Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits) is a comic poem about a group of adventurers hunting a legendary beast. It borrows occasionally from Carroll's short poem "Jabberwocky" in Through the Looking Glass, (especially the latter's creatures and portmanteau words), but it is a stand-alone work.
The poem has some aspects characteristic of much of Carroll's poetry; it utilizes technically adept meter and rhyme, grammatically correct phrasing, logical chains of events — and largely nonsensical content, frequently employing made-up words such as "Snark". It is by far his longest poem — unlike Alice which is prose with occasional poems within the text, the hunting of the Snark rhymes from start to end.
The group is led by a Bellman, and consists otherwise of a Boots, a Bonnet-maker, a Barrister, a Billiard-marker, a Banker, a Butcher who can only kill beavers, a Baker, a Broker, and a Beaver. After crossing the sea guided by the Bellman's map of the Ocean--a blank sheet of paper--they arrive in a strange land. The Baker recalls that his uncle once warned him that, though catching Snarks was all well and good, you must be careful; for, if your Snark is a Boojum, then "you will softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again." With this in mind, they split up to hunt. At the end, the Baker calls out that he has found a snark; but when the others arrive he has mysteriously disappeared.
It is disputed whether Carrol had indeed in mind a young audience when he wrote the book. The poem has no young protagonists. It is rather dark and does not end happily. In addition to the disappearance of the Baker, the Banker loses his sanity, an event that is described in detail:
- 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!
- To the horror of all who were present that day.
- He uprose in full evening dress,
- And with senseless grimaces endeavored to say
- What his tongue could no longer express.
- Down he sank in a chair--ran his hands through his hair--
- And chanted in mimsiest tones
- Words whose utter inanity proved his insanity,
- While he rattled a couple of bones.
Similarly, the illustrations are caricatures with disproportionate heads and unpleasant features, very different from Tenniel's illustrations of Alice.
However, Carrol definitely thought the book was suitable for some kids. Upon the printing of the book, Carrol sent 80 signed copies to his favorite child friends. In a typical fashion, he signed them with short poems, many of them masterful acrostics of the child's name.
In composing the poem Carroll started from its last line. Then Carroll composed the final stanza to fit the line, and the rest of the poem to fit the final stanza. (One may compare J. R. R. Tolkien's composition of The Hobbit from its first line.)
- In the midst of the word he was trying to say
- In the midst of his laughter and glee
- He had softly and suddenly vanished away
- For the snark was a boojum, you see.
- -- Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"
Interpretations
Various theories have tried to elucidate or the text or parts thereof. We list below some of them
Lewis Carrol is the Baker
This is by far the most serious of them all. The text has a number of hints at this fact. The fact that his name is unknown to the other crue members (he forgets it) attests that some riddle is involved. The baker's character as described in Fit the First matches other descriptions of Carrol of himself (e.g. the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass). Lewis Carrol was 42 when he wrote the poem. The Baker is around the same age, as the phrase "I skip forty years" in Fit the Third: The Baker's Tale discloses. And finally, the Baker had "forty-two boxes, all carefully packed, With his name painted clearly on each" (Fit the First), which he left on the beach, presumably his previous life.
As already stated, the hunting of the Snark is unique among Lewis Carrol's work in its length and its dark nature. This also fits with an attempt to find a hidden personal message withing its pages. Many believe that this hidden message should be in the repeating stanza
- They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
- They pursued it with forks and hope;
- They threatened its life with a railway-share;
- They charmed it with smiles and soap.
But no convincing theory yet explains it.
The murderer was Boots
Apparently, as the poem states, the snark was a boojum. However, the following describes the Baker's last words, when the others see him leaping and cheering on a nearby hilltop:
- "It's a Snark!" was the sound that first came to their ears,
- And seemed almost too good to be true.
- Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
- Then the ominous words "It's a Boo-"
- Then, silence.
The others disagree whether they heard the syllable "-jum" after this. Thus, a rival school of interpretation of the poem suggests that in fact there was no Boojum, but that the Boots betrayed them all and murdered the Baker, and that this was what the latter was trying to say when he died. It is worth mentioning that the Boots is the most mysterious of the crew members. He is alluded to very shortly in Fit the First and Fit the Fourth and nowhere else, and is the only one of the crew members which does not appear in any of the original illustrations. It is also reasonable to assume the Boots (shoeshine in contemporary English) would have a particular grudge against the Baker, as he was wearing 3 pairs of boots one over the other (Fit the first, and this also appears clearly in the illustrations).
The Boojum was only dangerous to the Baker
There are a number of clues for this theory throughout the text. It is never stated explicitly that a Boojum might be dangerous to other crew members. When the Baker's uncle warns him about Boojums he says
- " 'But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,
- If your Snark be a Boojum! For then
- You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
- And never be met with again!'
Hinting that the Baker might be vulnerable to Boojums since he is "beamish". On hearing this the Bellman is surprised and complains that the Baker should have mentioned this fact before. One would hardly suppose that the Bellman was unaware about an inherent danger in Snarks, or that he expected his crue members to enlighten him on such issues. Thus one must conclude that the Bellman did not know a fact specific to the Baker. Finally, and most revealingly, the Bellman's reply is
- "We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe,
- If you never were met with again--
Which clearly implies that the danger to the Baker is greater than to other crew members.
The illustrations
A related debate is to what extent the original illustrations should be considered when analyzing the poem. Opponents claim that they deviate from the text in a number of places (for example, the Baker is supposed to have whiskers and hair, Fit the Fourth, but in the illustrations he is bald) and hence should be discounted. Others claim they were prepared with great cooperation from Carrol, and that the correspondance of letters can tell us his opinion of each. Thus it would seem that Lewis Carrol did not intend care and hope from the repeating stanza to stand for two women, but was quite pleased with the interpretation after the fact. Contrariwise, Carrol suppressed an illustration of the Boojum itself, since he wanted the monster to remain undescribed (none of its features described in Fit the third is physical).
Aftermath
The word "snark" has since been used in graph theory, as has "boojum", and was also used, chillingly aptly, as the name of the SM-62 Snark nuclear cruise missile. The term "boojum" has also been used in physics to describe a phenomenon originally found in superfluid helium-3, and also in liquid crystals, and for the boojum tree.