Fairy tales tend to use similar tropes, character types, and plot lines, as Vladimir Propp demonstrated in his Morphology of the Folk Tale. Such stories of ‘overcoming the monster’ are as old as English literature itself, then, and there are other myths associated with England – such as the story of the patron saint of England, St George, slaying the dragon – which utilise this motif.Īnother useful way of interpreting ‘Jabberwocky’ is through considering the oral fairy-tale tradition. ‘Jabberwocky’, in one sense, takes us back to the very earliest ‘English’ poems, such as the great Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, in which the titular hero faces the fearsome monster Grendel (and, after that, faces the wrath of Grendel’s mother as well as a mighty dragon).
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