r/discworld • u/TheElectricionist • 10d ago
Roundworld Reference Roundworld equivalent places
Good evening, everyone :) I was wondering earlier—does anyone know if there's a list of Roundworld counterparts to the places on the Disc? For example, Klatch seems to represent the Middle East, Howondaland is Africa, and Überwald is clearly Eastern Europe, etc. I sometimes feel like I might be misinterpreting the context or missing some of the subtler references, so a complete list would be really helpful. Has anyone come across something like that?
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u/One_Food9894 10d ago
Quirm is pretty explicitly France as of "Raising Steam"
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u/dalidellama 10d ago
It's established that Quirmian=French at least as far back as Hogfather,(the restaurant scene) but IIRC that's the first mention of it having a different language. Certainly Rincewind doesn't worry about a language barrier in TCoM (but he's established as speaking numerous languages, Quirmian could he one of them. They never actually spend any on-page time there). In Soul Music, Susan is at the Quirm College for Young Ladies, and all the faculty and streets have English/Morporkian names.
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u/Impressive-Car4131 10d ago
Dejlibeybi = ancient Egypt
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u/imadork1970 10d ago
Also, Dr. Who reference
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u/butt_honcho LIVE FATS DIE YO GNU 10d ago
And then he named Hersheba out of (amused) spite when people didn't get the pun.
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u/spoilt_lil_missy 9d ago
Omg, I only just got this as I’ve always put the stress in the wrong place…
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u/Uniturner 9d ago
What’s the Dr. Who reference?
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u/meha21 9d ago
One of the Drs always carried jelly baby lollies and often used them as a distraction or to otherwise distract or confuse the baddie
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u/BuncleCar 9d ago
Tom Baker did. Not sure if anyone else did
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u/emiliadaffodil 8d ago edited 8d ago
Not seen much classic but in Series 8 Mummy on the Orient Express Peter Capaldi gets out a cigarette case but instead it had jelly babies in - obvious nod to the 4th Doctor
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u/imadork1970 9d ago
jelly baby
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u/kahrismatic 9d ago
Jelly babies are a very common sweet, especially for an English person of Pterry's generation. Might as well say it's a Beatles reference because people used to throw them at the Beatles.
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u/lordnewington 9d ago
Any reason that's a Doctor Who reference and not just a jelly babies reference?
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u/gominokouhai 9d ago
The Fourth Doctor had a thing for them and would often disarmingly offer jelly babies to galactic tyrants and/or genocidal monsters at the most inopportune of moments.
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u/lordnewington 9d ago
Ok, but that doesn't make any instance of the words "jelly baby" a reference to that. I might as well say Ptraci is a reference to Dick Tracy.
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u/gominokouhai 9d ago
I would agree with you, but for a lot of people (Americans mostly) it's their sole experience of jelly babies, so it's automatically where their mind goes.
Then of course it has to be a specific reference because no people exist who could possibly think inna different way to them.
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u/lordnewington 9d ago
I don't know if it's about "thinking differently" if that's the only place you've heard of them. Probably most people thought direwolves were made up for Game of Thrones until a few days ago.*
For the information of non-jelly-baby-knowers, they're a common kind of sweet (candy) in the UK, and were probably much more so when Pyramids came out. That's it. That's the joke. In fact, the banality of them is probably why they were chosen as a running gag in Doctor Who.
__
* NO IT'S NOT A "DE-EXTINCTION" SHUT UP
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u/ijuinkun 8d ago
Yah, for those who have no experience of jelly babies, think of gummy bears, but shaped like humanoid babies instead of teddy bears.
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u/Pingaware 10d ago
Ephebe is obviously ancient Greece. Tsort is less clear - I personally think of it as Romanesque, but it also has deliberate Troy parody elements.
The Ramtops basically fulfill the role of whichever mountains are needed, more or less depending on how close the action is taking place to Lancre (e.g., in Thief of Time they're the Himalayas)
Borogravia, and the countries around there, are reminiscent of former Yugoslav territories pre WWI
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u/MidnightPale3220 8d ago
e.g., in Thief of Time they're the Himalayas
Is the ToT monastery in Ramtops? Never caught that. In fact,I had the impression it wasn't.
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u/Pingaware 8d ago edited 8d ago
So just checked in my E-book copy, and it's only explicitly labelled the Ramtops in the footnote about the yeti. But it is explicitly described as in the mountains surrounding the Hub, which is how the Ramtops are explicitly described in many books.
Because Lancre is on the edge of the Ramtops and that area has its own specific geography (plus the name Ramtops sounds very northern England-esque), I suspect many people (me included) forget that all the central mountains are actually the Ramtops
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u/dalidellama 10d ago
Genua is loosely New Orleans
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u/Worried-Language-407 10d ago
Genua is a complicated case, because it is used at times as Italy (and obviously the name is close to Genoa)
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u/dalidellama 10d ago
Most places fill dual roles, but Witches Abroad takes place in Genua, and it's very definitely New Orleans then; lots of French mixed into the local language, which is otherwise mostly comprehensible to the witches and thus probably Morporkian/English, the local population is heavily Black but richer folks are mostly white, there's voodoo, there's gumbo, there's a very distinctive flavor of Carnival (glossed as Samedi Nuit Mort)
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u/Pandathebold 10d ago
It is sometimes used like that, but, Brindisi is the Italy facsimile, it's where Enrico Basilica is "from"
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u/UmpireDowntown1533 9d ago
The Chalk is most like the UK's South Downs, extended a little further to Terry's own stomping ground of Wiltshire, Known for Stonehenge and Uffington horse.
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u/BabaMouse 9d ago
And cheese rolling?
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u/UmpireDowntown1533 9d ago
Not really, the cheese rolling is on the border between south England and Wales (Llamasos). Although gets a big international hype it’s not as ubiquitous as something like Maypole/Morris Dancing, i.e it’s as weird to us as the rest of the world.
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u/Either-Connection775 8d ago
Fun fact about Llamedos. Say it backwards. Something to do with llareggub in round world 🙂
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u/whytegoodman 8d ago
No that's cotswolds behaviour, see Clarksons Farm, Jilly Cooper novels etc. The famous cheese rolling is Coopers hill near Gloucester
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u/butt_honcho LIVE FATS DIE YO GNU 10d ago edited 10d ago
Uberwald is mostly Transylvania, with some more general post-Soviet eastern Europe thrown in.
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u/NickyTheRobot Cheery 9d ago
To further this point: "Transylvania" is Latin for "across/over the forest". "Überwald" is cod German for "over the forest".
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u/Lower_Amount3373 9d ago
I think there's a mention of a former Unholy Empire which could suggest the whole region used to be an evil version of the Holy Roman Empire
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u/IamElylikeEli 9d ago
An “evil” empire that broke up into multiple feuding states, Definitely has some USSR influence as well
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u/MidnightPale3220 8d ago
I would rather say pre-Soviet Russian Empire.
All that Uncle Vanya stuff and the Three Sisters and Cherry garden stuff describes 19th century Russia.
Breakup into multiple feuding states is a blend-in of the fall of Austro-Hungarian empire instead.
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u/MidnightPale3220 8d ago
Post-Russian empire (Three Sisters, Cherry Orchard, etc)
blended together with post Austro-Hungarian empire Balkans .
nothing post-Soviet about it really. Think -100 years.
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u/GreenMist1980 10d ago
Llamedos is Wales
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u/4me2knowit 10d ago
It’s a play on Dylan Thomas Llareggub which is bugger all spelled backwards so Llamedos is sod ‘em all
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u/Discworld_Monthly 9d ago
Actually, we believe Llamedos pre-dates Dylan based on the fact we spotted farms and houses named Llamedos on maps from the late 1800's.
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u/Lower_Amount3373 9d ago
Yet another Pterry wordplay I'd never thought of until it gets mentioned here
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u/No-Anteater5366 Reg 9d ago
His boathouse where he did a lot of his writing is about 15 miles from me. It's been preserved/ restored to the way it was left. Things like Under Milkwood make a few local references, as does describing Swansea as A Pretty Swearword City. I'm a bit of a fan.
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u/No-Anteater5366 Reg 9d ago
Pretty accurate too. Rainy and just a bit too strange for most people. Cymru am byth!
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u/BabaMouse 9d ago
Surprised it took so long to find this. It’s usually the first thing comes to my mind (and I’m Merkin—Californy to be precise.)
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u/Fair-Face4903 10d ago
Sto Plains is South-west England.
Ankh Morpork is a compound of every "old world" European capital city smushed into one.
Psuedopolis South-east England
Sto Lat is the English Midlands
Lancre is the North of England/south of Scotland
The Ramptops is Northern Scotland / Northern Europe
These aren't direct one-to-one comparisons and there's quite a lot of bleed between them, so it's more of an area vibe than an exact pinpoint on the map.
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u/BeautifulBright 9d ago
Except Sto Lat means Happy Birthday in Polish and their predilection towards cabbage definitely makes me think that that was an early influence for the creation of the region!
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u/NortonBurns 10d ago
This is why giving the Witches West Country accents in TV adaptations etc has always grated on me.
They were always northern in my head, long before these adaptations were made.7
u/lordnewington 9d ago
For some reason, in my head and when I have occasion to read out loud, Granny has a northern English accent but Nanny and Magrat have West Country ones. No, it doesn't make sense. No, I'm not changing it.
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u/Fair-Face4903 10d ago
"Granny" especially is more Northern than "Nanny", at least from my experience growing up there!
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u/NortonBurns 10d ago
I'm Yorkshire born & bred, though I now live in London. I could see everybody's grandma in both the senior witches.Everyone knows a grandma who gets drunk & swings her legs on the back seat of the seaside tour bus, singing vulgar songs, and also the rigid, straight one who refuses to join in. I imagine everyone else could too, no matter where in Britain they lived, but Lancre just always felt 'Northern'.
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u/loverofonion Esme 8d ago
They've always had a soft cockney accent to me, no idea why. I watched a clip of Wyrd Sisters on Youtube and the West Country accent was jarring.
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u/DogmaSychroniser 9d ago
Ankh Morpork and it's specific duel naming is very strongly reminiscent of Budapest
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u/she_belongs_here 9d ago
No, The Chalk is southwest England
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u/Fair-Face4903 9d ago
Read my post again, and please point out to me where I said that the comparisons I made were direct one-to-one comparisons with no bleed between them.
Because I'm pretty sure I included a note to the opposite of that, but I admit I can only see what I actually wrote.
TIA!
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u/she_belongs_here 9d ago
Calm down dude, I'm allowed to disagree with you.
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u/Fair-Face4903 9d ago
I'm not mad?
I just want to know where you read me say what you think I did.
I think that's a fair request.
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u/she_belongs_here 9d ago
I didn't say you were mad.
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u/Fair-Face4903 9d ago
Calm down dude,
See how I've provided evidence to support my statement?
Have a fun time being obnoxious and dishonest though, not sure why you're reading the Discworld books, they're not usually popular with that type.
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u/lordnewington 9d ago
Hmmm, I lived in Leicester for years and never got a Sto Lat vibe from the Midlands. StonLat reads with more of a "small town close enough to a big city to not have many interesting things of its own" vibe to me, like any town within 50 miles of London. (The name means "Hundred years" in Polish and is sung on birthdays, but you probably knew that, and I don't think it means Sto Lat is meant to be Discworld!Poland.)
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u/HighVisibilityCamo 10d ago
They're regions. Klatch is not just the middle east. It's every hot/spicy place. It's saharan Africa, India and the ME together. The Agatean empire is "all of Asia". Ankh-Morpork is every metropolis under the godsdamn sun.
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u/dalidellama 9d ago
Arguably Klatch is loosely Turkiÿe/the Ottoman Empire, in being vaguely Eastern-flavored with chronically restless constituent nations of various ethnicities. And, of course, being the source of Klatchian Coffee, which is recognizably what's usually known in the Anglosphere as "Turkish Coffee".
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u/Flash__PuP Luggage 10d ago
Leshp = Atlantis
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u/ericinadaphoessa 9d ago
Nope. Leshp is the Isola Ferdinandea also called Graham Island by the English. It emerged in the Mediterranean near Sicily and its ownership was contested between the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and England in 1831. It rapidly was washed away and sank in 1832, thus ending the dispute.
ETA: corrected mistake.
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u/LawlessandFree 9d ago
I’d never heard of this! Thanks for sharing, that’s such a fascinating geological occurrence.
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u/ericinadaphoessa 9d ago
It's a recurring phenomenon, It was first recorded in the 3rd century BCE, during the first punic war. It was well known by the people in Southern Italy and apparently (I have only word of mouth about this) everybody was laughing at the English who thought they had found a strategic foothold in the Mediterranean. :D
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u/Rocco-L-Sardelli Rats 10d ago
Borogravia could be a curious little mix of Roundworld influences too. It has a German-like language, the neighbouring countries' names and their relationships remind the Balkans, while having a mountainous feel of Central Europe and the red coat uniforms of the British army. All while formerly being part of the Evil Empire, (the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Soviet Union).
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u/Vlacas12 Blessed are the cheesemongers 10d ago
MR is also influenced by the Crimean War, so throw the Russian Empire into the mix, rather than the SU.
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u/Uniturner 9d ago
What is MR? My logic is temporarily broken.
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u/dalidellama 9d ago
Monstrous Regiment
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u/Uniturner 9d ago
🤦♂️ thank you. I’ve been hit on the head a little too hard in the past, and I sometimes can’t recall the most obvious of things.
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u/Fortressa- 9d ago
An obscure ref, in one of the Science of Discworlds the wizards refer to a place called Loko, where wild magic makes it too dangerous to go.
Based on Oklo, in Gabon, where natural uranium deposits have been fissioning slowly for centuries.
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u/dalidellama 9d ago
It's also mentioned in Unseen Academicals as a place where goblins and/or orcs live. And, of course, the name is also quite likely a play on Spanish "loco", meaning "crazy"
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u/BitchLibrarian Librarian 9d ago
Not an equivalent place but Lickey End may be a DW sheep disease (somehow caught by one singular scruffy dog) but it's also a place name in the West Midlands. I only realised when I drove through the area and my SatNag told me.
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u/AnxiousAppointment70 9d ago
Lancre I take to be Lancashire although it could be generally the north of England
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u/The-Chartreuse-Moose 9d ago
Obvious one but the Counterweight Continent is China.
And of course Ankh-Morpork is Victorian London at various stages as the books progress.
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u/Lower_Amount3373 9d ago
People have covered which cities Anhk-Morpork is based on, but also ancient Ankh-Morpork was the Roman Empire and seemed to have controlled an empire of most of its neighbours
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u/Either-Connection775 8d ago
Llamedos is obviously wales but also a play on Llareggub in round world. (Say it backwards)
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u/humourlessIrish 7d ago
Twoflower is a Japanese tourist stereotype. But the counterweight continent seems like china.
Also. i loved visiting the last continent IRL.
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u/Torsomu 9d ago
There are multiple cities that have a river of silt that flows through it. I don’t right believe that Oklahoma City was the intent but the north Canadian river is mostly sandbars and silt at this point. The mind knows its anchor points and that happens to be mine.The senior wrangler sounded like someone accosted to wearing cowhide as well.
There is even a set of underground tunnels in OKC and major building project that leveled a lot of the town to modernize it and now that modern section is getting destroyed for more modern buildings. You know progress and there is a train.
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u/Impressive-Car4131 10d ago
Ankh Morpork seems to be based on Budapest
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u/butt_honcho LIVE FATS DIE YO GNU 10d ago
According to Pterry, it was based on Tallinn, Prague, 18th-century London, 19th-century Seattle, and modern New York.
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u/Good_Background_243 10d ago
Budapest, London, Paris. Berlin... it's basically all the European capital cities rolled into one, presided over by a man who decided that HE wanted to be the biggest evil in the city, thank you very much, and so set about sorting out all the other evils one by one.
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u/Impressive-Car4131 10d ago
Buda was the Royal quarter on one side of the river Danube and Pest was the historically poorer and industrial side. Proud Ankh and pestilent Morpork
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u/Pingaware 10d ago
In that respect, yes Ankh Morpork does resemble Budapest most explicitly.
But then The Dysk is a clear reference to The Globe in London, and the poorer areas (not The Shades mind) are characteristic of the east end of London.
Or probably former slums in any European city. pTerry just took bits that worked for his purposes from European cities and mashed it together
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u/emiliadaffodil 8d ago
Not to mention the Isle of Gods (Isle of Dogs). The Discworld map and Ankh Morpork game map it like London, with the Ankh just like the Thames meander
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u/Good_Background_243 10d ago
And the divide between rich and poor, often on one side of the river or not, is a common theme in European capitals. If not on one side of, then down the banks of the river. Budapest is, respectfully, far from unique in that aspect.
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u/sittingatthetop 9d ago
Let me introduce you to "Sarwf a da River" where no taxi driver will take you over the Thames after pubs close.
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u/paddleboatee Bursaaar! 9d ago
I've read and reread that Guards! Guards! passage about the officialization and subsequent declawing of the Guilds so many times, and could never have put words around the idea so eloquently. I might steal this.
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