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Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:Qwghlm

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

This is an intermediate page for Qwghlm.

Authored entries

UKQwghlmVagueS.png
Presumed Location of Qwghlm
(Large Version) * Qwghlm's Ducal Family (Alan Sinder) * Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:Waterhouse family Lawrence's daughter Nina is professor of Qwghlmian Linguistics * Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:Sghr * Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:21:Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes…(Alan Sinder) * Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:370:Qwghlm (Neal Stephenson) * Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:772:Sghr (Jeremy Bornstein) * Stephenson:Neal:Cryptonomicon:232:Qwghlmian runes(Alan Sinder) * A Stab at the Qwghlmian Alphabet

Qwghlm

Qwghlm is a fictitious country off the northwestern coast of Britain. Neal Stephenson says in an interview with Therese Littleton of Harper Collins Books [1] that the landscape features:

... towering spires of rock, some of which are underwater. It's surrounded by hazards to navigation that ships are forever running aground on. Some mudflats along the beaches. Lots of ice, and lots of guano deposited by seagulls.

Qwghlmians claim that it was formerly richly forested, but all the trees had been chopped down by Englishmen. That is true of several parts of the British Isles, so that's not even particularly fictitious.

According to Stephenson (from a booksigning Q&A), Qwghlm is pronounced somewhat like a Bushman-style tongue-click (the Q) followed by a glottal swallowing sound (particularly with a mouth full of liquid protein). Unable or unwilling to follow such linguistic acrobatics, Englishmen tend to pronounce it, roughly, as Taggum. According to this, the spires, called Sghr (mistransliterated by the French as Zeur), could sound something like Z-swallowingsound--eer."

Etymology of the word Qwghlm:

Using a bit of deconstruction - and the presumption that the Author is, in more than one way sired by Thomas Pynchon - one thing might become unconfused: The origin and the pronunciation of the word Qwghlm would seem to have been invented at the moment when Eliza was made Duchess of Qwghlm by the Prince of Orange aboard this little Ship with too little room for a Sword or even a dagger. (This might be true for the author, but cannot be true within the universe of the books, as repeated references to and enunciations of 'Qwghlm' have already at that point been made, notably in Stephenson's prior work, Cryptonomicon.)

Qwghlm is divided into Inner Qwghlm and Outer Qwghlm. Inner Qwghlm is very close to the mainland; at the time of the Second World War they are connected by a railway with a station at Utter Maurby on Inner Qwghlm. Outer Qwghlm is separated from Inner Qwghlm by a few miles of the North Atlantic. Naturally, the natives of Outer Qwghlm regard those of Inner Qwghlm with great disdain.

There are many similarities to be made with Qwghlm and the real islands of the Hebrides off the Northwest of Scotland. The Islands which are split into Inner and Outer groups. The local language Gaelic many foreigners find hard to pick up with its Guttural Sounds and also the religious references are not wholly inaccurate. The islands were also used as Military bases in WW2.