Page xvi

xvi INTRODUCTION 
among the Howth rhododendrons—and although Anna Livia's mind is wandering,
the itinerary of the expedition is tied down to its local habitation by the
place-names of Howth: Howth Castle, Evora stream, Drumleck point, The Summit,
Sheilmartin hill, St. Fintan's church, and the point known as the Nose of
Howth. In a more compressed passage (264-65), Chapelizod is described (exactly
as in Thom's Dublin Directories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries) in terms of its population of 1280 ("four of hundreds... [times]
twenty six and six"), its area of 63 acres ("three and threescore fylkers"),
and its distance of three miles from the General Post Office (265 .25—.29;
as Clive Hart calculated, 2,280,960 divided by 12 [months?] is 190,080, the
number of inches in three miles); and the rest of the passage is composed
almost entirely of the names of Chapelizod houses and other buildings. One
final example of the minor topographical set-piece is the list of Paris bridges
which J. S. Atherton discovered scattered through pages 7-17: a particularly
puzzling case since these pages are not otherwise Parisian or riverine. There
may be an undisclosed pattern of relevance, but then again Joyce may have
been up to his old trick of adding graffiti to the back side of a wall which
normally would never be seen except from the front. It is impossible to say
how many such clusters of graffiti remain to be discovered. A number have
been explored without enough success to justify their inclusion in this Gazetteer:
the list of Paris telephone exchanges and of Metro stops, for example, as
well as the cathedral cities of England and France, the Wren churches of
London (more London churches are named in the Wake than has been generally
realized), and the state capitals of the United States and provincial capitals
of Canada. I know of no study of allusions to islands in the Wake, but would
not be surprised to learn that Joyce was challenged by Canada's Thousand
Islands to try to include a thousand— or perhaps a thousand and one—allusions
to islands, even without counting Ireland itself. It is hard to think of
a list which does not have some relevance to the Wake, and Joyce might have
taken lists, or matrices, as Nathan Halper calls them, from anywhere. Although
the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica has long been the reader's
guide to Finnegans Wake, as it was one of Joyce's primary sources, it may
yet prove to be hardly tapped as the midden in which Joyce hunted for his
treasures. 
 Beyond all other uses of place-names, the Wake contains three major topographical
set-pieces. Two of these are already well-known to students of the Wake;
the third is explicated here for the first time. Not much need be said about
the Museyroom passage (pages 8-10), which in the context of the confrontation
of Wellington and Napoleon at Waterloo names most of Wellington's major engagements
in India and in the Peninsular War, and adds for good measure other historic
battles, like Thermopylae, Agincourt, and Bunker Hill. Most of the battles
are common knowledge, though a few like the Battle of the Golden Spurs are
esoteric. One might regard the Musey