Jules Gabriel Verne was born on 8 February 1828 on Ile Feydeau, a small artificial island on the Loire River within the town of Nantes, in No. 4 Rue de Clisson, the house of his maternal grandmother Dame Sophie Allotte de la Fuye. His parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney originally from Provins, and Sophie Allote de la Fuye, a Nantes woman from a local family of navigators and shipowners, of distant Scottish descent. In 1829, the Verne family moved some hundred meters away to No. 2 Quai Jean-Bart, where Verne's brother Paul was born the same year. Three sisters, Anna, Mathilde, and Marie,...

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The story begins in May 1863, in the Lidenbrock house in Hamburg, Germany, with Professor Lidenbrock rushing home to peruse his latest purchase, an original runic manuscript of an Icelandic saga written by Snorri Sturluson (Snorre Tarleson in some versions of the story), "Heimskringla"; the chronicle of the Norwegian kings who ruled over Iceland.
While looking through the book, Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel find a coded note written in runic script along with the name of a 16th-century Icelandic...