Rothenia

A fictional Central European state which first appears in the Heart of Oskar Prinz. At that point (apparently the year 2000) it was a recent accession state to the EU, ten years after the fall of the Communist regime that had ruled it since 1948, and a long period of Cold War dictatorship under a certain Horvath, whose 'brutalist' mausoleum we later discover was erected in the industrial city of Zenden. The back history of Rothenia is explored principally in the quasi-historical novels, Count Oskar, King Maxim and The Unnatural Archaeologist. However HoOP provides the key link to the Hopeverse. In the course of the story we learn that the protagonist Oskar Prinz is in fact the scion and heir of the Tarlenheim dynasty engaged in a protracted and apparently hopeless struggle to reclaim the family estates. He tells his lover William Vincent over wine in the Strelzen Spa the story of the original Rudolf Rassendyll and the events that transpired in what was then called Ruritania on the death of King Rudolf IV, and how his throne was saved for Rudolf V Elphberg by the English adventurer Rassendyll. In HoOP these events are set in 1862. In HoOP just as an Englishman saved the Elphbergs in 1862 at the cost of his love, so Vincent goes on to save the fortunes of the Tarlenheims in 2000, but in doing so loses Oskar.

Rothenian People and Culture
HoOP sketches out a history of a Rothenia which emerged from a Kulturkampf in later 19th century Ruritania. The Rothenian people (Roteniskij) were a Western Slavic offshoot, one of the neighbours of the kingdom of Eastern Francia. The Slavic ethnic mixture in Ruritania is in fact implied in the Hopeverse in Hope's coining of place names in the kingdom, and Arram takes the idea to its logical conclusion. The Rothenians were evangelised by St Vitalis, first bishop of Strelsau, and formed a stable duchy in the Starel basin during the course of the ninth century. It benefitted from an alliance with the Emperor Otto III (980-1002) who first extended recognition to Duke Tassilo of the Rothenians and awarded him the diadem which became in due course the Crown and national symbol which carried his name. Though unlike Bohemia and Pomerania, Rothenia avoided incorporation in the Western Empire.

From Count Oskar and Henry in Finkle Road we learn that the Rothenians - like many European peoples - developed an origin myth. This focussed on a legendary Slavic chief by the name of Ruric, whose warrior band and people populated the Starel basin in the Volkwanderung of the sixth century. The medieval legend had Ruric as a descendant of wandering Trojan exiles (in much the same was as the Franks, Britons, Goths, and indeed the Romans, explained their origins). It was from Ruric that the ruling house of Tassilo took the name Ruritanides. The Ruritanid dynasty died out in the fifteenth century, the last ruler, Duchess Osra, marrying a member of the Swabian Elphberg family, who acceded to the throne.

Rothenia and Ruritania
The Elphbergs who progressively Germanised the ruling class and cities of Rothenia, coined the term Ruritania for their new realm, to distance it from its Slavic past. It was as Kings of Ruritania that they received their crown from Pope Innocent X in 1644.

In the Hopeverse 'Ruritania' was a manufactured name from the Latin rus (gen. ruris) meaning 'countryside' and implying an agrarian and backward state. In Prisoner of Zenda we are given the vague information that the kingdom was to be found south of Saxony (the 'Thuringia' of the Arramverse) and that Strelsau the capital was the next stop after Dresden on the line which presumably takes the express to Vienna. The Arramverse Ruritania is placed south of Bohemia (Czech Republic), west of Slovakia, east of Bavaria and north of Austria.