Children's Book Week: Journey to the Center of the Earth

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Journey to the Center of the Earth (French: Voyage au centre de la Terre, also translated under the titles A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and A Journey to the Interior of the Earth) is an 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The story involves German professor Otto Lidenbrock who believes there are volcanic tubes going toward the centre of the Earth. He, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans descend into the Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull, encountering many adventures, including prehistoric animals and natural hazards, before eventually coming to the surface again in southern Italy, at the Stromboli volcano.

The genre of subterranean fiction already existed long before Verne. However, Journey considerably added to the genre's popularity and influenced later such writings. For example, Edgar Rice Burroughs explicitly acknowledged Verne's influence on his own Pellucidar series.

Plot

The story begins in May 1863, in the Lidenbrock house in Hamburg, Germany, with Professor Lidenbrock rushing home to peruse his latest purchase, an original runic manuscript of an Icelandic saga written by Snorri Sturluson (Snorre Tarleson in some versions of the story), "Heimskringla"; the chronicle of the Norwegian kings who ruled over Iceland. While looking through the book, Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel find a coded note written in runic script along with the name of a 16th-century Icelandic alchemist, Arne Saknussemm. (This was a first indication of Verne's love for cryptography. Coded, cryptic, or incomplete messages as a plot device would continue to appear in many of his works and in each case Verne would go a long way to explain not only the code used but also the mechanisms used to retrieve the original text.) Lidenbrock and Axel transliterate the runic characters into Latin letters, revealing a message written in a seemingly bizarre code. Lidenbrock attempts a decipherment, deducing the message to be a kind of transposition cipher; but his results are as meaningless as the original.

Professor Lidenbrock decides to lock everyone in the house and force himself and the others (Axel, and the maid, Martha) to go without food until he cracks the code. Axel discovers the answer when fanning himself with the deciphered text: Lidenbrock's decipherment was correct, and only needs to be read backwards to reveal sentences written in rough Latin.^[a] Axel decides to keep the secret hidden from Professor Lidenbrock, afraid of what the Professor might do with the knowledge, but after two days without food he cannot stand the hunger and reveals the secret to his uncle. Lidenbrock translates the note, which is revealed to be a medieval note written by Saknussemm, who claims to have discovered a passage to the centre of the Earth via Snæfell in Iceland. In what Axel calls bad Latin, the deciphered message reads:

The Runic cryptogram

In Snefflls [sic] Iokulis kraterem kem delibat umbra Skartaris Iulii intra kalendas deskende, audas uiator, te [sic] terrestre kentrum attinges. Kod feki. Arne Saknussemm.

In slightly better Latin, with errors amended:

In Sneffels Jokulis craterem, quem delibat umbra Scartaris, Julii intra kalendas descende, audax viator, et terrestre centrum attinges; quod feci. Arne Saknussemm

which, when translated into English, reads:

Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the jökull of Snæfell, which the shadow of Scartaris touches (lit: tastes) before the Kalends of July, and you will attain the centre of the earth. I did it. Arne Saknussemm

Professor Lidenbrock is a man of astonishing impatience, and departs for Iceland immediately, taking his reluctant nephew with him. Axel, who, in comparison, is anti-adventurous, repeatedly tries to reason with him, explaining his fears of descending into a volcano and putting forward various scientific theories as to why the journey is impossible, but Professor Lidenbrock repeatedly keeps himself blinded against Axel's point of view. After a rapid journey via Kiel and Copenhagen, they arrive in Reykjavík, where the two procure the services of Hans Bjelke (a Danish-speaking Icelander eiderdown hunter) as their guide, and travel overland to the base of the volcano.

In late June, they reach the volcano, which has three craters. According to Saknussemm's message, the passage to the center of the Earth is through the one crater that is touched by the shadow of a nearby mountain peak at noon. However, the text also states that this is only true during the last days of June. During the next few days, with July rapidly approaching, the weather is too cloudy for any shadows. Axel silently rejoices, hoping this will force his uncle – who has repeatedly tried to impart courage to him only to succeed in making him even more cowardly still – to give up the project and return home. Alas for Axel, however, on the second to last day, the sun comes out and the mountain peak shows the correct crater to take.

After descending into the crater, the three travellers set off into the bowels of the Earth, encountering many strange phenomena and great dangers, including a chamber filled with firedamp, and steep-sided wells around the "path". After taking a wrong turn, they run out of water and Axel almost dies, but Hans taps into a neighbouring subterranean river. Lidenbrock and Axel name the resulting stream the "Hansbach" in his honour and the three are saved. At another point, Axel becomes separated from the others and is lost several miles from them. Luckily, a strange acoustic phenomenon allows him to communicate with them from some miles away, and they are soon reunited.

After descending many miles, following the course of the Hansbach, they reach an unimaginably vast cavern. This underground world is lit by electrically charged gas at the ceiling, and is filled with a very deep subterranean ocean, surrounded by a rocky coastline covered in petrified trees and giant mushrooms. The travelers build a raft out of trees and set sail. The Professor names this sea the "Lidenbrock Sea" and the port as "Port Gräuben", after the name of his goddaughter. While on the water, they see several prehistoric creatures such as a giant Ichthyosaurus, which fights with a Plesiosaurus and wins. After the battle between the monsters, the party comes across an island with a huge geyser, which Lidenbrock names "Axel Island".

A lightning storm again threatens to destroy the raft and its passengers, but instead throws them onto the coastline. This part of the coast, Axel discovers, is alive with prehistoric plant and animal life forms, including giant insects and a herd of mastodons. On a beach covered with bones, Axel discovers an oversized human skull. Axel and Lidenbrock venture some way into the prehistoric forest, where Professor Lidenbrock points out, in a shaky voice, a prehistoric human, more than twelve feet in height, leaning against a tree and watching a herd of mastodons. Axel cannot be sure if he has really seen the man or not, and he and Professor Lidenbrock debate whether or not a proto-human civilization actually exists so far underground. The three wonder if the creature is a man-like ape, or an ape-like man. The sighting of the creature is considered the most alarming part of the story, and the explorers decide that it is better not to alert it to their presence as they fear it may be hostile.

The travellers continue to explore the coastline, and find a passageway marked by Saknussemm as the way ahead. However, it is blocked by what appears to be a recent cave-in and two of the three, Hans and the Professor, despair at being unable to hack their way through the granite wall. The adventurers plan to blast the rock with gun cotton and paddle out to sea to escape the blast. Upon executing the plan, however, they discover that behind the rockfall was a seemingly bottomless pit, not a passage to the center of the Earth. The travellers are swept away as the sea rushes into the large open gap in the ground. After spending hours being swept along at lightning speeds by the water, the raft ends up inside a large volcanic chimney filling with water and magma. Terrified, the three are rushed upwards, through stifling heat, and are ejected onto the surface from a side-vent of a stratovolcano. When they regain consciousness, they discover that they have been ejected from Stromboli, a volcanic island located in southern Italy. They return to Hamburg to great acclaim – Professor Lidenbrock is hailed as one of the great scientists of history, Axel marries his sweetheart Gräuben, and Hans eventually returns to his peaceful life in Iceland. The Professor has some regret that their journey was cut short.

At the very end of the book, Axel and Lidenbrock realize why their compass was behaving strangely after their journey on the raft. They realize that the needle was pointing the wrong way after being struck by an electric fireball which nearly destroyed the wooden raft.

Inspiration

The book was inspired by Charles Lyell's Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man of 1863 (and probably also influenced by Lyell's earlier ground-breaking work Principles of Geology, published 1830–33). By that time geologists had abandoned a literal biblical account of Earth's development and it was generally thought that the end of the last glacial period marked the first appearance of humanity, but Lyell drew on new findings to put the origin of human beings much further back in the deep geological past. Lyell's book also influenced Louis Figuier's 1867 second edition of La Terre avant le déluge ("The Earth before the flood") which included dramatic illustrations of savage men and women wearing animal skins and wielding stone axes, in place of the Garden of Eden shown in the 1863 edition.^[1]

Main characters

• Professor Otto Lidenbrock: a professor of geology.
• Axel: the nephew of Professor Lidenbrock, overcautious and unadventurous student.
• Hans Bjelke: a Danish-speaking Icelandic eiderduck hunter who becomes their guide; dependable, resourceful and imperturbable.
• Gräuben: the goddaughter of Professor Lidenbrock with whom Axel is in love, from the Vierlande area of Hamburg.
• Martha: the maid at the house of Professor Lidenbrock.

Publication notes

The first English edition was published in its entirety by Henry Vickers in 12 installments of a boys magazine entitled The Boys Journal. The plates are more numerous than the book, which was published with an 1872 title page. If it was released in 1871 as a single volume, it was late in the year. This "True" first edition also found in an octavo normal book size (not Annual size), has been overlooked by bibliographers.^{[clarification needed]} It has a place of pre-eminence up to about a third of the way through the 12 monthly issues and then slides down into the main body of the journal. The magazine does not seem to have survived in its loose format of 12 individual parts.^[2]

The 1871 English language edition published by Griffith and Farran (named Journey to the Centre of the Earth^[3]at Project Gutenberg) is an abridged and altered translation. It changes the Professor's name to Hardwigg, Axel's name to Harry (or Henry) Lawson, and Gräuben's name to Gretchen. It omits some chapters, while rewriting or adding portions to others. The redactor's note by Norm Wolcott, at Project Gutenberg, claims that this translation is the most popularly reprinted one, despite the flaws.

The 1877 translation by Ward, Lock, & Co., Ltd., translated by Frederick Amadeus Malleson, is more faithful, though it too has some slight rewrites (according to the redactor at its Project Gutenberg page,^[4]where its title is translated as Journey to the Interior of the Earth).

The 1877 translation by Ward Lock & Co Ltd., translated by Frederick Amadeus Malleson, was adapted by AD Classic Books' 2008 edition of Journey to the Center of the Earth.^[5]In this edit by A.R. Roumanis, antiquated writing and out of date sayings were replaced, which makes this the most "modernized" version available.

The novel frequently uses the device of the Professor explaining or arguing scientific matters with Axel, in order to communicate scientific facts on which the worldview is based. In the midst of their descent, this role reverses at one point, as Axel points out strata to the Professor as another example of the same storytelling method. Many things postulated in the novel are now known to be incorrect, including the temperature of space being minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and volcanoes erupting due to a reaction between water and chemicals in the Earth's crust.

Adaptations

Film

• 1959: Journey to the Center of the Earth, USA, directed by Henry Levin, starring James Mason and Pat Boone. In the film, the beginning locale is transferred from Hamburg to Edinburgh, "Professor Otto Lidenbrock" becomes "Professor Oliver Lindenbrook", and the nephew Axel becomes student Alec McEwan and is more adventurous than cowardly as he is in the novel. The film introduces two new main characters: a female explorer (Arlene Dahl) and a main antagonist (Thayer David).
• 1978: Viaje al centro de la Tierra, Spain, directed by Juan Piquer Simón, starring Kenneth More and Pep Munné. It was distributed in both the U.S. in theaters as Where Time Began and the U.K. on TV as The Fabulous Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
• 1989: Journey to the Center of the Earth took only the title and a general idea from the Verne novel, and had a unique plot aimed at a teen audience. It was written by Debra Ricci, Regina Davis, Kitty Chalmers, and Rusty Lemorande, and was directed by Lemorande and Albert Pyun. It stars Emo Philips, Paul Carafotes, Jaclyn Bernstein, Kathy Ireland, Janet Du Plessis, Nicola Cowper, Lochner De Kock, and Ilan Mitchell-Smith. It was based on an uncompleted version, more faithful to Verne's text, written and directed by Lemorande, that had been left unfinished because of Cannon Films' premature closure.
• 2008: Journey to the Center of the Earth is a 3-D film by Eric Brevig. Cast members include Brendan Fraser, Anita Briem and Josh Hutcherson. The film follows as a sequel to the original book.
• 2008: Journey to the Center of the Earth was a direct-to-DVD release by The Asylum, which is a loose adaptation of the original book. It was released as Journey to Middle Earth in the United Kingdom.

• Walt Disney Pictures began work on a Journey adaptation in the late 1990s, but was not happy with the appearance of the caverns, so the project was scrapped. The cavern scenes were altered and used in the production of their 2001 film Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

Television

• An animated television series, Journey to the Center of the Earth, first broadcast in 1967 on ABC, starring the voices of Ted Knight, Pat Harrington, Jr., and Jane Webb, only loosely based on Verne's novel and based more on the 1959 film.^[6]
• The first part of the second series of Around the World with Willy Fog entitled Willy Fog 2 by Spanish studio BRB Internacional was "Journey to the Centre of the Earth".
• A limited animation television special in the Famous Classic Tales series was aired by CBS in 1977.
• In 1993, NBC aired a made-for-TV film version with a cast including John Neville, F. Murray Abraham and Kim Miyori. The film used the title and general premise of Verne's novel, but had its heroes carry out the journey in an earth-penetrating machine.^[7] A television series was supposed to follow, but was never produced.^{[citation needed]}
• The Wishbone 1996 episode "Hot Diggety Dawg" was based on the novel, featuring several major scenes starring the title character as Professor Lidenbrock.
• The 1999 Hallmark Entertainment miniseries starred Treat Williams, Jeremy London, Bryan Brown, Tushka Bergen, and Hugh Keays-Byrne (this version deviates considerably from Verne's original).
• A TV film version by RHI Entertainment starring Rick Schroder, Peter Fonda, Victoria Pratt, Steven Grayhm and Mike Dopud was shot on location in and around Vancouver on high definition video during the summer of 2007. The show aired on February 4, 2008 and been released on DVD. Pratt and Fonda's characters were added to the original story.

Radio

• A seven-part radio serial was broadcast on the BBC Home Service in 1962. It was produced by Claire Chovil, and starred Trevor Martin and Nigel Anthony.^[8]
• An eight-part radio serial was produced for BBC Radio 4 by Howard Jones in 1963. It starred Bernard Horsfall and Jeffrey Banks.
• A radio drama adaptation was broadcast by National Public Radio in 2000 for its series Radio Tales.
• A 90-minute radio adaptation by Stephen Walker directed by Owen O'Callan was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 28 December 1995 and re-broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra on 20 November 2011, on 11 and 12 November 2012 and on 20 and 21 December 2014. Nicholas Le Prevost starred as Professor Otto Lidenbrock, Nathaniel Parker as Axel and Oliver Senton as Hans. Rosemary McNab, an original female character who funds and accompanies the expedition (and has affairs with both Hans and Otto along the way), was played by Kristen Millwood.^[9]
• A two-part BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth was broadcast on 19 and 26 March 2017, with Stephen Critchlow as Professor Lidenbrock, Joel MacCormack as Axel and Gudmundur Ingi Thorvaldsson as Hans. It was directed and produced by Tracey Neale and adapted by Moya O'Shea.^[10]

Theme park (themed areas) and rides

• A thrill ride based on the book, Journey to the Center of the Earth, is open at The Mysterious Island section of Tokyo DisneySea's theme park. It also includes a dark ride based on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
• Le Visionarium (Timekeeper), featuring Jules Verne in a circle vision ride (1992–2005) and Space Mountain, de la Terre à la Lune, in its original version (1995–2005), based directly on From the Earth to the Moon in Discoveryland (the hub facing part of the Land features steampunk-related theming) at Euro Disneyland (now Disneyland Paris) between 1992 and 2005

Other

• Video games called Journey to the Center of the Earth: in 1984 by Ozisoft for the Commodore 64; in 1989 by Topo Soft^[11] for the ZX Spectrum and in 2003 by Frogwares.^[12]
• A board game adaptation of the book designed by Rüdiger Dorn was released by Kosmos in 2008.^[13]
• Caedmon Records released an abridged recording of Journey to the Center of the Earth read by James Mason, in the 1960s.
• Tom Baker was the reader for a recording released by Argo Records in 1977.
• In 2011, Audible released an unabridged "Signature Performance" reading of the book by Tim Curry.
• A concept album called Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Rick Wakeman was released in 1974. It combines song, narration and instrumental pieces to retell the story.
• Wakeman released a second concept album called Return to the Centre of the Earth in 1999. It tells the story of a later set of travelers attempting to repeat the original journey.
• Alien Voices, an audio theater group led by Leonard Nimoy and John de Lancie, released a dramatized version of Journey to the Center of the Earth through Simon and Schuster Audio in 1997.
• Christopher Lloyd's character of Doctor Emmett Brown, one of the two main fictional characters of the Back to the Future film series, attributed the origins of his lifelong devotion to science to having read as a child the works of Jules Verne in general, and Journey to the Center of the Earth in particular. (This is evident when he reveals that he tried to dig to the center of the Earth at the age of twelve.) Back to the Future Part III, especially, pays homage to the book when Dr. Brown carves his initials in a mineshaft after storing the time machine, just like Arne Saknussemm did to help guide future explorers. At the end of the film, it is revealed that Dr. Brown's two sons are named Jules and Verne.
• Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the Pellucidar series using the Journey to the Center of the Earth concept.
• The surname of Kathy Ireland's character in Alien from L.A. (1988), a film about a girl who falls through the earth and discovers a repressive subterranean society, is Saknussemm.
• The 1992 adventure/role-playing game Quest for Glory III by Sierra Entertainment used Arne Saknoosen the Aardvark as a bit character for exploration information, alluding to the explorer Arne Saknussemm.
• The DC Comics comic book series Warlord takes place in Skartaris, a land supposed to exist within a Hollow Earth. Its creator, Mike Grell, has confirmed that "the name comes from the mountain peak Scartaris that points the way to the passage to the earth's core in Journey to the Center of the Earth."^[14]
• Louis MacNeice's final play Persons from Porlock contains a reference to Journey to the Center of the Earth at the beginning. Because his mother used to read it aloud to him, Hank became fascinated with "caves and pot-holes and things". At the end of the play Herr Professor Lidebrock is one of the characters Hank meets down the pot hole. Hank says to him, "Oh, my dear Professor, I've always wanted to meet you, since my mother used to read me your adventures. How you went down the volcano and ran into all those mastodons. But, of course, in your case you got out again." The Professor replies, "That was because I am a character in fiction... Jules Verne invented me".^[15]
• Halldór Laxness, the only Icelandic author to be awarded the Nobel Prize, set his novel Under the Glacier in the area of Snæfellsjökull. The glacier has a mystic quality in the story and there are several references to A Journey to the Center of the Earth in connection with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_Center_of_the_Earth