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“For the Snark was a Boojum, you see”
In Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, a baker mysteriously disappears when he mistakes a Snark (safe and tasty) for a dangerous Boojum, which has the strange property of making captors “softly and suddenly vanish away”. Little did Carroll realise that his apposite example of the perils of monster classification would still have relevance in the 21st century.
When I was in my teens, I was a keen player of Dungeons and Dragons. I not only played, I also took the part of the referee or “dungeon master”. For those readers who are unfamiliar with Dungeons and Dragons, it is a role-playing game where the players take on the characters of individuals on a quest in a mediæval fantasy world with technology and magic on a par with Tolkein’s Middle-earth.
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