The Folklore of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘It likes crisps,’ volunteered Rincewind, and then added, ‘Well, that’s a bit strong. It eats crisps.’

  ‘What about people?’

  ‘Oh, and people. About fifteen so far, I think.’ [Sourcery]

  Fifteen, eh?

  But it would be unfair to take leave of the Luggage without any mention of the gentler, more domestic side of its nature. During a brief return to its native country, described in Interesting Times, it gallantly rescued a rather charming trunk with inlaid lid and dainty feet (with red toenails) from the unwelcome attentions of three big, coarse cases covered in studded leather. Romance blossomed. Mysterious sounds of sawing and hammering were heard by night on a hillside where pear trees grew. And when the Luggage reappeared it – or shall we say he? – was followed by the dainty-footed Luggage, and then, in descending order of size, four little chests, the smallest being about the size of a lady’s handbag. But the Luggage could not deny its inner calling. After one or two sad backward glances, or what might have been glances if it had had eyes, it cantered away through the dimensions, still following Rincewind.

  Chapter 8

  THE WITCHES OF

  LANCRE

  WHY THREE? WHY ‘WYRD’?

  THE GREATEST CONCENTRATION of natural magical talent in the Discworld is found in the Ramtop Mountains, especially in the small kingdom of Lancre. There have been witches there for generations, remembered to this day with fondness and fear. And still one can hear the age-old rallying call, as an eldritch voice shrieks through a thunderstorm, ‘When shall we three meet again?’ To which, after a pause, another replies in far more ordinary tones, ‘Well, I can do next Tuesday.’

  Which is all very well, but it does raise questions. Lancre witches normally work alone, each having her own personal approach to her craft. So why do these particular witches (Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick) often meet as a threesome? Why is the first account of their deeds entitled Wyrd Sisters, when they are not sisters? And isn’t wyrd a weird way to spell weird, even if they are weird?

  As with so many other things, it’s all down to Will Shakespeare. His impact on the universe certainly stretches as far as Lancre.

  In Will Shakespeare’s Macbeth, there is a trio of secret, black and midnight hags who forgather in a thunderstorm on a blasted heath, boil up unappetizing brews in a cauldron, and utter tricky prophecies which shape the destinies of kings. The stage directions are quite clear as to what they are (‘Thunder and lightning; enter three witches’), and the text is equally clear as to their name. They are the Weird Sisters. That is what Macbeth calls them, and what they call themselves. The Weird Sisters.

  Being strong individualists, it would never occur to Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat to give themselves a collective name. But the book does. Being receptive to inspiration, it calls them Wyrd Sisters.

  That, actually, is how Shakespeare ought to have spelled the name of his own three witches, since it is their true and original title. It doesn’t mean they were peculiar or crazy. It is the Anglo-Saxon wyrd, a word meaning Fate or Destiny, which is now completely forgotten in England, but is still sometimes heard in Scotland, in encouraging remarks such as ‘Weel, laddie, ye maun e’en dree your weird’ (roughly, ‘That’s your bad luck, son, and you’ll just have to put up with it’). Shakespeare’s witches could foretell, and probably direct, your destiny.

  Shakespeare found their name in the book where he first read about Macbeth’s career, Raphael Holinshed’s History of Scotland (1577). Holinshed was too cautious to commit himself as to what exactly the three women on the heath can have been. He wrote:

  The common opinion was, that these three women were either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophecie by their necromanticall science, because euerie thing came to pass as they had spoken.

  Goddesses, nymphs, fairies, witches, necromancers, prophets? You can take your pick. But there is no doubt that they had power.

  But why, in both universes, are there precisely three of them? It is of course true that this suits the theatre, as the great playwright Hwel remarks when he looks through a script which, emanating from the mighty power-source of Shakespeare’s mind, has drifted over to the Discworld without too much damage.

  There were, he had to admit, some nice touches. Three witches was good. Two wouldn’t be enough, four would be too many. They could be meddling with the destinies of mankind and everything. Lots of smoke and green light. You could do a lot with three witches. It was surprising no one had thought of it before. [Wyrd Sisters]

  But the true reason lies far, far deeper. Three has always been an important number in stories, and in magic. All good things come in threes, and all bad things too. Which is why the Ancient Greeks and Romans spoke of three Fates who held in their hands the thread of each person’s life: Clotho spun it on her distaff, Lachesis measured it, and in due time the dreaded Atropos (‘She who can’t be turned aside’) snipped it with the shears of death. They were usually said to be old women, looking much alike, except that the first two wore white robes and the third, guess who, black.

  Norsemen too believed in goddesses of destiny, the Norns. According to one poem there were just three, whose names were Urd–r, Verd–andi, and Skuld – meaning ‘what’s-happened-already’, ‘what’s-happening-now’, and ‘what’s-bound-to-happen’. But others said there were many of them, and that they came to every child when it was born, to shape its life.

  In southern Europe people thought that there were supernatural women who bestowed wishes and gifts on newborn babies. They were a kind of fairy, but it was most unwise to use that word – better to refer tactfully to ‘Ladies from outside’, or ‘Ladies who must not be named’. They were the original fairy godmothers. In Greece and the Balkans, they would arrive on the third night after the birth, and there were three of them. Everyone went to bed early that night, the dogs would be chained up, the door of the house left unlocked. The baby’s cot would be placed near the icon in the main room, and beside it a table with three low stools for the Ladies. There would be a candle burning, and heaps of food – bread and wine, fruit, nuts, honey-cakes. Nobody could enter the room till morning, when the midwives and female relatives would eat up the goodies themselves, for the Ladies had already magically taken what they wanted of them during the night.

  On one occasion (as recounted in Wyrd Sisters), Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat saved a baby’s life and appointed themselves his godmothers. In normal circumstances, they would certainly have appreciated a cosy midnight feast, if one had been on offer. But the circumstances were far from normal, and they had to bestow their gifts from a distance.

  Magrat sighed.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘if we are his godmothers, we ought to have given him three gifts. It’s traditional.’

  ‘What are you talking about, girl?’

  ‘Three good witches are supposed to give the baby three gifts. You know, like good looks, wisdom and happiness.’ Magrat pressed on defiantly. ‘That’s how it used to be done in the old days.’

  ‘Oh, you mean gingerbread cottages and all that,’ said Granny dismissively. ‘Spinning wheels and pumpkins and pricking your finger on rose thorns and similar. I could never be having with all that.’

  In the end, however, Granny agreed. Each gave her gift separately, and these gifts shaped the child’s destiny, for, as the Anglo-Saxons used to say, Wyrd bid– swid–ost, ‘Fate is the strongest’, and Wyrd bid– full aræd, ‘Fate is inflexible.’

  As a result of this episode and of the events in Witches Abroad, Fairy Godmothers are officially defined in the Discworld Companion as ‘a specialized form of witch with particular responsibility for the life of one individual or a group of individuals’.

  MAIDEN, MOTHER, CRONE

  When Magrat got married, she gave up witching for a while. This caused problems for the other two, because not only is thre
e a good number for witches, but it has to be the right sort of three. The right sort of types. Nanny Ogg brooded on the matter:

  As a witch, she naturally didn’t believe in occult nonsense of any sort. But there were one or two truths down below the bedrock of the soul which had to be faced, and right in among them was this business of, well, the maiden, the mother and the … other one.

  Of course, it was nothing but an old superstition and belonged to the unenlightened days when ‘maiden’ or ‘mother’ or … the other one … encompassed every woman over the age of twelve or so, except maybe for nine months of her life.

  Even so … it was an old superstition – older than books, older than writing – and beliefs like that were heavy weights on the rubber sheet of human experience, tending to pull people into their orbits.

  They needed to be three again. [Maskerade]

  Nobody would dream of arguing with Nanny on a point like this. The Discworld is about what people believe is true. So if Nanny says it’s a truth down below the bedrock of her soul that three witches must be of different ages, then – on the Discworld – it is. If she says that it’s a superstition older than books, older than writing, then – on the Discworld – it is.

  But on Earth it’s not. It’s just over one hundred years old, actually. Will Shakespeare’s witches were all the same age. So were the three Fates, the three Norns, the three Graces, the three Mothers in early Britain, the three War Goddesses in Ireland, and other female trios in old mythologies.

  It was in 1903 that a Cambridge scholar, Jane Ellen Harrison, decided that all the many goddesses in ancient religions could be tidily sorted out into three aspects of one great Earth Goddess: the Maiden, the Mother, and a third she did not name. She was mainly interested in the first two; so was her colleague Sir James Frazer (he of The Golden Bough), who thought they were a mother-and-daughter pair like Demeter and Persephone in Greece.

  The first writer to pay much attention to the third one was the magician Aleister Crowley, who called her ‘the crone’ and identified her with the sinister Hecate, a Greek goddess of darkness and black magic. He seems to have loathed her. In his novel Moonchild in 1921, he wrote:

  Artemis [the moon goddess] is unassailable, a being fine and radiant; Hecate is the crone, a woman past all hope of motherhood, her soul black with envy and hatred of happier mortals; the woman in the fullness of life is the sublime Persephone.

  And then the idea took root in the mind of the poet Robert Graves, and grew into his book The White Goddess (1948), the picture of a lovely, cruel threefold deity who brings both life and death, inspiration and despair. Her third aspect is the crone, the hag, the destroyer, but beyond the pain she represents there is a promise of reward and renewal, so she is not to be seen as evil. This powerful image which Graves created is now firmly imprinted on the minds of modern occultists on Earth, where the trio of identical figures which Shakespeare knew has faded away, morphing into the sharply differentiated group of Maiden, Mother, and Crone.

  But if Nanny Ogg is right (and she always is) it all began on Discworld way back in the mists of time. There is leakage between universes.

  So she and Granny Weatherwax had to find some way of setting up a threesome of the right type, to spread the load. They began by recruiting shy young Agnes Nitt (also known, in the recesses of her own mind, as Perdita) to replace Magrat and carry out the traditional tasks of the Maiden, which consist mainly of fetching the tea and getting bullied. But then Magrat had a baby, and so would be qualified to return as Mother. This, however, is Nanny Ogg’s natural role, seeing as she has had fifteen children, and revels in an ever-growing horde of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In literal years, Nanny belongs to the same generation as Granny, but in these matters it is not literal facts that count. It is no accident that her cottage is called Tir Nani Ogg, which, as Tiffany Aching rightly suspects, means ‘The Land of the Ever-Young’ (Tir nan Og) in the ancient Celtic speech which the Nac Mac Feegles brought to the Discworld – and not, regrettably, ‘Nanny Ogg’s Place’ [Wintersmith].

  It is understandable that when it seemed that Granny might be about to withdraw from witching, Nanny disliked the consequences for herself: ‘Can’t say I fancy being a crone. I ain’t the right shape and anyway I don’t know the sound they make.’

  So, for the present at least, the threesome is a quartet, and who-stands-for-what still has to be sorted out. Nevertheless, Granny and Nanny have grown into their roles during the course of the series: Nanny is the notionally soft big-hearted one, an expert on midwifery, while Granny is the one you will, with some trepidation, call in when death is in the air.

  BORROWING IS NOT SHAPE-CHANGING

  Granny Weatherwax is the most skilful Borrowing Witch in all Lancre. While her body lies cold and rigid in her bed, her mind goes off and borrows the consciousness of any bird or animal she chooses. Steering it gently, she sees with its eyes, feels its pleasures and fears and appetites, absorbs any knowledge it has. In due course she guides it into her bedroom, and quietly slips out of its mind. Then she has a short lie-down, just to get used to the feel of her own body again. And then, since things have to balance, for the next few days she will put out some food for the creature whose mind she entered.

  She is so skilled that she has even Borrowed a swarm of bees:

  ‘She’s going to swank about this for weeks,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘No one’s ever done it with bees. Their mind’s everywhere, see? Not just in one bee. In the whole swarm.’

  ‘I done it with beezzz! No one can do it with beezzz, and I done it! You endzzz up with your mind all flying in different directionzzz! You got to be good to do it with beezzz!’ [Lords and Ladies]

  Which also goes to show that some of what you’ve Borrowed stays with you for a while, such as, in this case, a certain confusion in the vocal cords, plus a need for a bunch of flowers, a pot of honey, and someone to sting. The bees themselves – or the owl, bat, hare, or whatever – remain almost unaware that a human mind has been riding them. At least, that is how it should be. If someone ruthless does it, an Elf Queen for example, she goes through the animal’s mind like a chainsaw, leaving it half crazed.

  There are dangers, of course. No magical procedure is without risks. A young inexperienced witch with a natural talent can become so intoxicated by the joy of Borrowing that she sinks too deep in, and stays there. So can an old one, come to that. For years Nanny Ogg used to put out lumps of fat and bacon rind for a bluetit that she was sure was old Granny Postalute, who went out Borrowing and never came back. Even Granny Weatherwax knows that she must be careful. It’s addictive, like a drug.

  There is also the practical problem that someone might mistake your body for a corpse, and pop it into a coffin before you can get back. To avoid this embarrassment, Granny Weatherwax always holds, in her rigid hands, a small card which says I ATE’NT DEAD.

  Not all Discworld witches are able, or willing, to Borrow, while on Earth the skill is almost unknown. There, one of the very few accounts of what appears to be a Borrowing Witch comes from St Briavels in Gloucestershire, and was reported in the journal Folk-Lore in 1902. There was a girl there who, for some reason, had to share a bed one night with a certain old woman and her daughter.

  During the night she happened to wake, and was alarmed to feel how very cold the old woman was. She shook her, but in vain. So she then woke the daughter, crying, ‘I do believe your mother’s dead!’ – ‘Dead?’ laughed the daughter. ‘Her bain’t dead, her be out and about now!’

  Shape-changing witches, on the other hand, are extremely common in the lore of this world. The difference is that whereas a Borrower sends her separated mind to ‘ride’ in an animal (which has its own real existence, before, during and after the process), the shape-changer changes herself entirely, body and mind together, into the appearance of an animal. There is no real animal there at all, simply the transformed witch.

  Witches of the Earth could turn into any animal they wanted, but hares s
eem to have been the favourites, with cats a close second. Being a hare was especially good fun because it gave them the chance to infuriate huntsmen. Stories about this were told throughout Britain well into the twentieth century, for instance one which was collected by members of a local Women’s Institute for their book It Happened in Hampshire (1937):

  When I was a boy, they did say there was a woman over to Breamore that could turn herself to a hare up there on the Downs. If the dogs did press her too much she could turn herself back again and they wouldn’t see nothing but a woman combing her hair. One day the dogs were after her, just as she was getting near her cottage. She did shoot through the keyhole, but they were after her. The children cried out, ‘Run, Granny, run! or the dogs’ll have ’ee.’ But her was up on the top of the old brick oven so they never had her. Whether ’twas true or whether it wasn’t, that is what I did hear when I was a boy.

  The witch-hare did not always escape. If the hounds were particularly fast, or if the huntsman was a good shot with a bullet made from a silver sixpence, she might get bitten or shot in the rump as she bolted indoors. And next day everyone would see that she was limping badly.

  People on the Discworld have heard about this somehow, and those who do not understand Granny Weatherwax sometimes think this is what she gets up to. Thatcher the carter, for instance:

  ‘Cor, she frightens the life out of me, her. The way she looks right through you. I wouldn’t say a word against her, mark you, a fine figure of a woman, but they do say she creeps around the place o’ nights, as a hare or a bat or something. Changes her shape and all. Not that I believes a word of it, but old Weezen over in Slice told me once he shot a hare in the leg one night and next day she passed him on the lane and said “Ouch” and gave him a right ding across the back of his head.’ [Lords and Ladies]

  In Equal Rites, there is an argument on this point between Esk, an intelligent little girl, and her brothers Gulta and Cern: