Fantasy worlds

Atlantis was a real estate scam – and 9 more crazy fictional worlds

Image: Artem Sapegin

Fiction has given us worlds beyond comprehension—realms where logic collapses, physics defies expectation, and imagination reigns supreme. From cities in the sky to entire worlds beneath our own, some of these fictional places have captivated us since their creation. Join us on a fantastical journey through some of the quirkiest and most head-scratching of these imagined worlds.

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Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland conjured a world where words, rules, and even size lose all meaning. Time halts at tea parties, cats vanish mid-sentence, and logic itself becomes nonsense.

Carroll, a mathematician and Oxford don, infused what at first glance seems like just a children’s story with riddles, puns, and complex paradoxes. The book’s wordplay critiques Victorian social norms while subtly introducing mathematical and logical concepts.

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A technicolor realm of talking animals, magical shoes, and wicked witches, L. Frank Baum’s 1900 classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz reshaped children’s literature forever. Baum’s storytelling introduced a vivid fantasy world filled with unique characters, whimsical landscapes, and moral lessons that appealed to both children and adults.

Characters like the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion have become iconic figures in American popular culture for generations. The 1939 MGM film starring Judy Garland cemented the book’s imagery, leaving an enduring influence on film, theater, and the broader cultural imagination.

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An island where no one grows up and pirates battle endlessly, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan debuted in 1904 and quickly became a lasting symbol of escapism. Barrie first introduced the character in a 1902 play before expanding the story into his 1911 novel, embedding themes of adventure, imagination, and the tension between childhood and adulthood.

Psychologists and literary scholars often reference Neverland as an allegory for arrested development, representing the desire to remain permanently in a state of innocence and freedom.

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A wardrobe that opens to another world, talking lions, and epic battles of good versus evil—C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (first published in 1950) created a richly imagined fantasy universe.

Drawing on Christian allegory, classical mythology, and his own experiences in World War I, Lewis crafted seven novels that explore courage, faith, and moral growth through fantastical adventures. The series has had a profound cultural impact, inspiring stage adaptations, radio dramas, films, and countless illustrated editions.

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A floating island of science, invention, and eccentric rulers, Laputa appears in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels. The island hovers in the sky, controlled by magnets, and is inhabited by scholars obsessed with abstract mathematics, music, and astronomy—often to the detriment of practical life below.

Swift, a master of satire, used Laputa to lampoon the scientific and political elite of his time, highlighting their detachment from practical, everyday concerns. Its striking imagery has also had a lasting impact on the depiction of futuristic societies and utopian civilizations.

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Rolling hills, cozy hobbit holes, and a peaceful, pastoral life—J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire, introduced in The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), embodies an idyllic, pre-industrial England beneath the veneer of a fantasy world.

Tolkien, a scholar of languages and mythology, infused the Shire with intricate customs, poetry, and festivals, aiming to create a mythology for England that he felt was missing—one that celebrated simplicity, community, and harmony with nature.

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A hidden plateau where dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures survive, Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World introduced readers to a thrilling world untouched by time. Doyle’s story follows Professor Challenger and his expedition as they encounter giant reptiles, ape-men, and other wonders on a remote South American plateau, blending adventure with early paleontological speculation.

Doyle was likely inspired by Mount Roraima, a flat-topped plateau in South America’s Guiana Highlands. Its sheer cliffs, isolated ecosystem, and mysterious cloud-covered summit provided a tangible model for the novel’s prehistoric world.

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A legendary sunken city, Atlantis was first described by Plato in his dialogues around 360 BCE. According to Plato, Atlantis was a powerful and advanced civilization that sank beneath the ocean in a single day and night of catastrophic events, serving as a cautionary tale about hubris and moral decline.

Despite its origin as a philosophical example, many scholars believe Atlantis was inspired by the real-life Minoan civilization on Crete. The Minoans were an advanced maritime society whose cities, such as Knossos, were eventually devastated by natural disasters, including the volcanic eruption of Thera (Santorini) and subsequent tsunamis.

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A hollow Earth filled with prehistoric creatures and lost civilizations, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar (1914) imagines a world at the center of the planet, lit by an eternal inner sun. The series follows David Innes and his adventures among tribes of humans, dinosaurs, and other strange beings, blending swashbuckling action with imaginative geography.

Burroughs drew inspiration from the era’s fascination with unexplored frontiers and the Hollow Earth theories popular in the 19th century. Pellucidar has influenced later science fiction and adventure literature, inspiring works that explore hidden worlds and isolated ecosystems.

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A mysterious Scottish village that appears for only one day every hundred years, the legend of Brigadoon draws on deep-rooted folklore from the Scottish Highlands. The tale likely originates from myths of fairy-haunted glens and hidden villages, where magic protected communities from outsiders and the passage of time.

Such stories often emphasized the danger and allure of the supernatural, reflecting local beliefs about enchanted landscapes and the thin boundary between the human and fairy worlds.

The creators behind timeless verses

Who said Humpty Dumpty was an egg? Stories of 10 ageless nursery rhymes

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We have been singing the same nursery rhymes to little kids for years and years, often without considering the words we are repeating. Some of these songs, narrating the adventures of farm animals, stars, and itsy bitsy spiders, have very cryptic lyrics that we learned as infants and never again questioned. Who wrote these rhymes? How long have humans been singing them to one another? In this article, we unveil the stories behind 10 timeless verses.

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Do you know the five stanzas of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star?" Very few people do. The ultimate lullaby belongs to the opening verses of "The Star", a poem written in 1806 by English author Jane Taylor. The poem was originally published in Rhymes for the Nursery, a collection by her and her sister Ann.

The couplets are set to the very famous French melody officially called "Ah! vous dirai-je, maman" ("Ah, will I tell you, mom"). It’s a universal classic from 1761; Mozart himself had composed a set of variations based on the melody. However, it wasn’t until thirty years after the Taylor sisters’ publication that another book proposed singing their poem to the catchy music. The nursery rhyme "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" uses a variant of the same tune.

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Nowhere in the poem is it mentioned that Humpty Dumpty is an anthropomorphic egg. The lyrics are enigmatic and many attempts have been made to link them to historical figures, like kings or battle heroes. The first version of the rhyme appeared in writing in 1797 in Juvenile Amusements, a music collection by English composer Samuel Arnold. It is believed that "Humpty Dumpty" was 18th-century slang for a clumsy person.

Why an egg, then? Some believed the poem was a riddle to which the answer was that Humpty Dumpty was not a human, but some fragile thing. It was none other than Lewis Carrol, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who first depicted Humpty Dumpty explicitly as looking like an egg. The character appears on a wall in the popular book’s 1871 sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, where Alice meets him and points out how much like an egg he looks.

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"Mary Had a Little Lamb" is based on a true story. It was first published in 1830 by American writer Sarah Josepha Hale. She was a teacher who schooled girls and boys in her hometown, Newport, New Hampshire. One day, a student named Mary showed up accompanied by her pet lamb. This incident, the children’s reactions, and the obvious affection between Mary and her lamb —who "followed her everywhere she went"—, eventually inspired Hale to write a three-stanza poem called Mary’s Lamb.

In the same year, a composer from Boston, Lowell Mason, rearranged the poem and set it to music to have a singable version. We still use the words Mason wrote, but the melody we sing today is not the one he composed. We usually sing it to an 1867 tune known as "Merrily We Roll Along."

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For context about how old this song is, Mozart wouldn’t be born until 50 years after its earliest known version. "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" appears in a 1706 opera by English writer and composer Thomas d'Urfey. The play, The Kingdom of the Birds, included a song called "In the Fields in Frost and Snow", which was a very near version of the song we know today, down to the iconic "Here a Boo, there a Boo, every-where a Boo".

It is unknown whether this was already a popular song that d’Urfey quoted in his play. What we know, though, is that after his opera the song became very widespread, and eventually became a folk song with varying versions in Britain, Ireland, and North America.

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This one was conceived from the start as a song. The rhyme has only four lines. The first printing of the song is dated 1852 and attributed to author and teacher Eliphalet Oram Lyte. The melody, however, was very different from the one that was later popularized. It wasn’t until 1881 that the tune as we know it today was attached to the words.

The current version of Row, Row, Row Your Boat is intended to be sung as a four-part round canon. That means that the melody of each line can be combined to harmonize with any of the others. That’s why it’s usually taught to children and popularly used to teach choir singing.

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Children from as far back as the Late Middle Ages might have already been singing this song. The earliest printed version of nursery rhymes about the London Bridge falling appeared in England in 1744 in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, though the rhyme may have been sung long before this.

There are many myths behind the lyrics of this song, from claiming that the bridge falls because of Viking attacks, to stating that the "fair Lady" mentioned is Virgin Mary.

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This beloved nursery folk song was only born in 1938 when it was published as "The Bus" in the American Childhood magazine. Verna Hills, born in 1898 in Boston, conceived this tune to distract the little ones during long bus rides. That’s why the repetitive yet catchy lyrics enlist parts of the moving bus while adding some mimic or sound to go with it. "The Bus" eventually became a folk song also popular in Canada, the UK, and Australia.

The song is believed to be based on "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush", an old English nursery rhyme about a group of young ones going about everyday chores. This one had been set to music from an opera published in mid-1700s London. Its melody and rhythm are very similar to the one we know today.

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Also known as the "Spider Song," this rhyme has received different names throughout English-speaking countries. Its earliest appearance seems to have been in Arthur Walbridge North’s 1910 book Camp and Camino in Lower California, except that it mentions a "blooming, bloody spider" instead.

In varying versions and regions, the spider has also been called "eency weency" and "teeny weeny." Other countries added further variations to one of the most famous nursery rhymes ever. In France, it’s a gypsy spider; in the Netherlands, it’s a beetle; and in Norway, the spider is called Peter.

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The timeless finger-counting nursery rhyme was designed to teach children coordination and dexterity. Famously, the words match the narration of the fates of 5 pigs while folding the fingers on a child’s hand one by one.

The first time the poem appeared in writing was in 1728, in a medley called The Nurses Song. Since then, over the decades, varying versions have been written. Some say it may have been inspired by "To Market, To Market," also known as "To Market, To Market, to Buy a Fat Pig," another folk nursery rhyme with a first version that dates back as far as 1598.

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You probably have noticed that the iconic ABC song uses the same melody as the aforementioned "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"; Ah! vous dirai-je, maman. However, the lyrics were not applied to the melody until 1835, when Boston publisher Charles Bradlee decided to borrow the familiar tune to sing the alphabet to it, as a strategy to help children learn letters through a catchy and well-known melody. It became a preschool classic, and it has been adapted to be used in many languages other than English.