User:Dwalexan/World of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

The world of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman is a fictional universe created by Alan Moore in the comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where all of the characters and events from literature (and possibly the entirety of fiction) coexist. The world the characters inhabit is one more technologically advanced than our own, but also home to the strange and supernatural. Beyond the comic itself, the world of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is expanded upon by supplemental prose material, including The New Traveller's Almanac, Allan and the Sundered Veil, and the documents from the Black Dossier[1],[2],[3].

The British Isles

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In the Black Dossier, the alternate history of the League's United Kingdom is explored in depth. As in medieval Welsh Mythology, in approximately 1100 BC, Brutus of Troy founds the kingdom of Britain (then called Brutain) with the capital at New Troy. He is accompanied by the ageless and gender swapping Orlando, who aids Brutus in subduing Brutain's population of savage giants and their chieftain, Gogmagog. In 43 AD Britain is invaded by the Roman Empire under Claudius. In 363, the year of Merlin's birth, the Emperor Julian declares Britain a pagan nation. In 410 the Romans withdrew, and Uther Pendragon rose to power. Circa 450, his son Arturus became king, ruling until 468. Britain descended into barbarism, plagued by ogres, giants, and faeries ruled by Arthur's half-sister Morgana. The faerie remained a powerful force in Britain, so much so that King Henry VIII took the second cousin of King Oberon of the Faerie, the polydactyl Faery-blooded Anne Boleyn, as his wife. From this union sprang Queen Gloriana the First, who reigned from 1558 to 1603. Under her rule, magical and otherworldly forces became more popular in Britain. Her court held such notables as Johannes Suttle, Edward Face, Sir Jack Wilton, and Sir Basildon Bond (ancestor to Campion and James Bond). Gloriana was also the patron and associate of William Shakespeare.

After her death, the puritanical magic hater King Jacob the First ascended to the throne, and proceeded to purge the faerie and other supernatural races from Britain, resulting in the faerie kingdom cutting all ties with the human world by 1616. It was also under Jacob's rule that the King Jacob Bible was compiled. Beginning in 1610, Prospero, by order of a decree written by Gloriana before her death, began to assemble the first 'League' of extraordinary individuals to defend Britain. The group disbanded when Prospero returned to the Blazing World, but was succeeded by similar groups in the 1740s, early 19th century, 1890s, early 20th century, and a failed group in the 1950s.

In the late 1890s the United Kingdom was attacked by Martian invaders, who were defeated via germ warfare. The nation went on to fight in World War I and against the Germany of Adenoid Hynkel in World War II. After the war, General Sir Harold Wharton, an agent implanted by rogue factions of MI5 into the Labour Party, took power and turned the United Kingdom into a communist dictatorship. Under Wharton's Ingsoc government, cameras monitored citizens' daily activities, torture of dissidents was widespread, and a reduced and simplified version of English known as Newspeak was made the official language of the state. After Wharton's death in 1952, he was succeeded by Gerald O'Brien. O'Brien was unable to maintain power, and conceded to the Conservative Party's demands to be reinstated as an official party. Soon after he was voted out of office, and most of the Ingsoc government's programs were reversed. By 2008, Britain's Prime Minister is Tom Davis and engaged in a prolonged war in Q'umar.

The first chapter of The New Traveller's Almanac covers Britain and Ireland, describing, in addition to sites related to British and Irish folklore such as faeries, leprechauns, giants, The Mabinogion, and Arthurian legend, sites from both British and Irish literature such as:

She gets sucked into the world again 10 years later while visiting Oxford, via a looking-glass, but returns with her body inverted so that features on her left side are now on her right side and vice versa. She has situs inversus, but does not die from it. She dies from malnutrition, because her amino acids and proteins are now isomers. A being made of isomer proteins is 'incompatible' with Earth's biosphere, which exhibits a preferential handedness. An expedition to explore the original riverbank hole was then organized by a "Dr. Bellman", accompanied by a lawyer, a banker, a butcher, a shoemaker, a bonnet-maker, a billiard-maker, and a woman named "Miss Beever" (a reference to the cast of The Hunting of the Snark). They too disappeared, and reappeared again months later, except the baker (who vanishes in The Hunting of the Snark); their adventure log is nothing but nonsensical poetry (a reference to Phantasmagoria and other poems by Carroll, including The Hunting of the Snark). The banker suffers the same fate as Alice, although his skin has become black whilst his hair and waistcoat have become white (a reference to the line in the poem "While so great was his fright that his waistcoat turned white."). All of the survivors are institutionalized, and years later, Mina Murray visits the only living survivor, Dr. Bellman, who gives her a blank piece of paper that's supposedly a map to Snark Island (the same map which Bellman used to navigate the sea to Snark Island).

Continental Europe

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The second chapter of the Almanac covers continental Europe.

Islands off the coast of Iberia:

  • Max Frisch's Andorra (1961), about a country peopled by the violently pro-Christian and anti-Semitic.
  • Montesinos Cave, in La Mancha, where Prospero befriended Don Quixote, containing the tomb of Durandarte, Spanish folk hero.
  • Barataria, the "island" where Sancho Panza was governor for a short time.
  • Exopotomania, from Boris Vian's utopian L'Automne à Pékin (1956).
  • Andrographia, from Nicolas-Edme Rétif's 1782 tome Andrographe ou idées d'un honnête homme sur un projet de réglement proposé à toutes les nations de l'Europe pour opérer une réforme générale des moeurs, et par elle, le bonheur du genre humain avec des notes historiques et justificatives (The andrographer, or ideas of an honest man on a scheme of regulations proposed to all the nations of Europe to produce a general reform of morality and thereby the happiness of mankind, with historical and supporting notes).
  • The wizard Atlantes' demonic castle, from Orlando Furioso.
  • The city which cannot be named for "theological security", and the mansion Triste-le-Roy are from Jorge Luis Borges' La Muerte y la brújula (Death and the Compass)(1956).
  • Auspasia, the most talkative land in the world, from Georges Duhamel's Lettres d'Auspasie (1922).
  • Bengodi, from Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, which has a mountain of Parmesan cheese, and heliotropes that bestow invisibility (which, in the League world, Hawley Griffin used to create an invisibility serum).
  • The libertine isle of Trypheme, from Pierre Louys' Les Aventures du roi Pausole (1901).

Islands off the coast of France

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The Americas

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The third chapter of the Almanac covers the Americas.

Off the coast of South America

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Off the coast of North America

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The fourth chapter of the Almanac covers Africa and the Middle East.

The fifth chapter of the Almanac covers Asia and the Australias.

The sixth chapter of the Almanac covers the Arctic and Antarctica.

Islands and seas off the coast of Antarctica

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Antarctica

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Northern Asia

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Islands and other locations in the Arctic Ocean

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Beyond the world

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See also

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League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Category:The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

  1. ^ League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Wiki https://lxg.fandom.com/wiki/League_of_Extraordinary_Gentlemen_Wiki. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  2. ^ "Jess Nevins's annotations on each of the issues of the series".
  3. ^ Manguel, Alberto; Guadalupi, Gianni (1980). The Dictionnary of Imaginary Places.