Tartary - Tartary in Fiction

Tartary in Fiction

In the novel Ada by Vladimir Nabokov, Tartary is the name of a large country on the fictional planet of Antiterra. Russia is Tartary's approximate geographic counterpart on Terra, Antiterra's twin world apparently identical to "our" Earth, but doubly fictional in the context of the novel.

In Puccini's last opera, Turandot, Calaf's father Timur is the deposed King of the Tartars.

In Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials novels, the European main characters often express fear of tartars, a term apparently referring to many Asian races, as the story takes place far from Mongolia.

In Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, the witches include Tartars' lips in their potion.

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein pursues the monster "amidst the wilds of Tartary and Russia, although he still evaded me, I have ever followed in his track."

In Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, Herbert Pocket describes Estella Havisham as a Tartar because she was "hard and haughty and capricious to the last degree, and has been brought up by Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on all the male sex."

In The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning, the Pied Piper mentions Tartary as one of his credentials in pest removal to the Mayor of Hamelin. "In Tartary I freed the Cham, last June, from his huge swarms of gnats;"

In his short work with E. Hoffmann Price, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," H. P. Lovecraft briefly mentions Tartary: "Upon their cloaked heads there now seemed to rest tall, uncertainly coloured mitres, strangely suggestive of those on certain nameless figures chiselled by a forgotten sculptor along the living cliffs of a high, forbidden mountain in Tartary..."

The Squire's Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is set in the royal court of Tartary.

In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the eponymic hero refers to his travels in Tartary on two occasions, and suggests that the then modern geographers of Europe were "in a great error, by supposing nothing but sea between Japan and California; for it was ever my opinion, that there must be a balance of earth to counterpoise the great continent of Tartary..."