Tag: Fit7

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

Surrealist Entanglements

This perhaps is the first reference in academia to my findings: Chapter 7 Surrealist Entanglements (excerpts which refer to my findings) in Marysa Demoor‘s book A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815-1918: Mudscapes and Artistic Entanglements, Springer Nature (Palgrave Macmillan), 2022-03-21.
(Review by Marnix Verplancke, translated by Kate Connelly.)

What Marysa Demoor’s wrote about Henry Holiday’s pictorial references in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark confirms what I wrote my article Nose is a Nose is a Nose in the LCNSA Knight Letter (№ 99, Fall 2017, p. 30~31). I found Holiday’s pictorial references to Gheeraerts’ Image Breakers in 2009. Actually, a reference from another Snark illustration by Henry Holiday to Gheeraerts’ print started my Snark hunt in December 2008.

Henry Holiday’s references to Gheeraerts are also mentioned in Marysa Demoor’s article Een culturele brexit? Grotesk! (2022-05-07, archive) in the Belgian De Standaard.

Professor Demoor didn’t specify her sources for what she wrote about Henry Holiday’s references to Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, William Sidney Mount and Benjamin Duchenne.

 
Mastodon | Reddit | ex Twitter

 
2022-11-21, updated: 2024-02-27

It Looks Furry

This is from an exTwitter thread:

No Spring til now: Mary Throckmorton, Lady Scudamore, painted by Marcus Gheeraerts in 1614. What was that message about, I wonder? pic.twitter.com/aBE2TxD6oa

— Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) January 20, 2019

exquisite. what is she hiding/nursing?

— Christine Bagot (@cm_bagot) January 20, 2019

That's what I was wondering. It looks… furry

— Aphra Pell (@AphraPell) January 20, 2019

Could be a flohpelze or zibellino – could she have been pregnant at the time?

— Sally Hickson (@HalcyonSilks) January 20, 2019

To some those scarfs might look "furry". @AphraPell, it is interesting that you say that, because perhaps that's what Henry Holiday "saw" when he got inspired by Gheeraerts for an illustration to Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark". — https://t.co/DhiHH0Usu0 pic.twitter.com/PtwlHPhmDE

— Goetz Kluge (@Bonnetmaker) January 20, 2019

2/2 Catherine Killigrew, Lady Jermyn, beautifully painted also in 1614 by Marcus Gheeraerts. It’s his day today. pic.twitter.com/l7RDGIEycB

— Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) January 19, 2019

inspiration by re-interpretation

 
2019-01-20, updated: 2023-10-05

The Bandersnatch fled
as the others appeared

509    The Bandersnatch fled as the others appeared
510        Led on by that fear-stricken yell:
511    And the Bellman remarked “It is just as I feared!”
512        And solemnly tolled on his bell.

※ Lewis Carroll (text) and Henry Holiday (illustration)
※ Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder
※ Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger
※ On Borrowing

 
2022-05-31 (my 5696×4325 assemblage: 2013)
update: 2022-11-08

Waistcoat Poetry

 

There was an old man of Port Grigor,
Whose actions were noted for vigour;
He stood on his head
till his waistcoat turned red,
That eclectic old man of Port Grigor.

Edward Lear, 1872

 

He was black in the face,
and they scarcely could trace
The least likeness to what he had been:
While so great was his fright
that his waistcoat turned white –
A wonderful thing to be seen!

Lewis Carroll, from “The Hunting of the Snark”, 1876

 
 

Martin Gardner annotated (MG058) to The Hunting of the Snark that Elizabeth Sewell pointed out in The Field of Nonsense (1952) that a line in Carroll’s poem has a similarity to a line in a limerick by Edward Lear.

See also:


In The Field of Nonsense (I use a 2015 reprint), Elizabeth Sewell compared Carroll’s waistcoat stanza and Lears’s waistcoat limerick while taking a safe distance to considering “mutual plagiarism” by stating that “there is no evidence that either man was familiar with the other’s work”, adding that “the likeness do not in any case suggest borrowings…” (p. 9). However, Carroll/Dodgson knew Lear’s work (Marco Graziosi), and borrowing isn’t necessarily evil.

 
2017-09-11, update: 2022-10-24

On Borrowing

One of the surest tests [of a poet’s superiority or inferiority] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

T. S. Eliot, p. 114 in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1920

 
Likewise, a good illustrator welds the theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different and sometimes even funnier than that from which it is torn.

And Lewis Carroll may have borrowed from Thomas Gray.

 

All art is infested by other art.

(Leo Steinberg, in Art about Art, 1979)

 

Gustave Doré was an inspired master thief too:Segments from:
※ Plate I (mirror view) of Gustave Doré’s illustrations to Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1863),
※ Matthias Grünewald’s Temptation of St Anthony (c. between 1512 and 1516, a panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece, now located at Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France).

 
The borrowing never ends:

 
2018-02-18, update: 2022-09-05

This is worth a follow

UofG Fantasy @UofGFantasy, Apr 13, 2020

This is worth a follow: a twitter account that offers astonishing insights into Henry Holliday’s illustrations for The Hunting of the Snark. Turns out there are dozens of visual gags in them, detectable only by the enlightened!

 
My bragging is not perfect. I accidentally deleted the Tweet which earned me the recommendation by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic (University of Glasgow). But luckily the Internet doesn’t forget.
(Firefox theme: Dark Snark)

 
2021-02-14

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

The Image Breakers

  • [left]: The Banker after his encounter with the Bandersnatch, depicted in Henry Holiday’s illustration (woodcut by Joseph Swain) to the chapter The Banker’s Fate in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.
  • [right]: a slightly horizontally compressed rendering of The Imagebreakers (1566-1568, aka Allegory of Iconoclasm), an etching by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder.

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