to be a special world inhabited by those who died by violence, the changing rays representing deceased souls playing ball with a walrus head. Most of the distinctive 12th-century Lewis Chessmen from northern Europe are carved from walrus ivory, though a few have been found to be made of whales' teeth. Literature Because of its distinctive appearance, great bulk, and immediately recognizable whiskers and tusks, the walrus also appears in the popular cultures of peoples with little direct experience with the animal, particularly in English children's literature. Perhaps its best-known appearance is in Lewis Carroll's whimsical poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" that appears in his 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass. In the poem, the eponymous antiheroes use trickery to consume a great number of oysters. Although Carroll accurately portrays the biological walrus's appetite for bivalve mollusks, oysters, primarily nearshore and intertidal inhabitants, these organisms in fact comprise an insignificant portion of its diet in captivity. The "walrus" in the cryptic Beatles song "I Am the Walrus" is a reference to the Lewis Carroll poem. Another appearance of the walrus in literature is in the story "The White Seal" in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, where it is the "old Sea Vitch—the big, ugly, bloated, pimpled, fat-necked, long-tusked walrus of the North Pacific, who has no manners except when he is asleep". See also Elephant seal References Further reading External links Biologist Tracks Walruses Forced Ashore As Ice Melts – audio report by NPR Thousands Of Walruses Crowd Ashore Due To Melting Sea Ice – video by National Geographic Voices in the Sea – Sounds of the Walrus Pinnipeds of the Arctic Ocean Mammals described in 1758 Mammals of Asia Mammals of Canada Mammals of Greenland Mammals of North America Mammals of Russia Mammals of the United States Mammals of Europe Marine mammals Pinnipeds of North America Odobenids Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus Holarctic fauna