The Folklore of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  Sometimes a chicken is nothing but a bird. [Hogfather]

  Thanks to the humorous workings of narrative necessity, these well-bred singers, so beautifully free from anything that could distress either the musical ear or the moral susceptibilities of their audience, find themselves face to face with what may well be the last vestige of pure, raw wassailing in the city, the makers of the Rough Music of Time – Foul Ole Ron and the Canting Crew of deranged beggars, singing and swearing at the tops of their voices, and banging saucepans together. The beggars are not well versed in folkloric theory, but they do know this is the sort of thing one does at midwinter, and have good reason to believe that if you make enough din people will give you money to stop.

  Those who have looked into the history of folklore of western Europe over the last couple of hundred years will notice some quite astonishing similarities to this situation. There too, some genteel Victorian collectors, while professing their deep love of tradition, took for granted that it must be stripped of all coarseness and daintily repackaged. There too, some customs slipped down the social scale till they were little more than a way for the poorest of the working class (or even beggars) to extract a little beer-money from their betters at festive seasons. And there too, these same customs might be rediscovered, imitated, revived and updated by later and more sophisticated generations.

  As soon as people begin to notice a custom (as opposed to just doing it), they start wondering where, when and why it began. They weave wonderful theories. But this is futile, since folklore is almost always unaccountable:

  Very few people do know how Tradition is supposed to go. There’s a certain mysterious ridiculousness about it by its very nature – once there was a reason why you had to carry a posy of primroses on Soul Cake Tuesday, but now you did it because that’s what was Done. [Jingo]

  The ceremony still carries on, of course. If you left off traditions because you didn’t know why they started you’d be no better than a foreigner. [Hogfather]

  In both worlds, old customs discarded by adults are often kept going for a few generations by children. According to the Bursar, when he was a boy there was a custom on Soul Cake Tuesday that children would roll boiled eggs down the Tump, a large steep hill on the outskirts of the city. Naturally, nobody can say what the point of it is, apart from the fairly obvious fact that it is fun, and that the eggs are nice to eat, even if they are a bit cracked and muddy. As Nanny Ogg would say, with surprising Biblical insight, ‘We all have to eat a peck of dirt before we die.’

  Since children in Lancre and other rural areas also get given eggs on this date, as we mentioned earlier, there is every reason to think the custom is genuinely folksy – possibly even mythic, if the Soul Cake Duck is involved. If so, it would have begun as something serious, to be done by adults. There are some people, including the compiler of The Discworld Almanak, who claim that the duck plays a major role in primeval mythology:

  Curiously written out of early legends of the creation of the Universe is the Great Duck, from whose single egg the whole of Creation was hatched. However, truth will out, and it is now known that, from the outside, infinity is duck-egg blue.

  It turns out that this was written in haste by a member of the Almanak staff to justify an error elsewhere in the book, but there once were similar myths scattered throughout our own world (in ancient Egypt, Finland, India, Greece and Persia, for example), telling how the universe was hatched from an egg laid by some Great Bird, often a duck or goose. And that, in a roundabout sort of way, might explain those chocolate eggs people buy at Easter, without quite knowing why.

  Folk custom also explains why one occasionally sees visitors to Ankh-Morpork leaning over the Brass Bridge in a meaningful manner. They are acting upon an old superstition that if you throw a coin into the Ankh you’ll be sure to return to the city – or is it if you just throw up into the Ankh? Probably it is a coin after all, since a remarkable number of supposedly rational species in various worlds feel compelled to toss coins into rivers, fountains, wishing-wells, and even oddly shaped cascades in airport terminals, in a vague expectation of good luck and wishes fulfilled. Why? Well, in the case of airports it is a convenient way of getting rid of small change you won’t need in Sydney while at the same time getting a small smug feeling of having done some good, but in the other cases? What mechanism is operating here, in the twenty-first century? On the Discworld, though, they know why. The Lady is a real presence.

  *

  Unseen University has a whole clutch of traditional ceremonies and festivals of its own, carried out with unfailing regularity. These of course have nothing whatever to do with anything or anybody beyond the University’s walls. They are ‘gown’, not ‘town’, and emphatically not ‘folk’. Those which involve processing through the public streets do so as a way of inspiring due respect in the uncultured masses. A prime example is the Convivium, when the Archchancellor, Council, and entire senior staff proceed ceremonially from the University to the Opera House, where new graduates are awarded their degrees in the presence of the Patrician. The procession then returns, rather more quickly, for a large banquet.

  But one ceremony which has a certain impact on the townsfolk is the Beating of the Bounds every 22 Grune. This involves a choir, all able-bodied members of staff, and a gaggle of students retracing the exact route of the boundaries of the University, as originally laid down centuries ago. They walk through or if necessary climb over any buildings that have since been built across the route, while ceremonially striking members of the public with live ferrets (in memory, for reasons unknown, of a long-ago Archchancellor Buckleby).

  Any red-headed men encountered are seized by several strong young men and given a ‘plunking’; this tradition has, most unusually – and subsequent to an incident which left three wizards hanging precariously from a gutter – been amended to read ‘any red-headed men except of course Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson of the Watch’. After the progress, the entire membership of the University heads back to the Great Hall for a huge breakfast at which duck must be served. [The Discworld Companion]

  Why red-heads? In Ankh-Morpork the reason, if there ever was one, is forgotten. On Earth, folklore asserts that red hair was the mark of Judas, and is found in descendants of Jews and of Viking raiders. They were distrusted, though there is no record of people plunking them.

  In Britain and Europe, processions to Beat the Bounds (also known as Rogation Processions) were mainly found in country districts, where priests led the people round the parish boundaries, blessing the fields and praying for a good harvest. The custom was legally useful too; when local administration was organized by parishes, it was important that everyone knew just where one parish ended and another began. That way, taxes and tithes could be fairly assessed, and if a penniless beggar dropped dead on the road one knew whose job it was to bury him. Boundary markers on walls, stones or trees were inspected, renewed if necessary, and ritually ‘beaten’ with rods. Sometimes boys were upended and beaten too, to make sure the next generation remembered everything quite clearly.

  The custom does not often survive in towns, but in Oxford on Ascension Day two parishes still provide a spectacle remarkably similar to what can be seen in Ankh-Morpork (but without the ferrets, alas). In the words of folklorist Steve Roud:

  The boundary markers in Oxford can be set into walls, high or low, or even into the floor, and can be down narrow alleyways, in basements, and behind or inside buildings. The routes take in the college buildings within the parish as well as shops and pubs, much to the surprise of people they meet on the way. They stop for refreshments at various locations, and at one point students throw coins and sweets for the choristers to scramble for. [The English Year (2006)]

  In Ankh-Morpork there are also traditional student activities, notably the dreaded Rag Week, which has all the normal perils of student humour with the additional seasoning of magic. Prudent citizens take evasive action, but the event is welcomed by the landlords of the
Mended Drum, the Bunch of Grapes, and other hostelries, since much alcohol is traditionally consumed.

  The even more dreaded mass football match is now discontinued. This used to involve teams of fifty students apiece from the University itself and from each of the Guild Colleges attempting to kick or carry a football from the outskirts of the Shades to the Tower of Art. Goals were scored by kicking the ball through the door (or more often the window) of landmarks along the way, most of them having names like the Mended Drum, the Bunch of Grapes, etc. The scoring team had then to be bought drinks by the other teams. Much alcohol was traditionally consumed. There were occasions when the match went on for a month.

  Something very similar used to happen on Earth, and in some cases still does. For, just as there is a whole area of folklore that concerns singing very loudly until being given money to stop, or at least to go away and infest some other street, so there is an area chock-full of folk games that consist of two sides trying to get a ball (or similar token) into an opposing goal by means of, apparently, a bout of allin wrestling.

  In many towns of Britain, some five or six hundred years ago, the streets would periodically be jammed tight with a heaving mass of young men shoving, kicking and head-butting one another. If you watched long enough, you would probably work out that it was not a fight after all, but some kind of game played between two teams. Somewhere down out of sight there would be a ball being kicked or carried, for this was the true, the original, form of British football. No rules worth mentioning, no limit on the number of men crazy enough to play for one team or the other. No goal posts either; the ‘goals’ would be at opposite ends of the town, at least a mile apart, and might just as likely be ponds or streams as buildings. It was a wild, violent type of game, and might very well last all day. In Derby in 1829 a writer explained how it was done:

  The game commences in the market-place, where the partisans of each parish are drawn up on each side, and about noon, a large ball is tossed up in the midst of them. This is seized on by some of the strongest and most active men. The rest of the players immediately close in upon them, and a solid mass is formed. It then becomes the object of each party to impel the crowd towards their own particular goal. The struggle to obtain the ball, which is carried in the arms of those who have possessed themselves of it, is violent … It would be difficult to give an adequate idea of this ruthless sport. A Frenchman passing through Derby remarked that if Englishmen called this playing, it would be impossible to say what they called fighting.

  If you asked the players what the point was, they’d probably tell you it celebrated the defeat of some Scotsmen (or Englishmen, or Vikings, according to taste), whose heads were then kicked round the battlefield.

  The tough young fellows who played it absolutely loved it. Others were less enthusiastic. People got injured, as the respectable citizens of Chester complained in the 1530s, ‘some having their bodies bruised or crushed, some their arms, heads or legs broken, and some otherwise maimed or in peril of their lives’. Worse still, windows got broken, which was expensive. The town authorities stopped the Chester game in 1539, but in some other places people were more stubborn; in Derby it took soldiers, special constables, and the reading of the Riot Act to finally subdue the footballers in 1849. Some towns kept their mass football till late in the nineteenth century. Indeed, there are a few places where it is still vigorously played. It can be seen at Alnwick in Northumberland and Ashbourne in Derbyshire every Shrove Tuesday, and at Kirkwall in Orkney at the New Year.

  The ‘Haxey Hood Game’ at Haxey in Lincolnshire every January is similar, though it is surrounded by more ceremonial, and though the object tussled over is not a ball but a roll of leather, like a truncheon. Allegedly, this represents the hood of a long-ago medieval lady which blew off, causing twelve or thirteen labourers to go chasing after it. Who knows, but for that unthinking piece of gallantry we might now be watching Association Archery on Saturday afternoons.

  GHOST SHIPS

  In Small Gods there’s a description of a shipwreck. When the captain cries, ‘We’ll have to abandon ship!’ Death replies, NO. WE WILL TAKE IT WITH US. IT IS A NICE SHIP. And so, though the ship has been completely smashed up and everyone aboard is drowned, it seems to become whole again (in a way) and sails away, grey and slightly transparent, through darkness and silence, bearing the ghosts of men and of rats.

  Sailors on Earth also find it perfectly natural that a ship can become a ghost, since before it sank it had been a living creature, with a soul of its own – a ‘she’, in fact, not an ‘it’. She’s got a name, hasn’t she? And wasn’t she christened, just like a human being, with somebody blessing her and smashing a bottle of champagne over her? In French fishing villages, there would be a full-scale religious ceremony for a new boat, with a godfather and godmother, and a priest to sprinkle holy water; everyone was given blessed bread, including the boat herself – scraps of the bread would be put into holes in the mast.

  Many also thought that a ship had a guardian spirit. Some said it lived in the figurehead. Others, from Ancient Egypt to modern China and the Mediterranean, have painted huge eyes on the prow; these are the eyes of its guardian, to bring luck, to see the way ahead, and to outstare any evil spirits. The Swedes have a different notion; they say that when boat-builders cut a tree down to make the keel, the tree’s guardian gnome follows it, and becomes the boat’s luck-bringer.

  Ships and death go well together. Vikings thought a dead man should sail in his own boat to the land of the dead. So some of them buried or burned the man and the boat together; others lit a pyre for the corpse on board a ship, which was then set drifting out to sea; others marked the site of the man’s grave by an oval of standing stones, forming the outline of a boat. An English poet, D. H. Lawrence, wrote in the 1920s of ‘The Ship of Death’:

  We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do

  is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship

  of death to carry the soul on its longest journey.

  A little ship, with oars and food

  and little dishes, and all accoutrements

  fitting and ready for the departing soul.

  There are also the phantom ships doomed to sail the seas of Earth for ever, because of some crime or sin committed on board, or because of the tragic circumstances in which they sank. To see one is an omen of disaster, or at least of very bad weather. You can recognize them because they are sailing at full speed against the wind, or when there is no wind at all. Often they have no crew; if there is one, they are skeletons. They never reach a port; they never answer when hailed. There is at least one, at Porthcurno in Cornwall, which has been seen to sail straight for the shore at dusk, rise up into the air, and go on sailing across dry land.

  The most famous of the phantom ships is the Flying Dutchman. She haunts the seas around the Cape of Good Hope, because her captain blasphemously swore he would round the Cape, despite a gale, even if it took him till Doomsday. In Britain, several ghost ships haunt the Solway Firth, as a result of crimes. Two were pirate vessels; one was deliberately wrecked by a jealous murderer as it carried a bridal party; one was a slave trader, homeward bound, whose rich but godless captain refused to go ashore to attend church on Christmas Day. There is also the Lady Lovibund, which is supposed to appear on 13 February once every fifty years, heading for the Goodwin Sands (in the Channel, off Deal), because the first mate deliberately ran it aground there, being driven crazy with jealousy because he was in love with the captain’s newly wedded bride. This is said to have happened in 1748, and some people claim the spectral ship was sighted at fifty-year intervals up to and including 1948. Oddly, when boatloads of journalists went looking for it in 1998, it failed to appear.

  The derelict ghost ships in Going Postal are real, or rather, the way they hang suspended in the depths of the sea was once thought to be a real scientific possibility. But the wonderful image of skeletons crewing rotting hulks faded in the light of deep oceanic research in the n
ineteenth century. Until then, it was quite respectable to assume that water, like air, got denser with depth, and that a stricken ship would sink only until it encountered water at a density slightly higher than its own, where it might then drift on the interface until it rotted. In fact water does not compress like air, which is why fish at the bottom of the sea don’t have to drill holes in it. When you sink, you sink.

  FEMALE SOLDIERS

  Folk songs, most notably ‘Sweet Polly Oliver’, keep alive the theme of the cross-dressing girl who goes off to war in men’s attire:

  As sweet Polly Oliver lay musing in bed,

  A sudden strange fancy came into her head:

  ‘Nor father nor mother shall make me false prove,

  I’ll ’list for a soldier and follow my love.’

  So early next morning she softly arose,

  And dressed herself up in her dead brother’s clothes.

  She cut her hair close, and she stained her face brown,

  And went for a soldier to fair London Town.

  The songs were based on fact, and Monstrous Regiment was only an exaggeration for comic effect – very little which is said in that book about the girls’ cross-dressing experiences was made up.

  There are plenty of references to such women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries13 (up to 1,400 of them in the American Civil War, it has been suggested, but 500 or fewer seems more acceptable). They made the decision out of love, for adventure, or from a desire to escape from a burdensome life. They came to light as a result of falling in love, betraying themselves by lack of acting skill, or being wounded somewhere that obliged the surgeon to remove the patient’s trousers; or, quite often, by proudly admitting it much later on. When some of them were grandmothers. Obviously, we will never know about ones who didn’t own up.