Lilliput and Blefuscu
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- For other usages of Lilliput, see: Lilliput.
Lilliput and Blefuscu are two island nations that appear in the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Both are portrayed as being in the South Pacific and are inhabited by tiny people who are "not six Inches high". The two are separated by a channel eight hundred yards wide.
In the novel Gulliver washes up on Lilliput and is captured by the inhabitants while asleep. He discovers that Lilliput and Blefuscu are permanently at war because of differences over the correct way to eat a boiled egg – from the rounded end according to the Blefuscuans, or from the sharp end according to the Lilliputians. The supporters of the differing views were called Big-endians and Little-endians. (These are sometimes incorrectly reversed in various sources, remember (L)illiput for little and (B)lefuscu for big.) This dispute was a mirror for the argument between consubstantiation and transubstantiation in the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. The causes of the war have also given us the computing terms big endian and little endian.
The story is a parody of the European nations, particularly Britain and France, who were in Swift's view constantly at war over 'trivial' matters. Lilliput and Blefuscu were the names used in Samuel Johnson's retellings of the debates in Parliament. [1] (http://www.samueljohnson.com/debates/).
The word Lilliputian has come into common usage, meaning 'very small sized'. The tiny people of Lilliput contrast with the giants of Brobdingnag who Gulliver also met.