Golgafrincham is a planet in the Milky Way galaxy and formerly home to the Golgafrinchan race. It has an ancient and mysterious history, rich in legend, red, and occasionally green with the blood of those who sought in times gone by to conquer her; a land of parched and barren landscapes, of sweet and sultry air heady with the scent of the perfumed springs that trickle over its hot and dusty rocks and nourish the dark and musty lichens beneath; a land of fevered brows and intoxicated imaginings, particularly amongst those who taste the lichens; a land also of cool and shaded thoughts amongst those who have learned to forswear the lichens and find a tree to sit beneath; a land also of steel and blood and heroism; a land of the body and of the spirit.
This is its history. And in all this ancient and mysterious history, the most mysterious figures of all are without doubt those of the Great Circling Poets of Arium. One of their descendants managed to persuade an entire useless third of their population to relocate, and the other two-thirds were then wiped out by a disease. The planet is now mostly uninhabited.