Yes, a constrast indeed. It contains nonsense vocabulary, but it’s a perfectly coherent story, so not hard to remember.
Note also, in D&D and probably other related cultures, a “vorpal” weapon has come to mean a magic weapon with a chance of automatically decapitating a foe. And this is pure narrative compression too: in the poem, the hero goes galumphing back with the jabberwock’s head after using the vorpal blade to defeat it. The poem doesn’t say the jabberwock was killed by decapitation, but it’s too easy to join the dots between the snicker -snack and the victorious galumphing, and thus extract an unconscious theory about what it is that “vorpal” blades do.
I couldn’t even finish reading the second one.
Contrast this famous piece of nonsense:
Yes, a constrast indeed. It contains nonsense vocabulary, but it’s a perfectly coherent story, so not hard to remember.
Note also, in D&D and probably other related cultures, a “vorpal” weapon has come to mean a magic weapon with a chance of automatically decapitating a foe. And this is pure narrative compression too: in the poem, the hero goes galumphing back with the jabberwock’s head after using the vorpal blade to defeat it. The poem doesn’t say the jabberwock was killed by decapitation, but it’s too easy to join the dots between the snicker -snack and the victorious galumphing, and thus extract an unconscious theory about what it is that “vorpal” blades do.
Nonsense vocabulary that was also carefully crafted to sound plausible, with echoes of meaning and associations to existing words.
I doubt it’s possible to be any more comprehensible than Jabberwocky without using only real words.