A Journey to the World under-Ground
Ludvig Holberg's *A Journey to the World Under-Ground* (Niels Klims underjordiske rejse, 1741) presents itself as the memoir of Nicholas Klimius, a poor young graduate of the University of Copenhagen who, in 1664, returns to his native Bergen, Norway, and takes up an amateur passion for exploring the region's caves and mountains. Investigating a mysterious, sighing cavern atop Mount Floyen, he is lowered into it on a rope; the rope snaps, and he plunges into the earth's interior, discovering that the globe is hollow, containing a smaller sun, planets, and firmament of its own. After a bizarre celestial interlude in which he briefly becomes a satellite orbiting a small planet and fights off a griffin with his harpoon, he crash-lands on the planet Nazar. There he discovers that its inhabitants are intelligent, ambulatory, talking trees, ranked by number of branches and governed with extraordinary gravity and slowness of thought. Mistaken for a monkey and then accused of assaulting a magistrate's wife (whom he had climbed thinking her an ordinary tree), Klimius is tried before the rational-tree courts of the city of Keba and gradually learns their language and customs. Central to Holberg's satire is the Potuan Empire's inversion of human values: quickness of wit is regarded as a dangerous, superficial trait, while slow, deliberate judgment is prized above all; Klimius's own sharp intelligence marks him as intellectually deficient, and he is assigned the lowly post of King's Messenger, since his one useful "virtue" turns out to be his speed on foot. Through his time at court in the capital, Potu, and his dealings with its prince, chancellor, and the visionary female treasurer Rahagna, Holberg lays out an elaborate utopian political and religious system: hereditary but paternal monarchy, meritocratic promotion irrespective of sex, abolition of hereditary titles, tolerant natural religion stripped of theological disputation, restrained and evidence-based justice, and a philosophy of moderation in all things, including a horror of disputation, war, and excessive learning. Frustrated at his unglamorous position, Klimius is commissioned to survey the entire planet Nazar, and the bulk of the book becomes a picaresque, Gulliver-like tour of neighboring nations, each embodying a satirical thought experiment. He encounters a country whose people enjoy perpetual health and therefore feel neither joy nor compassion; a land of effortless natural abundance whose idle inhabitants are miserable and self-destructive; a nation, Mardak, that persecutes citizens whose eyes perceive a sacred tablet's shape differently, satirizing religious conformity and hypocritical oaths; a wealthy but crime-ridden, paranoid mining society; a kingdom where aging reverses maturity so that old age brings childish folly; a society (Cocklecu) where sex roles are entirely reversed, women governing and fighting while men keep house and are treated as sexual objects, which Klimius finds outrageous despite his hosts' rebuttal that the "weakness" of either sex is a product of custom, not nature; a land of philosophers so absent-minded and physically neglectful that its Anatomy professors nearly dissect Klimius alive out of scientific curiosity; a country of pure, guileless "Reasoners" whose flawless rationality leaves their society flat and unmotivated, prompting them to import fools as a needed "ferment"; nations of headless people, seven-headed people, people whose hearts sit in their thighs (and who bully only the defenseless), atheists bound solely by civil law, communities practicing extreme brevity of speech versus wasteful long-windedness, a city that sleeps twenty hours a day contrasted with one that never sleeps, and a land, Jochtan, that shelters every religious sect side by side in perfect civic harmony, precisely because it enforces no compulsion of belief — an argument, voiced by a native interlocutor, that hypocrisy and religious strife spring from coercion rather than diversity itself. Having completed and published his survey to great popular acclaim, Klimius nonetheless remains dissatisfied with his low status and, driven equally by ambition and a grudge against the "insolent" women who had mocked him, proposes a bill to exclude the female sex from public office throughout the Potuan Empire. The Senate rejects his sexist scheme as unjust and dangerous to the state, and — following the country's ironic custom that failed political "reformers" are punished — Klimius, having argued his case with a halter already around his neck, is sentenced to banishment "to the Firmament," a punishment reserved for repeat offenders against the law. He is dispatched via giant birds that periodically migrate between Nazar and the enclosing firmament, arriving in a world populated by loquacious, luxury-loving, tailed monkey-people governed by an aristocratic senate. Here, in the city of Martinia, his intellectual quickness — so despised among the deliberate tree-people — makes him seem dull and clownish by comparison with the monkeys' frantic wit, and he is assigned the menial post of sedan-chair carrier to a senator. The narrative (as previewed in the table of contents) goes on to recount Klimius's further adventures and eventual elevation to imperial power in this new world, a catastrophic downfall, and his final return to his own country after a ten-year absence — through all of which Holberg continues using invented alien societies as mirrors for satirizing the political corruption, religious intolerance, class vanity, scholastic pedantry, and gender and social conventions of eighteenth-century Europe.
By Ludvig Holberg · First published 1741 · Genre: Science Fiction, Satirical Novel, Political Novel · 89,856 words
First lines
A JOURNEY TO THE World Under-Ground.
BY _NICHOLAS KLIMIUS_.
What this Textopian page supports
A Journey to the World under-Ground is listed on Textopian as a novella by Ludvig Holberg, dated 1741 CE.
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- Work type: Novella
- Author: Ludvig Holberg
- Date: 1741 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Science Fiction, Satirical Novel, Political Novel, Philosophical Fiction, Utopian Fiction
- Length: 89,856 words
- Structure: 1 section, 472 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
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Genres
- Science Fiction — The central premise of a hollow Earth containing another sun, planets, and rational civilizations establishes this as speculative science fiction exploring an alternate world with different physical laws and inhabitants.
- Satirical Novel — The work systematically satirizes European customs, institutions, and philosophies through alien perspectives. The extensive 'Fragments of Tanian's Journey' section directly mocks European religions, fashion, law, academia, and social practices.
- Political Novel — Extensive exploration of governance systems, laws, and political structures dominates the narrative, particularly through the detailed description of the Potuan empire and the protagonist's rise to power in the Quamitic empire.
- Philosophical Fiction — Deep investigation into virtue, wisdom, justice, human nature, and the ideal society appears throughout, with particular emphasis on what constitutes good governance and moral behavior.
Tags
satire · science-fiction · voyage · fantasy · adventure · 18th-century · philosophical · social-commentary · utopian · world-building · allegorical · speculative-fiction