The Reader’s Gazetteer: G

For some reason, certain letters of this gazetteer are much easier to populate than others. G is a case in point. The fictional map of Europe is chock full of countries whose name begin with G. Here are a few of them.

I gave up on the Princess Diary series before we ever visited Genovia – the princess in question lives in New York, and has only just discovered her royal status – but even from a distance it was pretty convincing. In The Princess Diaries: Take Two, Mia describes it as:

a small country in Europe located on the Mediterranean between the Italian and French border

The history, as Mia tells it, seems a little bit unlikely, taking no account of Italian unification, and claiming a much nobler backstory than Genovia’s real-life equivalent Monaco, but the geography is plausible enough. How to get there? On your million-pound yacht, or don’t bother.

I can’t quite believe in the Brontës’ Gaaldine and Gondal, but a brief foray into Sherlock fanfiction allows me to bring in A. J. Hall’s Queen of Gondal series, which relocates them from an African island to somewhere in the Balkans and makes them into quarrelsome, complicated, plausible nations.

In The Heart of Princess Osra we have a visit from the Prince of Glottenberg, which I don’t propose to spend too much time on, given that I can’t actually tell where it is and I’ll be devoting a lot of attention to Anthony Hope when we get to Ruritania (and probably Strelsau and Zenda, too).

And I have to admire Robert Louis Stevenson’s bold assertion in Prince Otto that the reason you can’t find Grünewald on your map of Europe is that you’re looking at the wrong map; the one that would actually show you where it is has been long since rolled up:

You shall seek in vain upon your map of Europe for the bygone state of Grünewald. An independent principality, an infinitesimal member of the German Empire, she played, for several centuries, her part in the discord of Europe; and, at last, in the ripeness of time and at the spiriting of several bald diplomatists, vanished like a morning ghost. Less fortunate than Poland, she left not a regret behind her; and the very memory of her boundaries has faded.

There’s a good sense of physical and political geography, too, if one allows for some creative licence in the inclusion of The Winter’s Tale‘s Bohemia:

North and east the foothills and Grünewald sank with varying profile into a vast plain. On these sides many small states bordered with the principality, Gerolstein, an extinct grand duchy, among the number. On the south it marched with the comparatively powerful kingdom of Seaboard Bohemia, celebrated for its flowers and mountain bears, and inhabited by a people of singular simplicity and tenderness of heart. Several intermarriages had, in the course of centuries, united the crowned families of Grünewald and Maritime Bohemia; and the last Prince of Grünewald, whose history I purpose to relate, drew his descent through Perdita, the only daughter of King Florizel the First of Bohemia.

I can’t help wondering if that’s meant to be the same Gerolstein as the one in La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, which I haven’t included because it’s not a book. In fact, I rather suspect that Stevenson is having a good deal of fun with other people’s fictional locations. Which is, as is probably apparent, a favourite pastime of my own.

Books referred to in this post

The Princess Diaries and sequels, Meg Cabot

Queen of Gondal series, A. J. Hall

The Heart of Princess Osra, Anthony Hope

Prince Otto, Robert Louis Stevenson

A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H – I – J – K – L – M – N – O – P – Q – R – S – T – U – V