Lilliput and Blefuscu

thumb|[[Herman Moll: A map of the world shewing the course of Mr Dampiers voyage round it from 1679 to 1691, London 1697. Cropped region near the fictional island Lilliput. Swift was known to be on friendly terms with the cartographer Herman Moll and even mentions him explicitly in Gulliver's Travels (1726), chapter four, part eleven. The pair of islands center left on the map are Île Amsterdam (Amsterdam, seemingly corresponding to Blefuscu) and Île Saint-Paul (Saint Paul Island, corresponding to Lilliput) to the north and south, respectively.]]

Lilliput and Blefuscu are two fictional island nations that appear in the first part of the 1726 satirical prose novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. The two islands are neighbours in the South Indian Ocean, separated by a channel wide. Both are inhabited by tiny people who are about one-twelfth the height of ordinary human beings. Both nations are empires and the capital of Lilliput is Mildendo.

Location

Swift gives the location of Lilliput and Blefuscu in Part I of Gulliver's Travels, both in the text and with a map, though neither correspond to real-world geography, even as it was known in Swift's time. The text states that Gulliver's ship (the Antelope) was bound for the East Indies when it was caught in "a violent storm to the northwest of Van Diemen's Land" (Tasmania). He gives the latitude as 30°2'S, though the longitude is unspecified. Likewise, the map depicts Lilliput and Blefuscu south of "Hogs Island" (Simeulue), off northwest Sumatra, and northwest of Van Diemen's Land, though the map is considerably foreshortened; Van Diemen's Land is shown south of the Sunda Strait, some 10° (700 miles) east of Hogs Island, whereas Tasmania is actually some 40° (2,500 miles) east of that meridian. Neither the text nor the map make reference to New Holland (Western Australia), which had been discovered in 1644, some 80 years before publication, and was well-documented in the maps of Swift's time. While Australia's Cocos (Keeling) Islands are in roughly the right map location south-west of Sumatra, have two inhabited islands, and would have been known of in Swift's day, they are at entirely the wrong latitude.

Because the area indicated by Swift is actually occupied by Australia, and on the basis of other textual evidence, some authors have concluded that Swift intended to place Lilliput in the Pacific Ocean, to the northeast, not northwest, of Van Diemen's Land. However, none of the sea routes to the East Indies, Gulliver's stated destination, required ships to round Van Diemen's Land; the northern routes, via India or Ceylon, avoided Australia altogether, while the southern (Brouwer) route, taking advantage of the Roaring Forties, turned northeast in mid-ocean precisely to avoid New Holland, though the number of shipwrecks on that coast from the period attests to the dangers of overshooting the turning point. Swift was sceptical about the reliability of the travel literature of his day, and it is suggested that the unlikely geographic descriptions parody many of these works (described by Percy Adams as "travel lies").

Geography

Lilliput is said to extend 5,000 blustrugs, or 12 miles in circumference. Blefuscu is located northeast of Lilliput, across an 800-yard (730 m) channel. The only cities mentioned by Swift are Mildendo, the capital of Lilliput, and Blefuscu, capital of Blefuscu. However, the map showing Lilliput's position depicts the islands as considerably larger, approaching the size of Van Diemen's Land.

History and politics

Lilliput is said to be ruled by an Emperor, Golbasto Momarem Evlame Gurdilo Shefin Mully Ully Gue. He is assisted by a first minister (who carries a white staff) and several other officials (who bring articles of impeachment against Gulliver on grounds of treason): the galbet or high admiral, Skyresh Bolgolam; the lord high treasurer, Flimnap; the general, Limnoc; the chamberlain, Lalcom; and the grand justiciary, Balmuff.

For instance, the two major political parties of the day were the Whigs and the Tories. The Tories are parodied as the Tramecksan or "High-Heels" (due to their adhesion to the high church party of the Church of England, and their exalted views of royal supremacy), while the Whigs are represented as the Slamecksan or "Low-Heels" (the Whigs inclined toward low church views, and believed in parliamentary supremacy). These issues, generally considered to be of fundamental importance to the constitution of Great Britain, are reduced by Swift to a difference in fashions. Arbuthnot used this work to satirise Richard Bentley, master of Trinity College, Cambridge but also described the early history of Lilliput and Blefuscu. At one time (Gulliver is told), Blefuscu was a commonwealth and had its own language and an extensive literature. Lilliput, meanwhile, was divided among several petty kingdoms. The first emperor of Blefuscu attacked and subdued Lilliput, but later the Lilliputians won their independence and set up their own emperor.

20th-century works

It has been pointed out that the long and vicious war that started after a disagreement about which was the best end on which to break an egg is an example of the narcissism of small differences, a term Sigmund Freud coined in the early 1900s.

In 1946, T. H. White wrote Mistress Masham's Repose, which describes the adventures of a girl, Maria, who discovers a group of Lilliputians on a tiny forgotten island in the lake of a ruinous estate in Northamptonshire.

A modernised Lilliput is the setting of a 1958 sequel children's novel, Castaways in Lilliput, by Henry Winterfeld. This book provides more geographical detail: other cities in addition to Mildendo include Plips (a major city and cathedral town), Wiggywack (a suburb of Mildendo and seat of the Island Council), Tottenham (on the west coast), and Allenbeck (at the mouth of a river on the west coast).

Winterfeld also provides further details of Lilliputian history. The Emperor of Gulliver's time, Mully Ully Gue, is said to have reigned 1657–1746. (This contradicts Swift's account, in which the Emperor is only 28 years old and has reigned about seven years when Gulliver arrives in 1699.) His descendant, Alice, is the reigning Queen in the 1950s when three Australian children visit the island. The monetary system has apparently also been changed, the sprug of Swift's novel replaced by the onze, equal to ten dimelings or 100 bims. Technology has kept pace with the outside world, so the Lilliputians have trains, automobiles, helicopters, telephones, and telegraphs.

Winterfeld describes the flag of Lilliput as having blue and white stripes with a golden crown on a red field. These symbols are also painted on the police helicopters.

Language

Swift presents a number of Lilliputian words and phrases, and further states that the official languages of Lilliput and Blefuscu are about as far apart as typical European languages. Arbuthnot explains further that Blefuscu originally had its own language and an extensive literature, but during the period when it occupied Lilliput, the Blefuscudian language was much altered by contact with Lilliputian. Blefuscudian remained an old language of scholarship. In T. H. White's sequel, Mistress Masham's Repose, the protagonist Maria studies the Lilliputian language from a book owned by her professor friend. This is a rare copy of Gulliver's 1735 treatise: A General Description of the Empire of Lilliput, from its first Erection, through a long Series of Princes; with a Particular Account of their Wars and Politicks, Laws, Learning, & Religion, their Plants and Animals, their peculiar Manners and Customs, with other Matters very curious and useful, to which is added a Brief Vocabulary of their Language, with its English Correspondencies. In Winterfeld's sequel, English has become the official language, due to a decision of the Council of the Island in 1751.

Other references

right|thumb|Lilliput House, overlooking [[Lough Ennell in County Westmeath ]]

Lilliput is reputedly named after the townland of Lilliput on the shores of Lough Ennell near Dysart, just a few miles from Mullingar, in County Westmeath, Ireland. Swift was a regular visitor to the Rochfort family at Gaulstown House. It is said that it was when Dean Swift looked across the expanse of Lough Ennell one day and saw the tiny human figures on the opposite shore of the lake that he conceived the idea of the Lilliputians featured in Gulliver's Travels. In fact, the townland was known as Nure from ancient times and was renamed Lileput or Lilliput shortly after the publication of Gulliver's Travels in honour of Swift's association with the area. Lilliput House has stood in the locality since the 18th century.
Lilliput and Blefuscu were the names used for Britain and France, respectively, in a series of semi-fictional transcripts (with mutated names of people and places) of debates in the British Parliament. This series was written by William Guthrie, Samuel Johnson, and John Hawkesworth, and was printed in Edward Cave's periodical The Gentleman's Magazine from 1738 to 1746.
The word lilliputian has become an adjective meaning "very small in size", or "petty or trivial". When used as a noun, it means either "a tiny person" or "a person with a narrow outlook, who minds the petty and trivial things."
The use of the terms "Big-Endian" and "Little-Endian" in the story is the source of the computing term endianness.
Neela Mahendra, the love interest in Salman Rushdie's novel Fury, is an "Indo-Lilly", a member of the Indian Diaspora from the politically unstable country of Lilliput-and-Blefuscu.
Several craters on Mars's moon Phobos are named after Lilliputians. Perhaps inspired by Johannes Kepler (and quoting Kepler's third law), Swift's satire Gulliver's Travels refers to two moons in Part 3, Chapter 3 (the "Voyage to Laputa"), in which the astronomers of Laputa are described as having discovered two satellites of Mars orbiting at distances of 3 and 5 Martian diameters, and periods of 10 and 21.5 hours, respectively.
Lilliput is mentioned throughout the 2005 Malplaquet trilogy of children's novels by Andrew Dalton. Taking much of their initial inspiration from T. H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose, the books describe the adventures of a large colony of Lilliputians living secretly in the enormous and mysterious grounds of an English country house (Stowe House in Buckinghamshire). Their longed-for return to their ancestral homeland is one of the major themes of the stories.
In the Gabby cartoon shorts, it is the main and only major location mentioned.