The Folklore of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  Then there is St Nicholas, patron saint of children, who brings them gifts either on the eve of his own feast day (6 December) or on Christmas Eve. He is famous in Holland and Belgium, and in the Catholic parts of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. He comes in the night riding a white horse (or donkey); he is dressed as a bishop in red robes embroidered with gold, and has a fine white beard. Children put out hay and carrots for his steed, and a glass of schnapps for his servant who carries the bag of presents, whose name is Scruffy Johnny, or Black Peter. Often there is someone else with them – the hideous Krampus or Klaubauf, a shaggy monster with horns, black face, fiery eyes, and chains that clank as he moves. Children who know their catechism will be rewarded with sweets; those who don’t had better look out, for Krampus and Black Peter both carry a stick to beat them.

  The Protestant parts of Germany disapproved of saints, so St Nicholas is not mentioned there. Instead, it is the Christ Child, imagined as a radiantly lovely little boy, who comes at midnight on Christmas Eve to bless the good children and leave presents for them. However, it wouldn’t do for things to be all sweetness and light. So in north Germany there is also Knecht Ruprecht, a weird figure dressed in skins or straw; if children have been good and can sing a hymn nicely, he rewards them with apples and gingerbread from his wallet, but if they can’t he beats them with a bag of soot and ashes. In some parts people call him Rough Klas or Ashy Klas; since ‘Klas’ is short for ‘Nicholas’, they must think he is an avatar of the saint.

  Nowadays, the mood has changed. It is not now thought to be good for little children to be scared out of their wits, even if it does make them behave themselves. So in the course of the twentieth century some of the worst bogey-figures have reinvented themselves as comic and kindly. Take the Icelandic Gryla, for example, who has been around for some seven hundred years. She is a huge ugly she-troll with fifteen tails, carrying a sheepskin sack and accompanied by her thirteen sons, the Christmas Lads, who are smaller but equally ugly. Until fairly recently, the whole point about Gryla was that she was hunting for naughty children, to carry them off in that sack, and eat them; a fine old tradition with the smack of authenticity. Now she brings sweets and goodies in the sack, and the thirteen Lads slip into a child’s room, one by one, during the thirteen nights before Christmas, to pop something nice under the pillow … They still look like goblins, though.

  The best-known of all the gift-bringers on Earth, and most like the Hogfather, is the one whom some call Father Christmas and others Santa Claus and others Le Père Noël. He has been around for over 600 years, and is now stronger than ever. The myth just grows and grows and grows, since it is powered by money.

  When first glimpsed, in England at the end of the Middle Ages, he had nothing to do with children, and little to do with gifts. He wasn’t even necessarily called Father Christmas, but could be ‘Captain Christmas’, ‘Prince Christmas’, or ‘Sir Christmas’. His job was to personify all the joys of eating, drinking and general jollity. In the 1460s the rector of Plymtree in Devonshire wrote a lively carol about Sir Christmas singing ‘Nowell, Nowell!’ outside the door, and urging everybody to drink as much as possible:

  Buvez bien par toute la compagnie,

  Make good cheer and be right merry!

  He was still at it in the early seventeenth century (in spite of Puritan disapproval), when he was featured in Ben Jonson’s play Christmas his Masque (1616), coming on stage followed by his equally jolly sons, whose names were Misrule, Carol, Mince Pie, Pots-and-Pan, New Year Gift, Mumming, Wassail, and Baby Cake. He wore doublet and hose and a high-crowned hat with a brooch, and had a long thin beard.

  It was Charles Dickens who gave the finest account of a personified Christmas Spirit who embodies the joys of food and drink, in his A Christmas Carol (1843). He told how Scrooge came face to face with a ‘jolly Giant, glorious to see’, in a room thickly hung with holly, ivy and mistletoe, and piled high with food:

  Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkey, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.

  This Spirit looks like a younger version of Father Christmas, or indeed of the Hogfather. Like them, he wears a long simple robe, trimmed with white fur, but in his case it is green, not red, and has no hood; he has long curly brown hair, and is wearing a wreath of holly set with icicles. And though he takes Scrooge on a visionary journey through the night, wandering invisibly from house to house to watch the celebrations, he does not bring presents for the kiddies.

  Even so, the idea of Father Christmas as a gift-bringer started infiltrating Victorian Britain, probably from Germany. He became quite a familiar figure – an old man, bearded, trudging through the snow with his sack of presents, dressed in a long hooded gown which was often, but by no means always, red. He did not have a companion to beat or threaten naughty children, as his Continental kinsmen had.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, something quite extraordinary had been happening. The Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam (later renamed New York) had kept up the tradition that St Nicholas would come in the night of 5/6 December to pop presents in the shoes or stockings of sleeping children, just as he did in their old homeland. In 1809 the very popular writer Washington Irving drew attention to this, but transferred the idea to Christmas Eve. And then in 1822, suddenly, inexplicably, inspiration gripped a clergyman and professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages called Clement Clark Moore, and he wrote a little poem for his children. He called it ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’, but most people now think of the first line, not the title:

  ’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house …

  Moore probably disapproved of saints, and even bishops, since his Nicholas is not a bishop in full regalia on a white horse, but a fat little gnome, hurtling through the sky in a miniature sleigh drawn by eight tiny reindeer. (Why reindeer? Nobody knows. There are no reindeer in Holland.) He comes and goes by way of the chimney. He carries a sack of presents. As for his appearance:

  He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,

  And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot …

  His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,

  And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;

  The stump of his pipe he held hard in his teeth,

  And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;

  He had a broad face and a little round belly,

  That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly.

  Before too long, the folk imagination got to work. Bishops were forgotten, and the gift-bringer’s name was shortened to Santa Claus. In the 1860s the artist Thomas Nash began drawing him. Nash dropped the furs, preferring the typical Dutch costume of a belted jacket, blue breeches, and a flat sailor’s cap. But by the end of the nineteenth century red became the standard colour (with or without white trimmings), and the cap became a red one, long and floppy. In the twentieth, Santa Claus acquired a team of elves as little helpers, and a home near the North Pole.

  This American Santa Claus arrived in England in 1854, by way of a fictional story by Susan and Ann Warner, ‘The Christmas Stocking’. Little by little he became popular, and he and the native Father Christmas blended together, sometimes using one name, sometimes the other; sometimes in a long robe, sometimes in a jacket. And now the combined figure is spreading all over the world.

  This extraordinary history shows beyond doubt that a truly powerful idea bounces to and fro across space and time, from mind to mind and from one universe to another. In a way, both Santa and the Hogfather are communal ‘Shakespearean’ creations. As we point out elsewhere, Will would happily drag some fragments of myth and folklore together and weld them into something new in such a way that the end r
esult suits our sense of narrative grammar.

  Did people in northern Europe make sacrifices at the winter solstice? Yes. Human? Could be, long, long ago, to the extent that as a species we have occasionally indulged in human sacrifice, but later the most likely sacrifice would have been a horse or a farm animal. And the King of the Bean? A good story, which satisfies our desire for a thrilling narrative, but almost certainly untrue. The evolution of the proto Hogfather? Indeed, the person seen by Susan going through his different personifications does add up to the ‘festive spirit’. And the suggestion that, via some deep visceral means, the colours of the said spirit have become the colours of blood on snow? That’s a happy coincidence, and a good story, but it’s not folklore!

  One final thing. The Coca-Cola company is often credited with the ‘modern’ look of Father Christmas, but it is much truer to say that it popularized, over much of the world, one ‘look’ among many that already existed. Exposure wins. (For example, as Terry mentions in his introduction, the ‘magpie rhyme’ that introduced the ITV children’s series in the late 1960s and the 1970s almost certainly did a lot to wipe out the existing regional variations of the rhyme.) But across the Channel, at least, older avatars often appear alongside, or even instead of, the red and white demigod of Christmas expenditure. HO. HO. HO!

  14 In this particular case, the demonic warning might well be justified.

  15 Both the authors discovered Frazer in their teens and were bowled over, as probably most readers are, but became more sceptical later on. Folklorists have learned to be careful; if it looks like a jolly good story, it may very well be one.

  Chapter 16

  DEATH

  DEATH MAY WELL BE THE ONLY SUPERNATURAL entity (strictly speaking, an anthropomorphic personification) which is known and acknowledged throughout the entire multiverse. His arrival is quite, quite certain – and yet, most people secretly hope that for them and their friends it will be indefinitely delayed, and his actual manifestation generally comes as a surprise. On the Discworld only wizards and witches can foresee his arrival; on Earth, only exceptionally holy men and women.

  Some people try to bargain with him, staking lives on the outcome of a game of chess or cards. This rarely succeeds, though Granny Weatherwax did once win against him at Cripple Mr Onion (of course, he knew she would). Others try to run away. This is quite hopeless, since Death keeps an appointments diary, and knows precisely where and when he is scheduled to find them.

  A story is told about this on our world. It is part of the age-old traditions of Muslim lands, and reached English-speaking countries in the 1930s through a play by Somerset Maugham and a novel by John O’Hara. It tells of a servant who was buying food for his master’s household in the street market in Baghdad one morning when someone jostled him, and he turned to find himself face to face with Death, who made an abrupt gesture. Terrified, the servant ran home, begged his master for the loan of a horse, and galloped off to Samarra, which is about 75 miles away. The master then went to the market-place himself, and there he too saw Death. ‘Why did you raise your hand to threaten my servant?’ said he. ‘That was no threat,’ answered Death, ‘only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him here in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’

  Something similar happened once on the Disc, as we learn from The Colour of Magic, when Rincewind jostled a tall dark figure in the bazaar of Ankh-Morpork, and was told I WAS EXPECTING TO MEET THEE IN PSEPHOPOLOLIS. Actually, it turned out to be a misunderstanding.

  On both the Disc and the Earth Death manifests himself to humans and humanoid races (e.g. dwarfs) as a very tall human skeleton, every bone pleasantly polished, with remote but piercing points of blue light in his eye sockets. His deep resonant voice has been compared to many things of a funereal nature, such as the clang of the leaden doors of a crypt when slammed deep underground, yet no comparison really does it justice. He wears a hooded robe woven of absolute darkness. Normally he carries a scythe, but also owns a sword for use on kings; both weapons have shimmering semi-transparent ice-blue blades, for separating souls from bodies. There is usually an hourglass hidden in the folds of his robe; this is a lifetimer, which measures the life-span of the person he is about to visit.

  On Earth there are some countries in whose languages ‘death’ is a feminine word (la mort, morte, muerta). This has no effect at all on the manifested appearance of Death in those lands. In any case, it takes a calm, well-trained eye to tell a male from a female skeleton, and black hooded robes are unisex attire.

  There was a time when Death thought it polite to appear in whatever form the client expected – at least, for human clients; what shape he assumes when manifesting himself to, say, a sea anemone, a mayfly, or a nettle is beyond conjecture. However, he discovered that most people have no clear expectations at all, probably because in their hearts they never really believe they will die. And those who do think they know what they will see have some pretty strange ideas. For example, King Teppicymon XXVII, Pharaoh of Djelibeybi, found that the hooded robe lacked a certain something:

  ‘I understood that Death came as a three-headed giant scarab beetle,’ said the king.

  Death shrugged. WELL, NOW YOU KNOW.

  ‘What’s that thing in your hand?’

  THIS? IT’S A SCYTHE.

  ‘Strange-looking object, isn’t it?’ said the pharaoh. ‘I thought Death carried the Flail of Mercy and the Reaping Hook of Justice.’

  Death appeared to think about this. WHAT IN? he said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT A GIANT BEETLE?

  ‘Ah. In his mandibles, I suppose. But I think he’s got arms in one of the frescoes in the palace. Seems a bit silly, really, now I come to tell someone. I mean, a giant beetle with arms. And the head of an ibis, I seem to recall.’ [Pyramids]

  There have been times and places on Earth where Death would have found it just as tricky to fit in with his local image. For the Ancient Egyptians, he would have had to appear as Anubis, a man with the head of a jackal or wild dog; for certain South American peoples, as a cross between a jaguar and an eagle; for some Hindus, as the ferocious many-armed goddess Kali, adorned with garlands of skulls. So he decided to stick to what he liked best, using the costume and attributes he had been gradually collecting over the past 2,000 years or so.

  His starting-point was the Bible, specifically the sixth chapter of the Apocalypse (or Book of Revelation), which speaks of a ‘rider on a pale horse’ whose name was Death, wearing a crown, and flourishing a sword. The same passage mentions three other riders as his companions, War, Famine, and Pestilence. On the Discworld too, in suitable circumstances, he teams up with them and they appear together as the Four Horsemen of the Apocralypse, as a sure sign that the world is just about to end – probably. Some of their doings on the Disc are recorded in The Light Fantastic, Sourcery, Interesting Times, and Thief of Time; and on Earth in Good Omens.

  Death liked the idea of a horse, and got himself a handsome white steed named Binky, who is real flesh-and-blood, though capable of galloping in the air and across the dimensions as well as on land. He did briefly experiment with skeletal horses, but found bits kept dropping off; and fiery horses, which tended to burn down the stable. Binky is far more practical, and more reliable. He is well fed and well groomed (Death strongly disapproves of artists who represent the Pale Horse as a mangy, starving creature). From time to time he requires new horseshoes, and on these occasions Death takes him to the best farrier on the Disc, Jason Ogg of Lancre. Jason’s gift as a craftsman is that he can shoe anything, anything, that anyone brings him – a horse, a goose, a unicorn, an ant. But the price to be paid for the gift is that he must shoe anything anyone brings. So on certain nights, when he hears a certain knock and a certain voice, he does as his father and grandfather did before him: he puts on a blindfold, and shoes what must from the feel of it be the finest horse in the world – and certainly the most docile.

  As
far as is known, Death has not made similar arrangements on Earth. But apparently the Devil did, once. It’s said that there was once a blacksmith at Keenthorne in Shropshire who was so proud of his skill that he boasted that ‘if the Devil himself came to his forge he would shoe his horse for him, aye, and shoe him to rights too!’ And then, one dark midnight, a traveller on a great black horse arrived, demanding that it be shod – and the smith noted with horror that the rider himself had a hoof. The smith ran off in a panic and roused the parson, begging him for help. The parson answered that he must fulfil his boast, but should accept no payment, for that would be selling himself to the Devil. So the smith did shoe the Devil’s horse, most efficiently, but though the Devil repeatedly offered him good payment, he would take nothing. The Devil and his horse vanished in a flash of fire.

  To return to Death. In the course of the Middle Ages he became dissatisfied with the idea of himself as the crowned and sword-wielding Rider of the Pale Horse. He disliked the idea of kingship, even though it appealed to many artists and poets – to Milton, for example, who in Paradise Lost describes Death as a dark, faceless but menacing shadow:

  What seemed his head

  The likeness of a kingly crown had on.

  On one occasion on the Discworld, Death (who at the time had become more or less human and was calling himself Bill Door) encountered an entity which had taken on his role, and had adopted much the same wraith-like manifestation as Milton described. This filled him with fury: