Audiobook · read by volunteers
Hunting of the Snark
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)
Read by Robert Garrison · 1 chapter · 29 min
About the book
A crew of ten sets sail in search of a creature nobody can describe. The Bellman leads them, armed with a blank map. The Butcher, the Baker, the Beaver and the rest follow, each with a peculiar talent and an even more peculiar sense of duty. The quarry is the Snark, and the rules for recognising one are as slippery as the animal itself. Lewis Carroll's mock-heroic voyage is a splendid piece of nonsense verse, full of invented words, mad logic and sudden shivers of the uncanny. It races along at the pace of a chase, and a good reader can make every stanza sparkle. This recording fits the whole poem into half an hour, a brisk and joyous ride that children and adults can enjoy together. Come aboard and keep your wits about you. A rollicking ride for all ages.
Introduction
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who lived from 1832 to 1898. He was an English mathematician, a clergyman and a photographer, and he is remembered above all for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel. The Hunting of the Snark, published in 1876, came several years after the second Alice book, and it shows the same delight in wordplay and in the logic of the absurd, now applied to a long narrative poem.
The poem is subtitled an agony in eight fits, a joke that makes fun of the solemn labels of Victorian verse. It tells of a ship's company on an expedition to find a creature that is never properly described. Carroll's invented words, such as the famous portmanteau terms he explained in his preface, are part of the fun, and the poem is crammed with rules, rhymes and rituals that make perfect sense only within their own mad world. Underneath the comedy, readers have found anxiety, satire and a good deal of dread, and the poem has been interpreted in dozens of ways without ever being tied down.
It is often compared with the work of later nonsense writers, and some listeners hear in its galloping verse a forerunner of Dr Seuss. The reading takes about half an hour, in a single chapter, and is performed by one LibriVox volunteer. The galloping rhythm makes it ideal for reading aloud, and it can easily be enjoyed more than once.
It is a short, strange and delightful adventure for anyone who likes language to misbehave.
Public domain
Lewis Carroll died in 1898: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text