Lilliput and Blefuscu - Other References

Other References

• Lilliput is reputedly named after the real area of Lilliput on the shores of Lough Ennell in Dysart, Mullingar, County Westmeath in Ireland. Swift was a regular visitor to the Rochfort family at Gaulstown House. It's said that it was when 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. There is also an early Christian association - St. Patrick’s sister, Lupita, is known to the Lilliput area, which may recall her name. In fact, the townland known from ancient times as Nure 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 Eighteenth 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' 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 recent 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.