Brobdingnag
Brobdingnag is a fictional land in Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver's Travels occupied by giants. Lemuel Gulliver visits the land after the ship on which he is travelling is blown off course and he is separated from a party exploring the unknown land. More plot details can be found under A Voyage to Brobdingnag. The adjective Brobdingnagian has come to describe anything of colossal size.
Location
The map printed as part of Part II of Gulliver's Travels appears to indicate that Brobdingnag is located on the northwest coast of California. In the book Gulliver describes how the ship reached a latitude of five degrees south latitude, northward of Madagascar before it is blown by strong winds "a little to the east of the Molucca Islands, and about three degrees northwards of the line [equator]". From there the ship is driven by a storm "about five hundred leagues to the east". This would place the ship in Micronesia. Lemuel Gulliver claims to have discovered the land in 1703.
Brobdingnag is claimed to be a continent-sized peninsula six thousand miles long and three thousand miles wide, which based on the latitude and longitude given by Gulliver just before he shipwrecks there, would suggests it covers all of Alaska, the Yukon, the Bering Sea, and a small section of eastern Siberia. Further, it is claimed that a range of volcanoes up to 30 miles (48 km) high separates the country from unknown land to the northeast, and the people have never been able to develop ocean-going ships. Lorbrulgrud is claimed to be the capital with the king having a seaside palace at Flanflasnic.
Swift was highly skeptical about the reliability of travel writings and the unlikely geographic descriptions parody many unreliable travel books published at the time which Percy Adams describes as "travel lies" [1]. The drawings in Gulliver's travels are clearly based on cartographer Herman Moll's New Correct Map of the Whole World.
Though some historians cite Northern California as the likely setting for Brobdingnag, the Western coastline of the contiguous United States is geographically smooth and it isn’t until one arrives at the Southwest corner of Canada that any geographical features matching Herman Moll’s New Correct Map of the Whole World are found. Using Herman Moll’s map as a guide, Vancouver Island seems a more likely location for Brobdingnag, with the large river delta to the south likely the effluence of the Columbia River in Northern Oregon. Vancouver Island’s trees rival the size of California’s, and British Columbia is the legendary home of giants such as the Sasquatch and Dzunukwa.
Flora and fauna
The people of Brobdingnag are described as giants who are as tall as a church steeple and whose stride is ten yards. All of the other animals and plants, and even natural features such as rivers and even hail, are in proportion. The rats are the size of large dogs and the flies are the size of birds, for example. This also means that the country is far more dangerous for people of our size, as evidenced by Gulliver using his sword far more often here—namely, on attacking vermin—than in any other of the strange countries he visited; fortunately for Gulliver, the people are civilized. A splacknuck is an animal about 6 feet (1.8 m) long, to which Gulliver is compared in size, although it is never explained which animal it corresponds to (probably a rodent of some sort). Fossil records are claimed to show that the ancestors of the Brobdingnagians were once even larger. The King of Brobdingnag argues that the race has deteriorated.
History and government
Gulliver relates that, in the past, there were battles between the monarchy, nobility and people resulting in a number of civil wars ending in a treaty. The monarchy is based on reason. The King of Brobdingnag finds European institutions and behaviour wanting in comparison with his country's. Based on Gulliver's descriptions of their behaviour, the King describes Europeans as "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." [2] Swift intended the moral relationship between Europeans and Brobdingnagians to be as disproportionate as the physical relationship. The King of Brobdingnag is considered to be based on Sir William Steele, a statesman and writer, whom Swift worked for early in his career.
The army of Brobdingnag is claimed to be large with 207,000 troops including 32,000 cavalry although the society has no known enemies. The local nobility commands the forces; firearms and gunpowder are unknown to them. The King castigates Gulliver when he tries to interest the statesman in the use of gunpowder.
The laws of Brobdingnag are simple and easy to follow. There is little civil litigation. Murderers are beheaded.
Culture
Brobdingnagian culture consists of history, poetry, mathematics and ethics, mathematics being a particular strength. Printing has been long known but libraries are relatively small. The king has the largest library, which contains a thousand volumes. The Brobdingnagians favor a clear literary style.
Spelling
In a fictional letter by Lemuel Gulliver, it was stated that the actual spelling should be Brobdingrag, with an "r" instead of a "n".
Other uses and trivia
- There is a filk group called the Brobdingnagian Bards.
- The largest bank bills in the world as recorded by the Guinness Book of World Records are the 100,000 Philippine peso Centennial commemorative bills, which are called Brobdingnagian bills.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs also used brobdingnagian in his 1910 "John Carter of Mars" sci-fi series.
- Italy is often referred to in literature as "The Brobdingnagian Boot."
- In the novel "The Cheese Monkeys", by Chip Kidd, an entire art project is centered around the culture of Brobdingnag
- F. Eugene Barber used brobdingnagian in his CIA fiction novel "DEAD RINGER"
- Sylvia Plath used "brobdingnag" in her poem "Sow" from her first book "The Colossus."
- Richard Dawkins used brobdingnagian on page 115 of Climbing Mount Improbable
- Frank Norris uses a simile comparing McTeague to a "puny Gulliver struggling with the molar of some vast Brobdingnagian" (Page 116, Signet, McTeague)
- In Justice League Unlimited, League member Question describes his distaste for Lex Luthor as "Brobdingnagian".[3]
- In the Avengers (comics) (the Avengers #41 - "Let sleeping dragons lie!") Diablo refers to Dragon Man as a "brainless, Brobdingnagian brute."
- Anthony McCarten used brobdingnagian in "Death Of A Superhero" (page 126 of the Spanish edition, 2009).
- In Dorothy L. Sayers' novel, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter Wimsey refers to a chimney sweep's brush as a "Brobdingnagian corkscrew."
- In Jim Lovell & Jeffrey Kluger's book Apollo 13, the Saturn 5 rocket is described as Brobdingnagian (page 40).
- In at least one opinion for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the Hon. Henry Friendly used the term "Brobdingnagian" to describe a procedural issue that had prevented the parties from moving forward in the litigation. See Crane Co. v. American Standard, Inc., 490 F.2d 332, 334 (2d Cir. 1973).
References
- A voyage to Brobdingnag
- Gulliver's Travels Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag
- Imaginary countries: Brobdingnag
- "Jonathan Swift." Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 2: Writers of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1660-1789. Gale Research, 1992.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2005.
- "Brobdingnag" Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places Harcourt Brace New York 2000 ISBN 0-15-100541-9