The Folklore of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  To return to the early kings of Ankh. Theirs was a Golden Age, from which little remains – some well-built ancient sewers, a few ruined walls, a worm-eaten throne, and, if legend can be believed, a very special Sword. Nobody has set eyes on it for centuries, and many think it must be lost.

  And yet, there are always rumours. Although they are so proud of being modern and living in an Age of Reason, the citizens of Ankh-Morpork have surprisingly romantic imaginations. Their minds are littered with mangled myths and fragmented fairy tales. Deep down, they feel sure that one day a long-lost heir will turn up, brandishing the Sword and displaying a birthmark, to claim the throne. He will right all wrongs, and the Golden Age will return.

  Since the rules of fairytale narrative are known to every child in the multiverse (even in worlds where the books of Grimm and Andersen are not to be found), the people of Ankh-Morpork naturally assume that the heir will have begun life as a humble swine-herd, and/or revived a princess who has been asleep for a hundred years, and/or proved how royal he is by sleeping on a huge pile of mattresses and a few very small peas. His hands will have sensational, but highly specialized, healing powers, though there appears to be some uncertainty about what exactly it is that he cures. Some citizens think a true king can cure baldness by his touch, while the aristocratic Lord Rust mentions dandruff, and scrofula, a disease of the throat glands. On Earth, it was definitely scrofula, which was therefore known as ‘king’s evil’. Several kings of England, from the time of Edward the Confessor to the end of the Stuart dynasty, made a point of ceremonially touching sufferers; so did the kings of France.

  Best of all, if the heir to a kingdom encounters a dragon he will most certainly slay it. As Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler says to the sceptical Vimes:

  ‘You’ve got no romance in your soul, Captain. When a stranger comes into the city under the thrall of the dragon and challenges it with a glittery sword, weeell, there’s only one outcome, ain’t there? It’s probably destiny.’ [Guards! Guards!]

  In the same way, people know just how things will go if a dragon appears. It will fly around, flaming and ravening; it will want a pile of gold to sleep on; it will expect people to give it virgins to eat, chained to rocks; it will speak, quite likely in riddles; but, it will have one vulnerable spot, which a good archer can hit as it flies overhead. That’s what always happened in the old stories, and so that’s what will happen again.

  These expectations are moulded by all the dragon-lore which has been drifting from one universe to another from the dawn of time. There is no mythology in any world which doesn’t have dragons in it, together with gods or heroes to kill them. The tales known in Ankh-Morpork are just as famous on Earth. There, it was the Ancient Greek hero Perseus who was the first to rescue a virgin who had been left chained to a rock for a dragon to eat; her name was Andromeda. Later, St George did the same, though he, being a Saint, didn’t marry the girl. Several great warriors of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian legend – Beowulf, for instance, and the two Volsung heroes, Sigmund and Sigurd (whom Germans call Siegfried) – slew dragons which lay on hoards of treasure. One of these, the one named Fafnir which Sigurd killed, did indeed speak, and could ask and answer riddles.

  As for the one vulnerable spot, this is sometimes on the belly, as it was with Fafnir, and with Smaug in the tale of Bilbo the hobbit. More often, it is when a dragon opens his mouth that he becomes vulnerable to a well-aimed spear or arrow going down his gullet and into his vitals; this technique was pioneered by the Babylonian god Marduk, who destroyed the primeval dragoness Tiamat by hurling deadly winds down her throat. And then there is the sad case of the Yorkshire Dragon of Wantley, whom More of More Hall kicked in the arsehole with a spiked boot:

  ‘Murder, murder!’ the dragon cried,

  ‘Alack, alack for grief!

  Had you but missed that place, you could

  Have done me no mischief!’

  Then his head he shaked, trembled and quaked,

  And down he laid and cried;

  First on one knee then on back tumbled he,

  So groaned, kicked, shat, and died.12

  SOME MORE LEGENDS

  Many town-dwellers have, lurking in the corners of their minds, various half-remembered tales and no-longer-properly-believed beliefs which pop up again in the right circumstances. The tale of the shifting shop, for instance:

  Glod looked up at a blank wall.

  ‘I knew it!’ he said. ‘Didn’t I say? Magic! How many times have we heard this story? There’s a mysterious shop no one’s ever seen before, and someone goes in and buys some rusty old curio, and it turns out to—’

  ‘Glod—’

  ‘—some kind of talisman or a bottle full of genie, and then when there’s trouble they go back and the shop—’

  ‘Glod—?’

  ‘—has mysteriously disappeared and gone back to whatever dimension it came from— yes, what is it?’

  ‘You’re on the wrong side of the road. It’s over here.’ [Soul Music]

  But in fact Glod was right. This shop was magic, and contained, among other things, a flute which you mustn’t blow unless you want to be knee-deep in rats, a trumpet which can make the world end and the sky fall down, and a gong which can make seven hundred and seventy-seven skeletal warriors spring up out of the earth. Two out of the three would work on Earth too. Not the gong, since according to Greek myth, the correct way to make warriors spring up out of the earth is to sow the ground with dragon’s teeth, as the heroes Cadmus and Jason did. But the Bible does mention a Last Trump with which, according to prophecy, an angel will announce that Doomsday has come; and the flute is clearly a pair to the fife with which the Pied Piper of Hamlin summoned rats.

  The Hamlin story is a fine example of the weird power of narrativium. It seems reasonably certain that something did happen in the German town of Hamlin in 1284, something involving a stranger and the children of the town, and that everyone found it very upsetting. There are sober, reliable chronicles, written less than a hundred years after the event, which declare that someone marched into the town on 26 June in 1284 and marched away with 130 of its children. But they do not say anything about rats, or a pipe, or curiously coloured clothes. In fact, there’s no magic involved at all. He marches in, he marches away, taking the children … that’s all there is to it, at first.

  But that won’t do. Surely, people thought, something so terrible as the loss of all those children must have more to it than that. It must be due to sorcery, or a punishment for some sin – or both. Now, it was widely believed throughout Europe that some men had an uncanny power over snakes, or rats, or mice; they would summon the vermin by playing on a flute or pipe, and then lead them into deep water or order them to leap into a bonfire, and so destroy them all. Perhaps a man who could lure rats could also lure children? Could one of these legendary ratcatchers have come to Hamlin in great-great-grandfather’s time? Could something have angered him? Maybe the townsfolk tried to cheat him of his pay, and he took his revenge?

  And so the story of the Pied Piper was born. Back in 1284, people said, the town had been overrun with rats, until a stranger arrived, proclaiming himself a ratcatcher. He was dressed in a multi-coloured coat and carried a small fife, so they called him the Pied Piper, and promised him a great deal of money if he would help them. As soon as he started playing rats came running out of every house, and followed him as he marched out of town. He led them down to the river Weser and waded in; they followed, and drowned. But then the citizens regretted having promised so much money, so they made excuses not to pay, and he went off in a furious rage. On 26 June he returned, this time dressed as a hunter. Again he played his fife, but this time it was children who came running to him, and he led them out of the town, where they disappeared with him into a cave in a mountain, and were never seen again – though some said they came out alive, hundreds of miles away, in Transylvania.

  By the middle of the sixteenth century this had become the official explanatio
n. The Mayor had the entire story illustrated in stained-glass windows in the main church; a new city gate erected in 1556 carried an inscription stating that it was put up ‘272 years after the sorcerer abducted 130 children’; another inscription on the City Hall commemorated ‘130 children lost by a piper inside a mountain’.

  Of course, there are always some people who prefer a rational explanation to a magical one. With the Hamlin story, it’s not difficult to think of something that could fit, and many modern commentators have offered suggestions. There were wars going on in thirteenth-century Germany, so maybe a recruiting sergeant passed through the town and led away 130 young men, and maybe they were all killed in battle. Or maybe the date is wrong, and the story really recalls how friars came preaching wild sermons to get youngsters to join the so-called Children’s Crusade to Jerusalem in 1212; they never got there, and those who did not die on the road ended up as slaves. Or maybe it refers to the forced emigration of local families to colonize new territories far away. For example, Bishop Bruno of Olmütz recruited families from Lower Saxony to build up a German population in his diocese in Bohemia; a comparison of city records in Hamlin and Olmütz reveals a startling agreement in the family names in each place, which bears out the rumour that the lost children of Hamlin reappeared safe and sound in Transylvania.

  Be that as it may, it’s the rats, the pipe, and the pied coat that we remember now. And only a beastly spoilsport would point out that rats can swim.

  As for drums …

  There was even an Ankh-Morpork legend, wasn’t there, about some old drum in the Palace or somewhere that was supposed to bang itself if an enemy fleet was seen sailing up the Ankh? The legend had died out in recent centuries, partly because this was the Age of Reason and also because no enemy fleet could sail up the Ankh without a gang of men with shovels going in front. [Soul Music]

  There is a curiously close parallel here with the patriotic English legend of Drake’s Drum. After the great Elizabethan seaman Sir Francis Drake died off Panama in 1595 a drum painted with his coat of arms was brought back to his home at Buckland Abbey in Devon, and is still kept there. It is traditionally believed to have come from the ship on which he had once sailed round the world. In 1895, for the three-hundredth anniversary of the hero’s death, Sir Henry Newbolt wrote a vigorous poem telling how Drake on his deathbed promised that if the drum was struck when England was in danger, he would return to save the country once again, as he had done when the Spanish Armada came.

  Drake he was a Devon man an’ ruled the Devon seas,

  (Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)

  Rovin’ tho’ his death fell, he went wi’ heart at ease,

  An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.

  ‘Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,

  Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;

  If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,

  An’ drum them up the Channel, as we drummed them long ago.’

  In 1916, when England was at war, a poet named Alfred Noyes gave this story an even stronger patriotic twist. Writing an article in The Times about submarine warfare, he declared that Devon fishermen believed that the drum had sounded of its own accord in times of crisis, and that Drake would always hear and answer its call. It had been heard when Nelson’s fleet went to meet the French at Trafalgar, and again in that very year of 1916 before the naval battle of Jutland in the North Sea. And this, the fishermen said, showed that Drake had returned to inspire Nelson and Admiral Jellicoe and guide them to victory. Whether Noyes really had heard Devon fishermen saying this, or whether he made it up himself, hardly matters. It’s folklore now. And now people say Drake’s drum was heard in 1940 at the evacuation of Dunkirk.

  The citizens of Ankh-Morpork show in their legends an appreciation of virtue which is rarely evident in their lives. They can in fact be downright sentimental. Take the story of the famous dog Gaspode – not to be confused with the mangy, flea-ridden speaking cur of the same name, who was simply called after him. The reason the famous Gaspode is famous is his devotion to his master.

  ‘It was years and years ago. There was this ole bloke in Ankh who snuffed it, and he belonged to one of them religions where they bury you after you’re dead, an’ they did, and he had this ole dog—’

  ‘Called Gaspode?’

  ‘Yeah, an’ this ole dog had been his only companion, and after they buried the man he lay down on his grave, and howled and howled for a couple of weeks. Growled at everybody who came near. An’ then died.’ [Moving Pictures]

  Strangely, there are two cities on Earth – Edinburgh and Tokyo – where almost the same story is told, the main difference being that the dog survives for many years, fed by passers-by, though still faithfully grieving. In Edinburgh, this model of doggy devotion is a terrier called Greyfriars Bobby, after the graveyard where his master, a night-watchman called John Gray, was buried in 1858, and where there is now a statue of him (the dog, that is, not John Gray). He lived on for fourteen years; some say he spent all day at his master’s grave, but others say he was regularly fed in a nearby restaurant. When he died, a place was found for him near the entrance of Greyfriars Kirkyard, though not actually in consecrated ground. The stone is inscribed: ‘Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all.’

  In Tokyo, the faithful dog, named Hachi-koh, used to go daily to Shibuya Station to meet his master, a professor, when he got off the train on his return from work. The professor died in 1925, but the dog lived on for ten years more, loyally meeting the train every day at the usual time, and resisting all attempts to re-home him. A statue of him was set up in the station even in his lifetime, and a special section of the concourse was set aside as his home; his stuffed body is now in the Natural Science Museum in Tokyo, and his statue is always garlanded with flowers on the anniversary of his death.

  What Gaspode – the modern, mangy, flea-bitten Gaspode – would make of these stories is not hard to guess, considering his cynical ideas about his famous namesake:

  ‘That’s very sad,’ said Victor.

  ‘Yeah. Everyone says it demonstrates a dog’s innocent and undyin’ love for ’is master,’ said Gaspode, spitting the words out as if they were ashes.

  ‘You don’t believe that, then?’

  ‘Not really. I b’lieve any bloody dog will stay still an’ howl when you’ve just lowered the gravestone on his tail,’ said Gaspode.

  The modern Gaspode takes good care to keep his skills hidden, which is relatively easy since most people refuse to believe that any dog can talk. Even so, rumours get around. William de Worde, editor of the Ankh-Morpork Times, who is professionally inclined to scepticism, struggles (in vain) against that strange phenomenon, the urban myth:

  A couple of months ago someone had tried to hand William the old story of there being a dog in the city that could talk. It was the third time this year. William had explained that it was an urban myth. It was always the friend of a friend who had heard the talk, and it was never anyone who had seen the dog … There seemed to be no stopping that kind of story. People swore there was some long-lost heir to the throne of Ankh living incognito in the town. William certainly recognized wishful thinking when he heard it. [The Truth]

  Alas for William, who has chosen the wrong city in which to be an enlightened thinker …

  Meanwhile, other people, even more cynical, know how to take a legend and turn it into a nice little earner. One is the con-man known as the Amazing Maurice (who may in fact, according to rumour, be a remarkably cunning cat). He travels from town to town with his gang of Educated Rodents, who infiltrate the buildings. A musical confederate then undertakes, for a good fee, to summon them with his magic pipe and lead them all far, far away. It has always worked. Here, we know this as a rather inverted version of the Pied Piper story.

  TREACLE MINES

  Embedded in place-names, lurking like hidden diamonds, are precious traces of past history and traditions. The
re is, for example, a street in Ankh-Morpork called Treacle Mine Road, running from Misbegot Bridge to Easy Street. It takes its name from the treacle mines which used to be worked in this area, which are ancient, very ancient indeed. The deepest levels contain the remnants of pig-treacle measures that are estimated to be 500,000 years old, intermingled with basalt slabs carved with archaic trollish pictograms. The mines were abandoned many years ago, and most people believe that this was because they were exhausted. However, when some deep-down dwarfs (grags) bought property on that street and began mining below it, for reasons of their own (as told in Thud!), they reopened old tunnels and galleries, and their bores struck some residue of deep treacle.

  Up in the mountains, on the borders of Uberwald, there are still very productive treacle mines, enabling the dwarfs of that region to make a handsome profit exporting both raw pig-treacle and luscious treacle-based confectionery to the cities of the plain. Far away in the hot and swampy realm of Genua, there are lakes of liquid treacle fermenting happily only a little way underground, and occasionally bursting out under pressure to create springs of rum. Near Quirm, there are toffee beds. The origin of all this succulence goes back to the Dawn of Time, when the Fifth Elephant collided with the Disc with so great an impact that thousands of acres of prehistoric wild sugar cane was buried under massive landslides, and compacted into a dense crystalline mass.