Jabberwock (monster class)
- For the monster, see Jabberwock.
The jabberwock is a monster class that appears in NetHack, and is represented by an uppercase J glyph (J). Xorns are designated internally by the macro S_JABBERWOCK.[1]
The monster class contains the following monsters:[2]
- J jabberwock
- J vorpal jabberwock (deferred monster)
History
The jabberwock first appears in NetHack 3.0.5, while the vorpal jabberwock first appears as deferred monster data in NetHack 3.3.0.
Origin
The jabberwock is a creature featured in Jabberwocky, a famous nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, and its encyclopedia entry is an excerpt from the poem. The poem also makes mention of several other unusual creatures such as the jubjub bird and the bandersnatch.
Jabberwocky was first printed in Carroll's 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to the 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Alice finds herself in the looking-glass world and encounters the poem as part of a book written in a seemingly unintelligible language; she shortly discovers the text and the world at large is in fact inverted (or mirrored), and holds a mirror to the poem to read it, finding it as puzzling as the odd land she is now in. The poem is also the inspiration for the artifact weapon Vorpal Blade, based on the unnamed adventurer's weapon that is used to behead the jabberwock.
The original illustrations by John Tenniel accompanying the poem (and the rest of the two novels) depict the titular jabberwock as a bipedal creature that vaguely resembles a dragon: It has bat-like wings, a long serpentine neck, a long tail, a weird head with rabbit-like teeth, hands with three long spidery talons, and a waistcoat. Some of the jabberwock's more particular traits may reflect the contemporary Victorian obsession with natural history and the then fast-evolving sciences of paleontology and geology.
Variants
Many variants expand the jabberwock monster class by including the vorpal jabberwock, as well as other creatures based on the nonsense names from Jabberwocky and other Lewis Carroll works.
EvilHack
EvilHack adds the following new monsters to the monster class:
- J snark
- J boojum
- J vorpal jabberwock
SlashTHEM
SlashTHEM adds the following new monsters to the monster class:
