A Journey to the Centre of the Earth

A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, novel by prolific French author Jules Verne, published in 1864. It is the second book in his popular series Voyages extraordinaires (1863–1910), which contains novels that combine scientific facts with adventure fiction and laid the groundwork for science fiction.

Summary

Axel Lidenbrock, the teenage narrator of the story, lives in Hamburg, Germany, with his uncle, Professor Otto Lidenbrock, an impetuous and single-minded professor of geology. The story, set in May 1863, opens as the latter rushes home to show Axel his latest acquisition: a runic manuscript by the renowned Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson. They find hidden within its pages a separate note which, when translated into Latin and read backward, appears to be the Icelandic alchemist Arne Saknussemm’s record of a passage leading to the centre of the Earth in a crater of Snaefell, a dormant volcano in Iceland. The crater containing the passage, however, is only revealed by shadows at noon during the last few days of June, just a month away. Otto rushes off to the area, dragging a very reluctant, pessimistic, and skeptical Axel with him.

They eventually reach Reykjavík, where they hire the Icelandic eider hunter Hans Bjelke to guide them on the long journey to the volcano. After an arduous climb to Snaefell’s summit, the trio locates the correct crater, and they descend and find the passage. When they reach a fork, Otto chooses the eastern tunnel, but after three days they enter a cavern in which the history of the Carboniferous Period is visible, and Otto realizes that he was mistaken. They return and head down the other tunnel. The adventurers exhaust their water supplies, but Hans locates a subterranean river, and they follow that thereafter. One day Axel takes a wrong turn and gets lost, but eventually an acoustic phenomenon allows him to speak to Otto and Hans, and he is able to rejoin them.

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The trio finds a vast lake or sea, and along the shore they encounter a forest of giant mushrooms and lycophytes. On the ground are mastodon bones. Hans builds a raft of partially petrified wood, and the three men set sail, hoping to cross the sea. They catch fish of extinct species, and, after several days of sailing, they come across an ichthyosaur and a plesiosaur fighting. Later they are caught in an electrical storm that lasts for days. At one point a fireball strikes the raft, but the storm at last drives the vessel ashore. However, the compass indicates that they have returned to the shore from which they had set out.

As Hans repairs the raft, Otto and Axel explore the area. They find shells and bones of long-extinct animals and also discover a human skull. Soon they come across a fossilized human. As they continue, they spot a herd of mastodons, and suddenly they see a giant man shepherding the beasts. They flee back to the shore, where they find a marking indicating Saknussemm’s path. They follow it but find themselves blocked by a large rock, which they blow up with gunpowder, after first returning to the raft to put themselves at a safe distance from the explosion. With the barrier removed, the explorers are carried past it on a torrent for hours, and then they find themselves being pushed upward. Two months after entering the underground world, the men are carried by a volcanic eruption to the surface of Stromboli Island, off the coast of Italy.

Background and adaptations

An understanding of the time in which Verne was writing sheds light on the story line. Theories that the Earth was hollow were bandied about in Europe in the 19th century, and there was also public interest in the growing sciences of geology, paleontology, and evolution at the time. A Journey to the Centre of the Earth was enormously popular, and numerous, mostly bad, English translations appeared quickly. The most notable among the several film and television adaptations was Henry Levin’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959).