If I had to define awesome, it would be: Sir Christopher Lee reads my favorite poem, "The Jabberwocky".
Yup. Awesome.
Original link: Times Online Entertainment. Tip o’ the vorpal blade to Fark.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
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March 23rd, 2010 at 3:20 pm
I can’t help but hear him as Saruman! Still totally awesome!
March 23rd, 2010 at 4:47 pm
AWESOME! I memorized the Jabborwocky (along with many other of LC’s poems in the Alice books) years ago, but hearing Christopher Lee read it is wonderful. I love that poem.
March 23rd, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Great reading – ‘Saruman Reads Carroll’. I do like the fact that Christopher Lee, in his later years, has retained a place in acting and the arts that befits his earlier career.
On a related note I’m still trying to work out if the author of ‘Vorpal Blade’, ‘Manxome Foe’ and ‘The Claws that Catch’ is playing a large early April Fools joke with the publication of “The Sceince behind ‘The Secret’”.
March 23rd, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Is there anything that he can’t do well?
March 23rd, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Did you know you can sing Jabberwocky to the tune of Blake’s Jerusalem? My now-wife and I discovered this years ago. We sing our son to sleep with it. The only tricky bit is that there are an odd number of verses, so you insert a voice of “Galumph galumph” in after the verse where he kills the Jabberwock. It works!
March 23rd, 2010 at 5:37 pm
You can sing it to Greensleeves as well. It used to be a standard at SCA events and SF Cons years ago.
March 23rd, 2010 at 5:44 pm
Fantastic! He’s so awesome.
March 23rd, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Remember using graphics for words (e.g. IIRC, the TV game show Concentration?
Welll……..
went
Have a frabjous day!!!
J/P=?
March 23rd, 2010 at 6:28 pm
Joy!
March 23rd, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Christopher Lee has had an amazing, and amazingly long career — and obviously it’s not over yet.
March 23rd, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Holy Hell… His voice can be terrifying. I am too young to be familiar with his older performances, but I love what he’s done recently.
March 23rd, 2010 at 7:23 pm
fantastic!
I really liked Depp’s recitation in the Burton film too, with a scottish or scot-like accent – brilliant.
March 23rd, 2010 at 8:08 pm
“I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one of them is respectable or unhappy, all over the earth.”
–Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), The Wicker Man, (1973)
One of my favorite lines spoken by Lee. Somehow he manages to be sympathetic, thrilling, and sinister all at once.
March 23rd, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Muppets did it better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGCJFFxoHJ4
March 23rd, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Stunning
March 23rd, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Confidential to Steve Ulven @ 11: Psssst . . . you’re not too young for DVDs.
(For that matter, some of early pre-Hammer work has fallen into public domain, like, say, Horror Hotel for example. You could start learning tonight.)
March 24th, 2010 at 12:21 am
Off topic:
Hip hop anthem for skeptics — via pharyngula
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/03/hip_hop_anthem_for_skeptics.php
and
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/FaceOff/
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/FaceOff/nightline-face-off-god-future/story?id=10170505
March 24th, 2010 at 3:30 am
We must join with Him, Gandalf. We must join with Sauron. It would be wise, my friend.
March 24th, 2010 at 3:45 am
If you like this, you’ll love Christopher Walken reciting Poe’s “The Raven”. Poetry and actors is a very happy combination.
March 24th, 2010 at 5:57 am
Let us not forget this classic version (starts at 1:30):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBbc0txWkQw
March 24th, 2010 at 6:32 am
Count Dooku rules!
March 24th, 2010 at 7:27 am
I memorized “Jabberwocky” long ago while listening to a recording by someone whose name is thoroughly lost to me, but it is obvious that Sir Christopher has the correct reading for “Came whiffling through the tulgey wood / And burbled as [it] came”–to me that part never was so sinister!
The original has “he” and not “it”.
March 24th, 2010 at 10:41 am
Check out this page – translations into German, French, Czech, Welsh, etc. http://www.waxdog.com/jabberwocky/translate.html
I once had all of The Hunting of the Snark memorized – but that was long ago… Charlie Dodgson was a genius.
March 24th, 2010 at 10:49 am
And appropriately enough, Sir Christopher does the voice of the Jabberwock in the Tim Burton “Alice in Wonderland”.
March 24th, 2010 at 11:48 am
Lee is good, but I have issues with his pronunciation of gyre. The Muppets duplicate him, but Arnaz in the SNL skit gets it right I think. I have to side with Humpty Dumpty over Carroll on the hard (go) vs. soft (gem) g. If Dumpty says gyre means to go round like a gyroscope, then it must be pronounced the same. Compare: gyrate. Also, see British and American pronunciations of gyre, here: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gyre
Carroll got it backwards when commenting in his author’s note 24 years after the fact, mixed up his hard and soft g, or whatever – I don’t believe he intended gyre to be pronounced in a non-standard way. Dumpty, by giving the meaning, gives the best evidence for Carroll’s intended pronunciation. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it unless someone can show me that gyroscope, gyrate and/or gyre were pronounced with a hard g in England the later 1800s.
March 24th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Nitpick: the name of the poem is “Jabberwocky”, not “The Jabberwocky”. The name of the monster itself is “the Jabberwock”.
I’ll have to wait until I get home to hear Lee’s reading, though.
Speaking of Saruman, I finally finished “The Silmarillion”, a book I’ve owned since 1975-ish but never could make it through before. It’s a slog, what with the stilted, archaic style — but my oh my, it sure is worth the effort.
March 24th, 2010 at 5:42 pm
Donnie @24, if you liked the Silmarillion, you need to read the Book of Lost Tales (vol 2). The fall of Gondolin brought tears to my eyes.
Back on topic, my students look at me with dread in their eyes when I mumble snicker-snack as I pass out exams.
April 1st, 2010 at 6:51 am
[...] And celebrating with the awesome Sir Christopher Lee reading one of my favourite poems – Jabbe… Current Mood: bouncy [...]
August 19th, 2010 at 10:45 am
I’m expecting nik nak to come stumbling out of nowhere and then drop him into a trap with nothing but his Golden Gun lol
August 24th, 2010 at 7:03 pm
Man. I have tears in my eyes. This reminded me so much of my dad reading this wonderful poem to me almost every night when he came home from work. I read it all the time to my niece now, but I never can get the feelings into it like my dad was able to.
August 25th, 2010 at 11:33 pm
oh man! it’s that guy from Gremlins 2! The one from the lab! I wonder what hes done since then?