In the sky there are both the dark and the light.
Grimpow: The Invisible Road (Grimpow, el camino invisible) is a 2005 Historical Fantasy children/young adult novel by Spanish author Rafael Ábalos. A major best-seller, it made Ábalos' name truly famous: it was translated to 25 languages and won the 2008 International Reading Association Children’s Book Award. Some critics called it "the Name of the Rose of young adult literature".In the dark Europe of 1313, a thirteen years old urchin named Grimpow makes a grim discovery in the snow: the corpse of a nobleman carrying a mysterious red stone and a message pointing to the city of Strasbourg. After taking refuge along with his mentor Dúrlib in the nearby abbey of Ullpens, the arrival of the always unexpected Catholic Inquisition shows Grimpow that there is a secret conspiracy behind his find. With Dúrlib out of his life, Grimpow will pass the next months studying with the old monks before becoming a squire to the knight Salietti di Staglia, which he will accompany in his travels to unveil the mystery.
The novel was followed in 2007 by a Distant Sequel set in modern times, Kôt, and in 2009 by a more traditional sequel keeping on from the original's ending, Grimpow and the Witch of the Lineage.
The first book ccontains examples of:
- Aerith and Bob: Many names of people and places in the novel follow the As Long as It Sounds Foreign route. Few of them actually are or even resemble historical names of the setting ("Salietti" and "Junn" are pretty much the only ones among all the important characters, and they are still problematic), while the rest are made up and sound more like High Fantasy-esque gibberish ("Figueltach", "Valdigor", "Rhadoguil" or "Grimpow" itself).
- Artistic License – History:
- Although the names used in the novel are generally their own world, in real life "Salietti" would have been a surname, not a given name. Ironically, surnames ending in -etti were typically found in Lombardia, while the character Salietti hails from Piemonte.
- Grimpow compares the gold nuggets produced by the stone to roasted corn kernels. Historically, corn would not be known in Europe after the discovery of America in 1492, almost 180 years later.
- Baron Figueltach is oddly described as not having a beard. In medieval Europe, beards symbolized virility and honor, and were considered very Serious Business. Being male and not having one meant that you were either a clergyman or too young to grow it, none of which is the case. In fact, considering what we get to see of Figueltach's personality and bravado, he should have be the most likely character to have cultivated a long, badass beard rather than the opposite.
- Salietti produces a Tarot deck to deceive Baron Figueltach. In real life, first records of Tarot in Europe are from around 1450, almost a century and half after the time the novel is set.
- In order to move a statue, Grimpow thinks to move it as in a Greco-Roman wrestling waist lock. This follows the popular belief that Greco-Roman wrestling and its signature waist-based ruleset are actually Greco-Roman, which would make it believable that people from the Middle Ages know it. However, despite what its name could make you think, Greco-Roman wrestling was invented in the 1840s and its rules don't actually resemble any known form of ancient wrestling (actual Greek wrestling was more similar to our modern Catch Wrestling and its ramifications, with groundwork, pins and submissions).
- Philosopher's Stone: What the stone turns out to be.
- Sadly Mythtaken: The Santa Compaña, a wholly Spanish myth almost entirely limited to Galicia, is mentioned here among characters living in France. It's possibly that this is just a Translation Convention and the characters are meant to be talking about the Maisnie Hellequin or the Le Grand-Veneur, though.
- Worst Aid: When Kense suffers a seizure, Rinaldo makes sure that he doesn't swallow his tongue by grabbing it with his own fingers. Tongue-swallowing is basically an urban legend in real life; people suffering a seizure can bite their tongue, though, which is exactly the reason why you must never stick your fingers in their mouth, as the uncontrolled force they can exert with their jaws might perfectly amputate them.
The Witch of the Lineage contains examples of:
- Aerith and Bob: Compared to the first book, this one is a huge improvement in this field, with most character names being real and relatively period-appropriate. Still, there are oddities like Sofí (a phonetic spelling in modern Spanish of the correct name that would be Sophie).
- Artistic License – History:
- Historical character Guillaume de Nogaret is solely referred to as "Nogaret", which is a mistake in the vein of The Da Vinci Code: Nogaret was a French city, with the character's name meaning "William of Nogaret", so in the context of the story it would have been bizarre to call someone solely by his native city. Also, the real Guillaume died in 1313, while the story places his death in 1314, shortly before that of King Philip IV.
- The novel makes it look like the University of Paris was a completely secular institution, a place full of freethinking, atheism and potential heresy which the Church was badly wanting to shut down. In reality, there was no such ideological separation; the university was originally owned by the Notre-Dame cathedral, it had a prestigious faculty of theology (in fact, a long list of bishops, saints and even Popes studied there), and there was never a raid for heretics as portrayed in the novel, among other things because the very university was under the protection of the Church in the first place.
- Students of the University of the Paris had not only to wear black robes, but also to cut their hair in the tonsure style, while in the book the only uniform they use is a black cape.
- The novel follows the popular culture that burning witches at the stake was frequent throughout the entire Middle Ages, as it is apparently a common eventuality in the year the novel is set. In real life, the Inquisition of the time was mostly focused on heresy, not witchcraft; the latter was very rarely prosecuted, and generally only when it came associated to the former. Witch hunts in its most classical shape wouldn't start until more than a century later.
- When she enters the University of Paris disguised as a boy, she feels as if she had "conquered a space always forbidden to women". This is accurate in the sense that the University of Paris itself didn't allow women, but the sentence implies no university at the time did, which is wrong. The University of Bologna, in fact the oldest university in the world and rival to that of Paris at the time, allowed women to teach, like the famous Bettisia Gozzadini. Of course, as Sofi is illiterate, this could be chalked simply to her not knowing this.
- Continuity Snarl: Kôt states the Ouroboros group was re-created by Grimpow in Florence, just like the first Grimpow book had proposed. In this book, however, it turns out Anatol and Edmond already did it in Paris.
- Last-Name Basis: Guillaume de Nogaret's first name is not mentioned in the entire book, which is doubly weird given that Ábalos often uses Full-Name Basis for many characters.
