The setting of Till We Have Faces must be inferred from tidbits sprinkled throughout the novel. The small, impoverished Kingdom of Glome lies on a plain irrigated by the Shennit River in the shadows of a rugged mountain range, somewhere north of the "Greeklands," and clearly beyond the boundaries of its linguistic domination, for they speak an unspecified vernacular language for which there appears to be yet no written form.