Annotations

1. 'Cross' meaning grumpy. This rather mild meaning belies the word's grimmer roots in latin 'crux' and 'crucio' meaning 'cross, gallows' and 'I torment, torture' respectively.
2. This remarkable argument marks one of the generally acknowledged references to the original boating party Lewis Carroll began telling the story of Alice's adventures on, 'Lory' being short for Lorina, one of Alice's sisters. The argument from age is by no means restricted to use by children, who learn it very quickly from their parents.
3. Debate still rages as to whether getting cold can cause you to contract a cold virus. However, in 2005 British researchers carried out a small study that suggests that 'getting chilled' doesn't cause you to catch a cold so much as it allows a cold that your body was already fighting off successfully to become symptomatic. Considering the greater prevalence of colds in winter when we have more opportunities to get cold, the study does seem persuasive.
4. 'To give yourself airs' or 'have an important air' means to hold yourself and speak in a way indicating you consider yourself thoroughly important and in charge. In contemporary canadian english, a person is more likely to say, bluntly, that 'you're acting like a snob.'
5. There are all sorts of dryness (watch out for the many sorts of muchness later on). Most basically, to be dry is to not be wet; but then there are things like dry wines (not sweet), dry humour (usually based on wordplay and delivered in a normal voice), and a dry run (a rehearsal). The sort of dryness intended here is that associated with stating only the facts, and therefore being an aid to insomniacs, although if you read the Mouse's paragraph more closely than usual (I certainly wouldn't blame you if you hesitated to do such a thing), you'll notice there's more than just 'fact' in what the Mouse is saying.
6. This character being the well-known Norman duke who was the only and illegitimate son of his father, also named William. After spending a few years fighting all the other norman warlords who thought they shouldn't have to accept him as duke (and really, who could blame them), he decided to dash across the english channel and take over england under the pretext that the throne there was rightfully his and had been promised to him, which he did starting in 1066.

   The norman french were and are descendants of vikings who invaded france and eventually settled in normandy. The eventual norman invasion of england is the ultimate reason why english is so full of french words that it can be surprisingly easy to make sense of simple french texts or ordinary speech after only basic instruction in the language (but beware, this doesn't make it easy to speak french). Norman french is far from the only source of french words in english, but it was the key event that established french's prestige among the wealthy and those hoping to be wealthy in england.

7. This is a remarkable statement if you go and look at the actual timelines of the norman conquest of england. It didn't hurt duke William at all that the english army had just won a victory so pyrrhich against an attempted norwegian invasion that if they had staved off the norman french as well it would have been a miracle. But this did not end english resistance, which continued for over five years, and was only brought under some form of control by the imposition of feudalism. Considering that in the end norman french ceased to be spoken in england and english made a resurgence, arguably the resistance never ended, it simply became based on other means than overtly fighting.
8. Edwin and Morcar led an english army in battle with another norwegian army and lost, then supported a different candidate for the english throne rather than submitting to William immediately. They spent several years alternately submitting to William, then leading new revolts.
9. English, unlike french, is a germanic language, and thanks to various invasions by other germanic language speakers as well as trade has absorbed words and names from those languages as well. For example 'Edwin' derives from Ead-wine 'prosperity friend' in old english, while Morcar is an old swedish name that may mean 'good plain.'
10. This interesting name may mean 'path wanderer,' and comes from old norse. It appears to have almost slipped out of use today except among role game players à la 'Dungeons and Dragons.'
11. More fun and confusion with pronouns. Pronouns behave in ways that are analogous to variables in algebraic equations – or more likely, algebraic variables were modelled on the behaviour of pronouns. That is, a pronoun can stand in for any noun in the same way a variable can stand for any number.

    The Duck understandably responds to this by trying to apply the 'find the replaced noun' rule, although a bit too literally. Those afflicted with latin grammar instruction may have learned to look for the question that the statement with the pronoun in it could answer as a means of finding the original noun in cases like this one. Following the idea in the previous footnote, this would be the linguistic equivalent of isolating and finding the value of an algebraic variable for a given system of equations.

    I have just very belatedly realized that I forgot to explain what "it" is actually doing linguistically speaking. In this case the word is serving as a sort of place holder because of the structure of the sentence. "Found" isn't an intransitive verb, it takes an object no matter what, but there is no object here. Instead, the verb is actually being used to describe the state of mind of Stigand, but in a round about way that deflects attention from the fact that he is switching sides and arguably going traitor. We could easily replace "found it advisable" with "decided that." I don't think this is the only case in which a dummy "it" can turn up, though it is difficult to spin out examples as I suspect they are primarily idiomatic. French has many "dummy pronouns" as well, usually buried in idiomatic question structures where they either help keep the phrase pronounceable or reflect fossils of latin sentence structures.

12. 'Atheling' is another old english name, and probably a fairly popular one at one time. It means 'member of a noble family.'
13. The most common image of the viking ancestors of the normans are understandably a bit one dimensional, as most of the descriptions of them come from documents written by people suffering their raids. They were part of an unfortunate (and sadly, ongoing) tradition of bands of people who combined extensive trading with raiding, warfare, invasion and colonization.
14. Following the english etymology theme, if we pretend for a moment that absorbed words don't become naturalized from the language they used to be into english words, the Dodo is indeed not speaking much english. 'Move' and 'remedies' come from norman french (also known as anglo-norman), the language spoken by duke William and his friends. 'Adjourn' and 'immediate' are from old french. 'Adoption' is from latin, while 'energetic' comes from greek.
15. 'Caucus' is one of the words british english managed to pick up from Indigenous people in north america. It derives from an Algonquian language term used in what is now usually referred to as virginia. The translations for the Algonquian word offered by non-Algonquians are irregular in detail although thematially consistent, including 'counsellor' and 'to meet together' which get us to ideas like meeting to take counsel together.
16. Since the Dodo has to place one finger on his forehead, of course Tenniel had to illustrate the Dodo with hands. The result is a bit surreal; as you can see to the right, it looks like a bird suit with a person in it, except for the feet. Tenniel couldn't resort to the Disney solution of reshaping the Dodo's wings into hands because the dodo was a flightless bird with wings too short to serve.
17. I can't find a picture of Shakespeare like this now, although it seems to me I have seen one. It suggests a curious human belief in taking up silly positions as a means of improving concentration – curious, but not necessarily unfounded. On one hand, the definition of a silly position varies over time and with culture; on the other, if you've ever watched a small child concentrating on a difficult task, you'll see that they almost always stick their tongue out a ways while they are concentrating. Most of us get trained out of this eventually, but it is probably an artifact of the way we all learn when we're just starting out in the world: by putting whatever it is in our mouth.
18. Evidently Carroll was satirizing british elections with a heavy hand here, with the 'candidates' starting and leaving off when they feel like it, and of course having to check with someone else who has won. It isn't at all clear whether the Dodo ran in the race himself, in which case he would correspond rather neatly to a returning officer, who is not allowed to run for office in the election they are working the polls for, although they can vote.
19. Returning to the topic of the Dodo's hands and Tenniel's illustration, it's a bit of a puzzle why he gave the Dodo a walking stick, except that the dodo is a very ungainly looking bird.
20. Comfits were a type of candy made by coating dried fruit, nuts, or spices with a sugar candy shell. They are ancestors of today's more familiar glosette's raisins and peanuts, at least in canada – in case these aren't familiar candies elsewhere, the raisins and peanuts are coated with chocolate. More commonly, comfits were small seeds covered in sugar candy, and indeed if you find actual comfits in a store, they will often be of this type, and come in a small tin box with a glazed lid, usually with a flowery picture on it.
21. Another alarmingly true to life reflection of real life caucus-races. It seems a longterm trend just now for politicians to offer voters short term installments of their own money as an incentive to vote for them.
22. Considering what comfits were, and that birds can neither suck on a candy nor chew on it, it's no wonder the comfits ultimately caused some trouble.
23. The saga of Lewis Carrol's efforts to get the Mouse's Tale printed properly is well worth reading in Martin Gardner's annotated Alice in Wonderland. In brief, Carroll had to resort to cutting out bits of paper and pasting them up into the shape he wanted. Today such a task is relatively trivial thanks to computers, although I have not found another web version of Alice in Wonderland so far that recreates it.

    The version of the Mouse's Tale here is not a scan. Part of the fun of reading it is that it is legible in spite of itself, an effect I couldn't mimic by scanning without creating a maniacally large image file. So I actually recreated it in Adobe Photoshop in a serif font rather than the default sans-serif font you see throughout the rest of the site, which made the job much easier, and allowed me to conform to the original linebreaks.

24. 'Cur' is the victorian english word for what many north americans now would likely call a mutt, a dog of mixed breed. For those of you who are familiar with Indiana Jones, how many of you got the pun implied by the name of his son?
25. Here is Alice in one of her supremely thoughtless moments, as well as one illustrating a rather alarming cruel streak. After all, Dinah would not have brought back the Mouse gently, and the last time I checked, cats don't take orders like 'bring it back alive.' In fact, according to my friends who cohabitate with outdoor cats, hunting cats may decide to bring back a dead mouse or small bird as a gift, but if they bring back something alive they either mean to play with it or teach a younger cat with it.
26. Magpies aren't known for having pretty voices, which is true of most members of the Corvidae family. Magpies were originally just called 'pies', which gives a whole new meaning to 'flying pies.' They are both highly intelligent and highly social, and like humans have an abiding love of collecting and hoarding interesting objects, especially shiny ones. This seems to have led some people, especially people of European descent, to take a remarkable dislike to them.
27. Why Alice should imagine such a thing beats me. In any case, we are apparently now at least just beyond the end of the long hallway in the Rabbit hole. Thinking over the Mouse's story – perhaps he represents an unwitting intrusion by Alice's sister, who was therefore reading a history textbook and may have tried reading it aloud for awhile? Any veteran of university is familiar with this strategy for reading dull material without falling asleep and hopefully with retaining the information.