While alice falls you can hear cheshire's voice echoing in the background saying 'why couldn't you save us?' The screen then fades to black, and we then see alice sitting folded rocking back and forth in the corner of a padded room, with the jabberwocky keeping her company. Alice appeared and managed to slay him, avenging the death of Gryphon. Madness Returns Though Jabberwock was not brought back to life when Wonderland was restored, he continued to haunt Alice in her hallucinations.
'Vorpal sword' and 'vorpal blade' are phrases in Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem 'Jabberwocky', which have been taken up in several other media. Carroll never provided a definition of what it really meant.[1] The term has been adopted by the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, where 'vorpal' blades have the ability to decapitate opponents on lucky strikes.[2]
Context and definition[edit]
Carroll published Through the Looking-Glass in 1871. Near the beginning, Alice discovers and reads the poem 'Jabberwocky', which Humpty Dumpty later attempts to explain, to her increasing consternation. One of the poem's several nonsense adjectives, 'vorpal' is twice used to describe the sword a young hero employs to slay the poem's titular monster:[1]
He took his vorpal sword in hand,
longtime the manxsome foe he sought
So rested he by the Tum-Tum Tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And later,
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
As with much of the poem's vocabulary, the reader is left to guess at the meaning of 'vorpal' from the context. As befits the sword in a heroic ballad, 'vorpal' is frequently assumed to mean deadly or sharp. Carroll himself explained that many of the poem's words were portmanteau words playfully combining existing words from English, such that 'frumious' meant 'fuming and furious', 'mimsy' meant 'flimsy and miserable' and 'slithy' meant 'lithe and slimy'. Carroll seems never to have supplied meaning for 'vorpal', at one point writing, 'I am afraid I can't explain 'vorpal blade' for you—nor yet 'tulgey wood'',[3] although Alexander L. Taylor notes (in his Carroll biography The White Knight) that 'vorpal' can be formed by taking letters alternately from 'verbal' and 'gospel'.[4]
References[edit]
Alice Madness Returns Esrb
- ^ abGardner, Martin, ed. (1971) [1960]. The Annotated Alice. New York: The World Publishing Company. p. 153.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
- ^'SRD:Vorpal - D&D Wiki'. www.dandwiki.com. Retrieved 2016-07-03.
- ^Graham, Eleanor (1981). Lewis Carroll and the Writing of Through The Looking Glass, Introduction to Through The Looking Glass in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through The Looking Glass. Puffin Books.
- ^Taylor, Alexander (1952). The White Knight. Oliver & Boyd.