“Carroll had no preference as far as the nonsense was concerned.”
-Martin Gardner
Lewis Carroll, along with Edward Lear, Spike Milligan and Mervyn Peake, was one of the greatest nonsense poets to ever have lived. Both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are full of them. Many of them (such as You Are Old, Father William) are parodies of poems that were popular at the time, though the majority are actually more famous now than the ones they were inspired by. However, there are a few that are completely original, The Walrus and the Carpenter being one of them.
Recited to Alice by Tweedledee and Tweedledum (despite her objections), The Walrus and the Carpenter tells the story of (surprise) a walrus and a carpenter. (This sounds like a good premise for a quirky “unlikely friendship” film, if you ask me.) It’s the middle of the night and the two of them are walking along a beach. They’re both pretty miserable, because there’s too much sand. (Maybe they just didn’t realise that beaches usually have lots of sand in them.) However, good fortune soon comes their way, as they encounter some anthropomorphic oysters, who they ask to come along. The eldest oyster decides not to go, because he can tell that anything involving these two weirdoes isn’t going to end too well. But the other four, being idiots, eagerly join the duo. And then the Walrus and the Carpenter horribly murder them. Yaaaaay! It’s a happy ending, if you think about it, because oysters are stupid.
Like with most of Carroll’s works, this is very fun to read. The words all fit together perfectly, like a literary jigsaw puzzle. The two main characters are so iconic that they’re referenced all the time in popular culture. There’s even this theory that the Carpenter is meant to be Jesus, while the Walrus represents Buddha. However, this isn’t actually true, as, according to Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice, the Carpenter could easily have been a baronet instead, or even a butterfly. (Carroll didn’t really mind, so long as it sounded right. When it comes to nonsense, often the noise a word makes is just as, or even more important than what it actually means.) Gahan Wilson has also written a rather chilling short story inspired by the poem called The Sea was Wet as Wet Could Be, which really puts it into a whole new perspective. You can find it in the short story anthology The Weird, if you’re interested.
