The Folklore of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  She saw herself set her boots firmly on the turf, and then …

  … and then …

  … and then, like someone rising from the clouds of a sleep, she felt the deep, deep Time below her. She sensed the breath of the downs and the distant roar of ancient, ancient seas trapped in millions of tiny shells. She thought of Granny Aching, under the turf, becoming part of the chalk again, part of the land under wave. She felt as if huge wheels, of time and stars, were turning slowly around her.

  She opened her eyes and then, somewhere inside, opened her eyes again.

  She heard the grass growing, and the sound of worms below the turf. She could feel the thousands of little lives around her, smell all the scents on the breeze, and see all the shades of the night …

  The wheels of stars and years, of space and time, locked into place. She knew exactly where she was, and who she was, and what she was. [The Wee Free Men]

  However, even if you are born with an aptitude for magic, there are still skills to be learned, and it is not wise to try to learn witching all by yourself. Get one little thing wrong, and you’re stuck among dangers you don’t understand. Even if you make no mistakes, you’ll be desperately lonely. Unless you can meet people of your own sort, you may end up mad – or bad.

  Things aren’t so bad for boys who are potential wizards, since they can go to Unseen University. Occasionally, in those few times and places in the multiverse where girls have been allowed to study the same things as their brothers, there has been some talk of boarding schools for young witches, and even of co-educational establishments. But on the Disc there is nothing like that. When Miss Tick tells Tiffany that yes, there is indeed such a school – very magical, nowhere else quite like it – this is a trick or test. The true ‘school’, as Tiffany soon understands, is all around you, once you know how to open your eyes and then open them again. As for the detailed skills of the craft, they are passed on from elderly witches to young ones on a one-to-one basis, together with some very necessary guidance and protection. It is Miss Tick’s responsibility, as a secret witch-finder, to pick out girls with talent and make suitable arrangements for them.

  So when Tiffany was eleven, she left her home in the Chalk country and travelled to the mountains, where she went into service with Miss Level, partly as a maid and partly as an apprentice. She learned about herbs, and broomsticks, and tried patiently to make a shamble. She accompanied Miss Level round the villages and isolated farms doing medicine and midwifery, and learned that though a witch never expects payment and never asks for it, there is a constant interchange of gifts and favours. There was nothing romantic about this work, nothing dramatic, no magic potions to cure the sick in an instant. Witchcraft, said Miss Level, was mostly about helping people by doing quite ordinary things. This has been the task of the true Wise Woman in every universe, and we can assume (though evidence is lacking) that girls who became Wise Women on Earth learned their skills and duties by some similar informal apprenticeship.

  However, cures and advice are more likely to be accepted if they sound magical, as Tiffany learned. Miss Level had been carefully telling one family that their well was much too close to their privy, so the water was full of tiny, tiny creatures which were making the children sick. They listened politely, but did nothing. Then Granny Weatherwax visited them and told them the illness was caused by goblins who were attracted to the smell of the privy, and that very day the man of the house and his friends began digging a new well at the other end of the garden. A story gets things done.

  Yet there was part of Tiffany’s mind which hankered for power and drama and picturesque paraphernalia. This is a very common weakness in young witches, and Tiffany meets one group of girls who practise ‘The Higher MagiK’.

  ‘Magic with a K?’ said Tiffany. ‘MagiKkkk?’

  ‘That’s deliberate,’ said Annagramma coldly. ‘If we are to make any progress at all we must distinguish the Higher MagiK from the everyday sort.’

  ‘The everyday sort of magic?’ said Tiffany.

  ‘Exactly. None of that mumbling in hedgerows for us. Proper sacred circles, spells written down. A proper hierarchy, not everyone running around doing whatever they feel like. Real wands, not bits of grubby stick. Professionalism, with respect. Absolutely no warts. That’s the only way forward.’ [A Hatful of Sky]

  Annagramma has learned this approach from Mrs Letice Earwig, a tall thin witch who wears so much silver that she gleams, uses words like ‘avatar’ and ‘sigil’, and writes books. This has earned her Granny Weatherwax’s heartfelt contempt. ‘That’s just wizard magic with a dress on,’ and ‘She thinks you can become a witch by going shopping,’ are two of Granny’s milder comments.

  Annagramma runs a coven of young girls, whom she bullies and sneers at, and chivvies through complex ceremonies involving such things as the Wand of Air, the Cauldron of the Sea, the Shriven Chalice, the Circlet of Infinity. They all go in for robes and occult jewellery, and patronize the very expensive shop of Zakzak Stronginthearm, a dwarf craftsman who supplies everything the Higher MagiKkkkian might require: wands of metal or rare woods, elaborately pretty ready-made shambles, crystal balls, luxurious cloaks, star-spangled hats, rings, pendants, your personal grimoire (‘Book of Night’, or ‘Book of Shadows’) bound in heavy leather with an actively rolling eye on the cover.

  It is really remarkable how similar ideas spring up across the multiverse. On the Earth groups like this have become common over the past hundred years or so. There too, some of them insist on an eccentric spelling for what they do, calling it Magick, to make sure that nobody mistakes it for that boring old-fashioned folk magic. They go in for formal initiations, oaths, grades, and hierarchies, and their founders and leaders (generally men) are notably authoritarian. They take grandiose names for themselves, their organizations, their ritual ceremonies, and the objects used in ritual. And the Zakzaks of our world do very good business. Well, whatever … but one instinctively feels that Granny’s ‘every stick is a wand, every puddle is a crystal ball’ is closer to the truth. Or a truth, at least.

  ‘SEE ME’

  The most remarkable of Tiffany’s abilities was one which she ought really to have mentioned to Miss Tick, but she didn’t, being too young and inexperienced to know how unusual, and how risky, it was. Closing her eyes and concentrating, she would say ‘See me’. Then, reopening her eyes, she would find herself standing a few feet away from herself. She had walked out of her own body, and now her detached self could move around, looking at her physical self from every side. When she had seen all she wanted, she would say ‘See me not’, and the two selves were instantly reunited.

  As a child, Tiffany simply thought of this as a handy little trick to use if you didn’t have a proper mirror. She had no notion that it is the basis of Borrowing, that supreme skill of great witches. Still less did she suspect that if you just walk out of your body and leave it there, without taking proper precautions, there are creatures only too ready to move in and take control.

  This ability, or something very like it, has been observed elsewhere in the multiverse, though not under the deliberate control of those who have it. One form is the ‘Near Death Experience’, much discussed nowadays on the Earth. People who are semi-conscious from heart failure or anaesthetic, and almost on the point of death, feel the mind detaching itself from the inert body and floating upwards; they can watch the body from above, and see what is going on around it, but eventually are reunited with it and regain consciousness.

  Older Earthly sources speak of the soul, rather than the mind, separating itself from the sleeping body and wandering off on its own. According to folk tradition, it is possible for an observer to see this happening, for the soul emerges in visible form, as a small animal, an insect, or a puff of smoke. This is said to have happened once to King Guntram of the Franks, who ruled Burgundy from 561 to 592; the story was written down some two hundred years later.

  One day, Guntram felt tired while out hunting, and t
ook a nap under a tree, while a courtier kept watch. This man saw that while the king was asleep a little animal slithered out of his mouth and went down to a tiny brook, where it ran to and fro on the bank, looking for a way to cross. Amused at this, the courtier laid his sword across the brook. The little creature crossed at once, and disappeared into a hole on the opposite bank. After a bit, it returned across the sword bridge, and slipped back into the king’s mouth. Then Guntram woke up, and said to his companion, ‘I must tell you what a strange dream I’ve just had. I saw a very large, very wide river, and across it a great iron bridge had been built. I crossed the bridge, and went into a cave in the side of a towering mountain, and it was filled with treasure!’ Then the courtier told the king what had actually happened, and they decided to dig into the bank of the brook, and sure enough, there was a treasure buried there.

  It is important that no one should touch or shake or shift the unconscious body while its soul is away, because if the soul cannot find its way back, the person will die.

  MAKING A MYTH OF ONESELF

  Tiffany’s next post is as apprentice to an extremely odd – nay, terrifying – witch named Miss Eumenides Treason, one hundred and thirteen years old, quite blind, and quite deaf. Yet these disabilities scarcely bother her, because she is skilled at Borrowing and uses the eyes and ears of any nearby animal as if they were her own. On occasion, she even Borrows Tiffany’s eyes, which is rather irritating of her.

  Whereas Miss Tick is a stealth witch, Miss Treason flaunts witchery in every detail of her lifestyle. All witches like wearing black, but she has gone further; the walls and floors in her cottage are black, and so, of course, are her candles; she keeps black goats and black hens; even cheeses must be coated with black wax. Everything has been carefully crafted to match images stamped deeply into the human psyche by the force of narrativium, since it is her aim to turn herself into a myth, in life and in death. She knows exactly how to do it.

  Every witch has her particular skill, and Miss Treason’s is to deliver Justice. People would come to her from miles around with disputes about land, or cows, or rent, or legacies, and she would sit in judgement. So, how does the image fit the role?

  First, blindness. Everyone knows that when Justice is personified she wears a blindfold, and so does Miss Treason – a black one, naturally. So indeed does Blind Io, chief of the gods, who has blank skin where his eyes should be and an impressive number of detached eyeballs floating round him. It is not known whether Miss Treason is deliberately mocking him; it is not impossible, for witches don’t have much respect for gods. What is quite certain is that she strikes terror into the hearts of disputants when she removes the blindfold from her pearly grey eyes and prepares to give judgement, saying: ‘I have heard. Now I shall see. I shall see what is true.’ Her blind eyes seem to look right into the soul. People say if you lie to her, you’ll be dead in a week.

  Then there is her name, Eumenides, which she must have found in the pages of Chaffinch’s Ancient and Classical Mythology – one of her favourite books, crammed full with bookmarks. On the Earth, in Ancient Greece, this was the polite name for the Erinyes or Avenging Furies, terrifying goddesses whose function was to hound the guilty to death; it literally means ‘Sweet-Tempered Ladies’ and was meant to be flattering to them and reassuring to us, but nobody was ever fooled by that. Her chosen hobby is weaving, which (like the spinning of the Fates) is a traditional metaphor for the way supernatural beings decide human destinies. One tale from the Earth (the medieval Icelandic Njal’s Saga) tells how twelve valkyries were seen setting up a gruesome loom, just before the great Battle of Clontarf between Vikings and Irishmen in 1014. As they worked, they sang:

  We weave, we weave a web of war.

  Human guts our warp and weft,

  Skulls our loom-weights, spears our shuttles,

  Swords to beat the blood-stained cloth.

  We decide who lives, who dies.

  We weave, we weave a web of war.

  Next, her birds. At the time Tiffany was living with Miss Treason, she kept two ravens, which had once worked for Blind Io; one would sit on each side of her head on a wooden perch which fitted like a yoke across her shoulders. The effect was very witchy, and mythic too; no doubt she had been reading about the Norse god Odin and his ravens Huginn and Muninn (‘Thought’ and ‘Memory’), which perched on his shoulders and told him everything they had seen as they flew round Middle Earth.

  Before the ravens, she had kept a pet jackdaw. There are no links between jackdaws and Justice, but good precedents for their use as magical familiars. The medieval English chronicler William of Malmesbury wrote in his Gesta Regum Anglorum (1125) of a witch who had lived at Berkeley in Gloucestershire some sixty years before his time, in the year 1063. She was skilled in interpreting omens, and had a tame jackdaw as her very great favourite; one day, the bird chattered more loudly than usual, and she turned pale, knowing this was a warning that her own death was at hand. (A Discworld witch wouldn’t mind knowing this, but the Witch of Berkeley had made a pact with the Devil, so for her it was not good news.) In much more recent times, in the 1960s, to be precise, a well-known witch in the New Forest in Hampshire, Mrs Sybil Leek, would always appear in public with a tame jackdaw called Hotfoot Jackson perching on her shoulder. Very eye-catching, but (like Miss Treason) she did have to put up with mess down the back of her cloak.

  Myth-making is a communal activity, even if most people involved don’t see that that’s what they’re doing. It’s built up from fears, rumours, thrills and stories, all driven by powerful doses of narrativium. Miss Treason takes a keen interest in the process, since she has a reputation to keep up. She asks Tiffany:

  ‘Have you heard the stories about me, child?’ …

  ‘Er, that you have a demon in the cellar?’ Tiffany answered … ‘And you eat spiders? And get visited by kings and princes? And that any flower planted in your garden blooms black?’

  ‘Oh, do they say so?’ said Miss Treason, looking delighted. ‘I haven’t heard that last one. How nice. And did you hear that I walk around at night in the dark time of the year and reward those who have been good citizens with a purse of silver? But, if they have been bad, I slit open their bellies with my thumbnail like this?’

  Tiffany leaped backwards as a wrinkled hand twisted her round and Miss Treason’s yellow thumbnail scythed past her stomach. The old woman looked terrifying.

  ‘No! No, I haven’t heard that one,’ she gasped, pressing up against the sink.

  ‘What? And it was a wonderful story, with real historical antecedents!’ said Miss Treason, her vicious scowl becoming a smile. ‘And the one about me having a cow’s tail?’

  ‘A cow’s tail? No!’

  ‘Really? How very vexing … I fear the art of story-telling has got into a pretty bad way in these parts. I really shall have to do something.’ [Wintersmith]

  It is to be hoped that she did, for they are indeed splendid stories, and it would be a great pity if they were forgotten. Their historical antecedents have deep roots in the Scandinavian and German-speaking parts of the Earth. The cow’s tail is characteristic of elf-women in the mountain forests of Norway and Sweden. From in front, they look beautiful, and many a human huntsman or charcoal-burner has been seduced into making love with one of them. But if he gets a glimpse of her back, he will see either that it is hollow, mossy and rotten like an old tree-stump, or that it ends in a long, dirty cow’s tail. If he runs off in horror, she will chase him, and if she catches him she will tear him to bits. They are not to be trifled with, these forest elf-women.

  As for the stomach-slitting, here Miss Treason is surely thinking of some Discworld equivalent of a famous supernatural hag known as Frau Holle in Germany and Frau Perchte or Frau Berthe in Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland. Stories about her go back at least a thousand years. Some say she lives on a mountain peak, but others say up in the sky; when it snows in the human world everyone knows that she’s shaking out her feather beds until
the feathers drift about in the wind. In midwinter, during the Twelve Days of Christmas, she comes to earth and travels round the countryside, checking on whether children have been good and obedient, and whether the village girls have worked hard on the farms, and spun as much flax or wool as they should have done in the course of the year. Then comes Twelfth Night itself, sometimes called Perchtanacht and reckoned to be the last night of the year. At midnight she comes into every house. Those who have been good and done their work properly may find a silver coin in their shoes, or in the milking pail. But as for those who haven’t, she will slit their bellies open, remove the contents, and fill them up with chopped straw, pebbles and dirt. Then she sews them up again, using a ploughshare as a needle and an iron chain as thread.

  Another notion which Miss Treason picked up from the tales of Earth is that of the External Soul. A good example is the legendary Russian evil wizard Koshchei the Deathless, who placed his Life or Soul in an egg. The egg was inside a duck, and the duck was inside a hare, and the hare was lying in a great hollow log floating in a pond in a forest on an island far, far away from Koshchei’s palace. Miss Treason’s version is less complicated. She wears a heavy iron clock on her belt, and is always winding it up. There is a story in the villages that this clock is her heart, which she has used ever since her first heart died.

  ‘Miss Treason,’ said Tiffany severely, ‘did you make up the story about your clock?’

  ‘Of course I did! And it’s a wonderful bit of folklore, a real corker. Miss Treason and her clockwork heart! Might even become a myth, if I’m lucky. They’ll remember Miss Treason for thousands of years!’