Talk:Quirm

Is Lord Rodley mentioned somewhere? Brenda is a widow and William de Worde send his newsletter to her. She is mentioned in the list of rulers who recive it in The Truth. I believe that she is the ruler of Quirm. --Death 17:04, 25 January 2006 (CET)

Lord Rodley appears very briefly in Mort. When Death was attending a party (I believe it's at the Ankh-Morpork Patrician's), and dancing in what I think is the equivalent of a conga line, Lord Rodley is "a rather stupid and fat young man" who is "heir to the fabulous Quirm Estates" (the two quotes directly from The Discworld Companion).

I admit I am not certain whether "heir" here means he has already inherited the ruling rights. It is possible that Lady Brenda is the ruler.--Vsl 02:19, 26 January 2006 (CET) Brenda Rodley is described as the "Dowager Duchess of Quirm", ie, one who has retired from public life. --AgProv 16:30, 18 August 2011 (CEST)

I should have check one of the older editions of the Companion, too, not only the newest one where they are no longer mentioned. She might just be an old lady still interested in political news. --Death 09:14, 26 January 2006 (CET)

I'm pretty sure Chirm is called Chirm in The Colour of Magic. It's some way past Ankh-Morpork from Quirm. --Old Dickens 01:22, 21 February 2008 (CET)

Isn't the floral clock unique in that it is formed of flowers that open up at certain times of the day, rather than the traditional form where it's merely a load of plants attached to a big clock in the ground? 77.102.101.220 14:40, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes indeed. They're a lot better at it on the Discworld: magic and all...--Old Dickens 02:42, 6 May 2011 (CEST)

Copied from my article on the Fanon wiki:-

Quirm has always been the Discworld analogue of France (and according to unwritten law in these manners, its depiction of “France” and “The French” must therefore be France with all the knobs turned up to at least eleven).

But the back-story of Quirm/France on the Discworld is necessarily different to that of France on Roundworld. Here, Ankh-Morpork has always been the dominant power on the central continent. Any of the struggling for dominance between England, later Britain, and France, which took at least seven centuries to resolve on our world, will be a long, long, way in the past, and Ankh-Morpork has clearly won by a country mile. (Apologies to my friends on VadeMecum…). In this world, France was still a major world power and a great influence on the development of the whole world. In some telling ways she remains a world power. But on the Discworld, Quirm was eliminated as a superpower player a long time ago. The country still has some influence: Vetinari is on record as saying that Quirmian is the language of international diplomacy, the language is clearly that of high-class cooking and the culinary arts (witness the restaurant menus in Hogfather and Aimsbury’s grammatically correct outburst in Making Money, concerning why the gods have singled him out to be the punchline of their joke.) Opera, classical music and ballet may be conducted in Quirmian, and Rosemary Palm regards it as the language of negotiated affection. And of course its people are renowened for Gallic tenacity, pride and self-respect. (Or bloody-minded Froggy chauvinism.)

So even allowing for immigration from Morporkian-speaking retirees, there would still be a significant proportion of the population who would speak Quirmian as a first language.

To dwell on the idea of a retirement community: look at the way so many affluent older British people are drawn to France because of lower property prices and a more forgiving climate. Witness Peter Mayne’s rather self-satisfied books about moving to France – A Year in Provence and its successors. And of course, Morporkians do not have an inconvenient sea channel to cross – the route to Quirm is overland. The French people are beginning to grumble about English enclaves living among them who socialise only with each other and who cannot or will not seek to learn French. This perhaps is human nature – look at the way North Welsh people have always worried about English immigrants coming in, drawn by comparatively cheap property, whilst their young Welsh-speaking people are driven out in search of jobs elsewhere. As Quirmian will have nowhere near the same status on the Disc that French does on Earth, could Quirmian be a minority language like Welsh on our world?

However, we also have to bear in mind the Discworld fact that thousands of miles away, the riparian culture of the river Vieux, and to a certain extent that of the city-state of Genua, is also a Quirmian-speaking one. A colony? Evidence that Quirmian was once spoken over a far greater range?

A working model for Quirm might not be in metropolitan France – for the city of Quirm, look to Montreal in Canada, a genuinely cosmopolitan city where English is as likely to be heard as French, despite the fact Montreal is in the heart of militantly French-speaking Quebec. Yet leave the city, go out into the Quebecois backwoods, and try to speak English. You will be met with hostility and bloody-minded seeming incomprehension until you give up and start to speak a civilised language. I suspect it will be the same in the Duchy of Quirm.

You almost sound as if you'd been to La Belle Province, but I think you're more likely to encounter the hostility in the French-speaking neighbourhoods of Montréal or the political atmosphere of Québec City than out in ski country or a Gaspé fishing village. (I believe the same is true of Paris vs. the regions of France.) The general comparison to Quirm is interesting; the trouble is that only the stories travel the Multiverse, the geography is a bugger. Consider the Italianate Leonardo da Quirm and family. Quirm may have to include Liguria and Tuscany with Marche, Puglia and Calabria shifted away over to Brindisi. La Fleuve Vieux has to flow from the mountains of Überwald where I placed Baron von Wendletreppe-Steckenpferd through the Iberian peninsula (moved inland) to southern Louisiana/Genua. This is no journey for a story, but you don't want to do it in a weekend by car.

(By the way, "Wendletreppe" in the article is spelled wrong, at least in German, but I don't think I have the canonical Überwaldean here, can you say for sure?) --Old Dickens 21:24, 15 October 2010 (CEST)

According to thre The New Discworld Companion entry on the Assassins' Guild, the canonical spelling is Wendeltreppe-Steckenpferd".

Damn, I'd forgotten old Leonard. But then, on Roundworld there's always been a bit of argy-bargy in the bottom right-hand corner of France as to which bits belong to whom. The last real Koom-Valley scale debate on where the border should run was in 1940, where Mussolini was in no doubt Nice and Monaco and the general area therein was really a part of Greater Italy where the people had better damn well knuckle down and learn Italian. I think Il Duce also snaffled Corsica, too; arguably, grabbing it back for Italy. And as you say, in the past, of course, the French have had similar claims on a goodly chunk of Northern Italy. So Leonard coming from a disputed border ara, perhaps a refugee from a war... (the real Leonardo had to dodge all the little wars taking place in Italy at the time) --AgProv 18:11, 16 October 2010 (CEST)

Fanfic

"In the forthcoming Snuff, a minor sub-plot will deal with a policing exchange between Ankh-Morpork and Quirm, in which we learn of La Gendarmerie de Quirm for the first time as an extremely Sûreté- like police force with a suspiciously French take on policing. but will it have its Clouseau? A central character in the Quirmian police will be a Captain Emile."

Damn, damn, damn. At least I can say I independently invented La Gendarmerie de Quirm for fanfic, but I'd better get a shift on with that Discworld/Pink Panther crossover.. (In which Vimes' opposite number turns out to be a bit of a Clouseau). Still, Terry has been clever enough to put out his disclaimer against my suing him for nicking my idea.... not of course that I ever would! --AgProv 15:15, 18 August 2011 (CEST)

Wow. I didn't even remember your Gendarmerie but it figures in the story I've been stuck in for months as well. Suddenly they're popular and I'm late. (Emile presumably works for my Colonel Ducharme.) --Old Dickens 23:53, 18 August 2011 (CEST)

At the moment my Gendarmerie is merely a named passing referent in three published stories.. Madame Deux-Epées holds them up to a class of student Assassins as a prime example of police ineptitude ("they could not tell le cul from le coude (the elbow) without an anatomy book and two opportunities to guess right, mes élèves.") My "Pink Panther" story is in preperation and imports the plot of the first PP movie to Quirm.--AgProv 13:41, 19 August 2011 (CEST)

That *&#@*! Mapp Again

When I wrote in 2006 that Quirm was "twenty leagues" from Ankh-Morpork I'm pretty sure I'd seen a reference to that distance and it agrees roughly with the map of the Circle Sea in The New Discworld Companion. The Discworld Mapp, however, shows it hundreds of miles farther up the coast. Snuff tells us that Crundells is only about a day's trip by coach and it's not a long way up the river from Quirm, suggesting something closer to sixty miles again. Are there any more clues to the location? Old Dickens 21:14, 23 March 2012 (CET)

Yes there are, dammit! Raising Steam tells it's two hundred miles again. I have the start of an essay on this whole mapping problem. --Old Dickens (talk) 00:52, 15 November 2013 (GMT)

Time for an overhaul?

This is starting to run on. It'll need organising with section headings. --Old Dickens (talk) 00:52, 15 November 2013 (GMT)