The rivers of Finnegans Wake

Anna Livia Plurabelle is a river — the Liffey. How many other rivers did Joyce let into her chapter? The measurement below.

1. The legend and the method

Of chapter eight of Book I — Anna Livia Plurabelle, two washerwomen gossiping over the Liffey — it is said that Joyce wove hundreds of the world's river names into it. I checked by machine: I collected 50,949 single-word river names (Natural Earth + Wikidata), discarded those that are frequent English words (top 20k of a frequency list — out go Orange and Snake), and counted matches in two modes: an exact word of the text, and a name of ≥6 letters hidden inside a longer compound. The chapter is delimited by text anchors (“tell me all about Anna Livia” … “hitherandthithering waters of”).

2. The legend confirmed

River-name density in ALP: 32.77/1,000 words against 8.57/1,000 in the rest of the book — 3.8× more. In the chapter alone (7,904 words) flow 222 different rivers matched exactly, among them: adda, aire, aisch, aisne, amstel, animas, annan, anon, aubette, bana, bann, bheri, bina, bloodvein, blyth, boyarka, braye, breeches, brosna, bubye, bushman, camac, camlin, chanza, chariton, chattahoochee, cheb, chir, cockle, collin, colo, concord, cree, darent, dargle, dasht, deel, deua, dinkel, doon, douro, durance, ebro, elster, embarras…

In the whole book: 905 rivers in 1,415 occurrences (exact) + 596 names hidden in compounds (669 occurrences). A methodological note: despite the filters some hits are homonyms (a river name that is also a surname or a town), so I treat the counts as an upper bound — but the ALP-vs-rest contrast is robust to this, since the noise spreads evenly.

3. The most frequent rivers of the text (exact matches)

taff (×20), ware (×18), shee (×17), muta (×13), dour (×8), rere (×8), rede (×7), pease (×7), chee (×7), lucan (×7), mand (×7), gander (×7), belles (×6), boyne (×6), thon (×6), liffey (×6), anon (×6), strait (×6), erse (×5), sall (×5), brune (×5), hies (×5), runes (×5), roche (×5), alum (×5), poplar (×5), fowl (×5), bourne (×5).

In the lead: taff — the Welsh river Taff, in the Wake also a twin's name (Taff opposite Butt); then boyne, bann, camac, brosna — rivers of Ireland.

4. Rivers hidden inside compounds

• whitehorsed — inside it flows the whitehorse (×1)
• waterhouse's — inside it flows the waterhouse (×1)
• coldstreams — inside it flows the coldstream (×1)
• chattertone — inside it flows the chatterton (×1)
• patrecknocksters — inside it flows the knockster (×1)
• irrawaddyng — inside it flows the irrawaddy (×1)
• mountsackvilles — inside it flows the sackville (×1)
• babilonias — inside it flows the babilonia (×1)
• wellesleyan — inside it flows the wellesley (×1)
• blanchardstown — inside it flows the blanchard (×1)
• margareena — inside it flows the margaree (×3)
• margareen — inside it flows the margaree (×2)
• seaforths — inside it flows the seaforth (×1)
• fitzpatricks — inside it flows the patricks (×1)
• peepestrella — inside it flows the estrella (×1)
• graveller — inside it flows the gravelle (×1)
• secheressa — inside it flows the secheres (×1)
• gargantast — inside it flows the garganta (×1)
• wildemanns — inside it flows the wildeman (×1)
• lovasteamadorion — inside it flows the amadorio (×1)
• retourneys — inside it flows the retourne (×1)
• hellicott's — inside it flows the ellicott (×1)

5. Where the book flows (chart + slider)

River-name density per 1,000 words across 100 windows of the text. The grey band is the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter — the spike is visible to the naked eye.