The Folklore of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  The subject is a fascinating one, and well documented. We give a couple of titles in the bibliography, but there are many more. What is interesting is how easily women could get away with it (after the not-really-serious were weeded out very early on). The Pollys often did well, acting as spies, where their wonderful skill at dressing up as women was a great help, and even getting promoted. There is a whole slew of explanations as to how they kept their secret while living with hundreds of men, and some of these turn up in Monstrous Regiment. For instance, in an age long before unisex fashions, trousers meant ‘man’ and skirts meant ‘woman’. Trousers plus high-pitched voice meant ‘young man’. People didn’t expect anything else, and saw what they expected to see. Many Pollys joined up as boys, and if the lad was a little shy, no one thought that odd. People did not often see one another naked, and the surgeon amputating a foot might only roll the trouser leg above the knee. But the big reason is that, if they are determined and careful, women can easily fool men.

  However, there was one thing, according to accounts, that many of them just could not manage. It was swearing. Many could not bring themselves to cuss, and found the ripe language of their comrades hard to bear, let alone imitate. So … a bit of a change there, at least!

  13 Indeed, more or less throughout recorded history, but this is when it happened in a major way.

  Chapter 15

  KIDS’ STUFF … YOU

  KNOW, ABOUT

  ’ORRID MURDER and

  BLOOD

  THERE ARE MANY LINKS between folklore and the mental world of children, but they do not always follow the paths one might expect. Theoreticians in the Ankh-Morpork Folklore Society (and indeed in similar institutions here) love to think that some age-old memory, preferably of something quite horrible, lurks in the background of the simplest rhyme or game. They claim, for example, that when children shape big fat figures out of piled-up snow and push in lumps of coal as eyes, these are ‘obvious survivals’ of primitive idols representing the dreaded Ice Giants with their tiny, deep-set black eyes who, according to mythology, will one day overwhelm the world. Of course, the children say they just do it for fun – they would, wouldn’t they? But a theoretical folklorist rarely if ever takes note of what the folk themselves have to say. It stands to reason that he or she is far better equipped than they are to roll back the mists of time. And in two shakes of a duck’s tail, the theory is accepted as a proven fact. If the moving pictures enterprise once begun at Holy Wood had succeeded, by now every audience in Ankh-Morpork would know that when a film-maker shows a brief shot of a snowman he means everyone to shudder at this sinister symbol of ecological doom and the imminent End of the World. Meanwhile, the kids go on throwing snowballs and lumps of coal around, regardless.

  In our Earthly culture, many parents and teachers worry whether fairy tales and nursery rhymes and children’s games and customs are respectable, morally and educationally sound, and fully in accord with health and safety regulations. Judging from existing records, few adults on the Disc are bothered by these issues. There, at least in the poorer parts of Ankh-Morpork, children freely play brutal and unhygienic street games, hallowed by long tradition. These include Dead Rat Conkers and Tiddley-Rat, though a recent observer has noted that Turd Races in the gutter appear to have died out, despite an attempt to take them upmarket with the name Poosticks. Hopscotch too is popular, especially a variation which Captain Vimes played in childhood, in which you kicked the least popular kid from one square to another, singing ‘William Scuggins is a bastard’ – actions and words which do not figure in handbooks designed for games teachers.

  Throughout the multiverse, parents have repeatedly discovered the useful fact that the best way to control a child is by working on its imagination to create a gruesome anthropomorphic personification: ‘Don’t you dare play in the cornfield! If you do, the Corn Mother will come with her long iron teeth and her long iron claws, and tear you to bits’ – ‘Behave yourselves while I’m out. Remember that Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones is watching you!’ Used in moderation, these Frighteners and Prohibitory Monsters have a great deal to recommend them. If Nanny Ogg’s grandchildren believe there’s a demon inside the copper in her wash-house,14 and if country children everywhere are scared of deep pools because there’s something down there with green eyes and big teeth just longing to pull them in, a lot of nasty accidents will be avoided.

  But there are snags, particularly on Discworld. Even though the adults don’t believe the Frighteners are real, the children do, and the high magic quotient built into the very fabric of the Disc ensures that whatever is powerfully believed in will, very shortly, exist. (‘If only people would think before they invent monsters,’ sighed Miss Tick, the teacher-witch of the Chalk country.) The problem seems to be at its worst in cities. True, there are fewer natural dangers there, but semi-sadistic adults still enjoy inducing irrational fears, as Susan Sto-Helit found when she became a governess in Ankh-Morpork. Since she was one of the rare adults capable of seeing the resulting monsters, she knew how to deal with them:

  One of the many terrors conjured up by the previous governess’s happy way with children had been the bears that waited around in the street to eat you if you stood on the cracks [in the pavement].

  Susan had taken to carrying the poker under her respectable coat. One wallop generally did the trick. The bears were amazed that anyone else saw them …

  The previous governess had used various monsters and bogeymen as a form of discipline. There was always something waiting to eat or carry off bad boys and girls for crimes like stuttering or defiantly and aggravatingly persisting in writing with their left hand. There was always a Scissor Man waiting for a little girl who sucked her thumb, always a bogeyman in the cellar. Of such bricks is the innocence of childhood constructed. [Hogfather]

  It is impossible to describe what bogeymen look like, since they are skilled shape-shifters and mould their appearance to match whatever horrors they find lurking in their child-victim’s subconscious. But one can say how to get rid of them – at any rate, on the Discworld. They are terrified of blankets, especially those with blue fluffy bunnies on. Even a small square of blanket fabric drives them off. Which stands to reason, for if you can protect yourself from a bogeyman by hiding your head under the blanket, how much more effective it will be to drop a blanket on his head!

  Most of the Frighteners exist on Earth too. A poem by A. A. Milne tells how Pavement Bears lurked in the streets of London in the 1930s; sensible children watched their feet as they walked, taking care to tread only on the square paving stones, never on the cracks between them.

  The Earthly Scissor Man, a monstrous tailor, was first described in nineteenth-century Germany by Heinrich Hoffman in Struwwelpeter, a book of verses known in English as Shock-Headed Peter. There, he is a tailor, a ‘great, long, red-legged Scissor Man’.

  One day Mama said, ‘Conrad dear,

  I must go out and leave you here.

  But mind now, Conrad, what I say,

  Don’t suck your thumb while I’m away.

  The great tall tailor always comes

  To little boys that suck their thumbs;

  And ere they dream what he’s about,

  He takes his great sharp scissors out,

  And cuts their thumbs clean off, and then,

  You know, they never grow again.’

  On the Discworld, he looks different:

  When Susan turned to go up the stairs the Scissor Man was there.

  It wasn’t man-shaped. It was something like an ostrich, and something like a lizard on its hind legs, but almost entirely like something made out of blades. Every time it moved a thousand blades went snip, snip.

  Its long silver neck curved and a head made of shears stared down at her.

  ‘You’re not looking for me,’ she said. ‘You’re not my nightmare.’ [Hogfather]

  Then there’s the Sandman. He sweeps right across the world at the speed of dark, just as dusk falls, an
d gets inside every house where there are children. It’s up to him to make sure that they go up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire the very minute they’re told, and get straight into bed and go straight off to sleep, no fooling about. If the mother is kind-hearted and modern in her views, she will say he does this by sprinkling magic sand which makes them so sleepy that they can’t keep their eyes open. Those who are less soppy know that the bag of sand he carries is small, but heavy, and he doesn’t bother to take any out before he swings it against the child’s skull.

  These days, on our world, he has been ‘dwindled’; mums all have the same idea of a nice Sandman. But go back a couple of hundred years, to a time when people really knew how to keep children in a constant wholesome state of terror, and listen to what a nanny says in a story by another German author, E. T. A. Hoffman:

  ‘Oh, the Sandman is a wicked man, who comes to little children when they won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so they jump out of their heads all bloody; and he puts them in a bag and takes them to the half-moon as food for his little ones; and they sit there in the nest and have hooked beaks like owls, to pick at the eyes of naughty little boys and girls.’

  The magic of childhood is not what it was.

  Thankfully, not all Anthropomorphic and Theriomorphic Personifications are so sinister. Jack Frost, an elderly man who draws ferns and paisley patterns on window panes at night, has no dealings with children at all. The Soul Cake Duck lays chocolate eggs for them, in gardens, on the Tuesday of the Soul Cake Days in the month of Sektober; she hides them well (but not too well), so that the kiddies can have fun hunting for them. In spite of her name, she does not lay cakes. Her equivalent on Earth is the German and Swiss Easter Hare, who has been laying eggs for children to find since the sixteenth century. Nowadays he is known in Britain and America under the name of the Easter Bunny – a terrible come-down. At first the Hare only laid real eggs, often brightly painted; more recently he has been producing chocolate ones. German and Swiss children enjoy building little nests of moss and flowers and hay, ready for the Hare to use. Just how a hare – and a male hare at that – can lay chocolate eggs will be no mystery to anyone who has noticed certain little brown oval objects in the corner of the rabbit hutch.

  Then there are the ever-welcome tooth fairies. Everybody knows what they do – when a child loses a tooth, he or she must slip it under the pillow, and a tooth fairy will come in the night to take it away, leaving at least half an Ankh-Morpork dollar as payment. Despite the name, they do not belong to the same species as elves, or even gnomes. They are human-sized, rather plain and dumpy, and none too bright.

  Fairies aren’t necessarily little twinkly creatures. It’s purely a job description, and the commonest ones aren’t even visible. A fairy is simply any creature currently employed under supernatural laws to take things away or, as in the case of the Verruca Gnome, to bring things. [Hogfather]

  Tooth fairies are to be found chiefly in towns (there are at least half a dozen in Ankh-Morpork alone), and then only in moderately well-off homes. This is probably due to socio-economic factors, since it is generally supposed that the coins the fairy brings have been recycled (by bogeymen) after being lost in the very same house. You won’t find many coins under the furniture of a cottage in Lancre, where the basic unit of currency is the chicken. Nor, come to that, in the poor quarters of Ankh-Morpork, in a place like Cockbill Street. Pennies were precious in Cockbill Street; if you had any spare ones you put them by to get you a decent funeral; you didn’t lose them under the settee, because you didn’t have one. The Tooth Fairy rarely visits Cockbill Street.

  Actually, it is wrong to speak of The Tooth Fairy, as if there was only one of her. The mistake originated in America somewhere around 1960, and has mysteriously leapt across the dimensions in an attempt to gain a footing in the Discworld. Fortunately, in Ankh-Morpork Violet Bottler and her fellow workers are united in loyalty to one another and to their weekly wage, insisting that they are all, each and every one of them, tooth fairies.

  In Britain, it is certain that fairies (in the plural) have been collecting children’s shed milk teeth from under pillows for about a hundred years, leaving money in exchange. What happened earlier is a mystery. Victorian folklore books do not mention tooth fairies, but this is probably because the collectors spent their time hunting for excitingly unusual customs and beliefs; it did not occur to them that the everyday stuff in their own homes was interesting too.

  Nowadays, owing to pervasive American influence, British children believe in one single Tooth Fairy. She is immensely popular. Even dentists talk about her, and keep a stock of dinky little envelopes with her picture on, so that when children have a tooth professionally extracted, they can take it home and pop it under the pillow just the same.

  So, how long have tooth fairies been around? There is one small scrap of evidence that in seventeenth-century England elves and fairies were already busy collecting pretty little items in the human world and carting them off to fairyland to decorate their dwellings – which answers the question, ‘What exactly do the fairies do with the teeth?’ This evidence comes in the poem ‘Oberon’s Palace’ by Robert Herrick, number 444 in his book Hesperides (1648). The poem describes a charming little cave or grotto where Oberon the Fairy King goes to make love to Queen Mab. They are very small fairies, possibly the same species as are often mistaken for wasps on the Disc. The cave walls are decorated with bits of peacock feathers, fish scales, blue snake skins, dewdrops etc. The floor is a mosaic of plum-tree gum, dice, brown toadstones, human fingernails, warts, and the teeth of squirrels and children ‘lately shed’. These bits and pieces, says Herrick, are ‘brought hither by the Elves’. They are not following quite the same procedure as a modern tooth fairy, since they don’t leave money, but they’re well on the way.

  There is another way of dealing with shed teeth, and this too goes back to the seventeenth century. Children would just rub the tooth with salt and throw it in the fire. This was still done in some homes in the 1950s, especially in the north of England, sometimes with a verse:

  Fire, fire, burn a bone,

  God send me a tooth again,

  A straight one, a strong one,

  A white shiny bright one.

  In many parts of Europe, especially Germany and Russia, it wasn’t fairies that took the teeth, but mice or rats. And what they gave in exchange was not a coin, but lovely new teeth to grow in place of the old – teeth as strong, sharp and well shaped as their own. So children would shove the tooth as far as they could down a mousehole, with some suitable rhyme:

  Mousey, mousey, mousey,

  Here’s my tooth of bone,

  Mousey, bring a new tooth,

  A tooth as hard as stone.

  Tooth Mice didn’t care whether a home was rich or poor, and they were one hundred per cent reliable. No child who put a tooth in a mousehole ever failed to find a new one growing through its gums.

  Unfortunately, the same magic law of like-to-like meant that if people were careless about shed teeth, the unlucky child could end up with something very ugly indeed. According to the folklorist Charlotte Latham, writing in 1878 about superstitions she had noted in Sussex ten years earlier:

  A servant girl said children’s cast teeth must never be thrown away, because if an animal found and gnawed them, the new tooth would grow just like that animal’s. ‘Look at old Master Simmons,’ she said, ‘with that gurt big pig’s tooth in his upper jaw. He allus says ’twas his mam’s fault, she having dropped one of his baby teeth in the hog’s trough, accidental like.’

  Poor Master Simmons! If he had lived on the Disc, people would have told him how lucky he was to look just like the Hogfather, whose teeth are remarkably tusk-like.

  But there is an older, darker reason why shed teeth must either be entirely destroyed by fire, or be hidden somewhere where nobody can ever lay hands on them. It has to do with power, and control, and magic – a magic so old and so simple it’
s hardly magic at all. In our world, this is explained by Sir James Frazer in his famous work The Golden Bough:

  The most familiar example of Contagious Magic is the magical sympathy which is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of his person, such as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets possession of human hair or nails may work his will, at any distance, upon the person from whom they were cut. This superstition is worldwide.

  Exactly the same principle works on the Discworld, as the assassin Teatime knows only too well, especially as regards teeth. So does Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, who remarks, with reference to his own toenails,

  ‘You can’t be too careful. Get hold of something like someone’s nail clippings and you’ve got ’em under your control. That’s real old magic. Dawn of time stuff.’ [Hogfather]

  HOGSWATCH

  In the bleak midwinter, frosty winds make moan. People, on the other hand, make as much loud and cheerful noise as they can:

  People have always had the urge to sing and clang things at the dark stub of the year, when all sorts of psychic nastiness has taken advantage of the long grey days and the deep shadows to lurk and breed. Lately people in Ankh-Morpork’s better districts had taken to singing harmoniously, which rather lost the effect. Those who really understood just clanged something and shouted. [Hogfather]

  They also gather to eat and drink and dance, to light bonfires, and to give one another presents. This happens in many parts of the multiverse, provided the climate is suitable. Obviously, you’ve got to have a midwinter before you can have a midwinter festival, so there’s no point looking for one in hot regions like Djelibeybi or the Rimward hinterland of Klatch, but wherever there’s a cold dark season you can find something pretty much like Hogswatchnight. It’s a way of telling the Sun what you expect of him – ‘Rise and shine, Sun, start to grow strong again, drive back the Ice Giants, bring us the warmth of Spring.’ The Sun needs a little encouragement, whatever astronomers may say.