as for my interpretations, there still is the possibility that I am misleading myself.

This is why the Snark hunt never will end.

 
2017-12-17, updated: 2024-06-04

Carroll & Religion

 

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2022-11-05, updated: 2024-06-02

When the Queen met the Boojum

This is the first page published in snrk.de, a blog which was set up in 2017. It’s mostly about Lewis Carroll‘s, Henry Holiday‘s and Joseph Swain‘s illustrations to The Hunting of the Snark.

In his Illuminated Snark, John Tufail assumed that the night sky in the front cover of The Hunting of the Snark could be a map. Together with my assumption that Henry Holiday drew inspiration from several paintings by Marcus Gheeraerts (I+II), John’s paper helped me to find the Ditchley Portrait. That again helped me to find the painting by an unknown artist depicting Elizabeth I at old age.

It took me several years to find another map to which Henry Holiday might have referred as well.

more

 
2017-08-28, update: 2024-05-12

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