Where It All Goes Down
Ancient Bayern
We might start out in Ani's home kingdom of Kildenree, but the main part of our story takes place over the mountains and through the woods, in Bayern. In this magical land, everyone has dark hair and a different accent than in the blonde world of Kildenree.
Good luck finding either of these places on a map, though, since this book is firmly rooted in completely made up places. On the flip side though, with so much royalty and the like running things, The Goose Girl—and fairy tales in general—looks a lot like old timey Europe. We're talking palaces, overflowing markets, soldiers and such.
Despite this decidedly European atmosphere though, most fairy tales don't happen in a specific place or time, and The Goose Girl is no exception. So even though Ani is focused on what kind of accent is from Bayern, or what sort of hair is Kildenrean, both of these worlds are foreign to us. She has points of reference, but they don't mean a whole lot to us in their specifics—all we get is that there are differences between places that impact how Ani navigates them.
Given the chance, we'd gladly hop aboard a plane to a pleasantly comfortable medieval-European-ish setting where all our wishes came true. The only problem, of course, is that there are no planes in Bayern. Drat.