Flashman on the March

APPENDIX III: Abyssinian Names

In the Explanatory Note mention was made of Flashman’s wild incon sistency in spelling Abyssinian names. He was not alone. When the Abyssinian campaign began, virtually no proper names of places or people were known outside the country, and everyone writing about it seems simply to have pleased himself; thus we hear of Theodore’s Queen as Tooroo-Wark, Teriwark, Teru-Wark, Terunsheh, Terunish, and even Terenachie; his second “queen-concubine", whom Flashman calls Tamagno, is also Yetemagnu and Itamanya; his valet Wald Gabr is also Welder Gabre. The same is true of place-names, so I have simply chosen the spellings which Flashman uses most often. Rather more serious are the discrepancies in maps of the period, and here again I have used Flashman’s own crude sketch, which differs no more from the rest than they do from each other. It seems right and proper that the word “Abyssinia” means “confusion", or so I am told.