A Slip of the Keyboard

by Terry Pratchett

  I want to talk about magic, how magic is portrayed in fantasy, how fantasy literature has in fact contributed to a very distinct image of magic, and perhaps most importantly how the Western world in general has come to accept a very precise and extremely suspect image of magic users.

  I’d better say at the start that I don’t actually believe in magic any more than I believe in astrology, because I’m a Taurean and we don’t go in for all that weirdo occult stuff.

  But a couple of years ago I wrote a book called The Colour of Magic. It had some boffo laughs. It was an attempt to do for the classical fantasy universe what Blazing Saddles did for Westerns. It was also my tribute to twenty-five years of fantasy reading, which started when I was thirteen and read Lord of the Rings in twenty-five hours. That damn book was a half brick in the path of the bicycle of my life. I started reading fantasy books at the kind of speed you can only manage in your early teens. I panted for the stuff.

  I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.

  Then Tolkien changed all that. I went mad for fantasy. Comics, boring Norse sagas, even more boring Victorian fantasy … I’d better explain to younger listeners that in those days fantasy was not available in every toy shop and bookstall, it was really a bit like sex: you didn’t know where to get the really dirty books, so all you could do was paw hopefully through Amateur Photographer magazines looking for artistic nudes.

  When I couldn’t get it—heroic fantasy, I mean, not sex—I hung around the children’s section in the public libraries, trying to lure books about dragons and elves to come home with me. I even bought and read all the Narnia books in one go, which was bit like a surfeit of Communion wafers. I didn’t care anymore.

  Eventually the authorities caught up with me and kept me in a dark room with small doses of science fiction until I broke the habit and now I can walk past a book with a dragon on the cover and my hands hardly sweat at all.

  But a part of my mind remained plugged into what I might call the consensus fantasy universe. It does exist, and you all know it. It has been formed by folklore and Victorian romantics and Walt Disney, and E. R. Eddison and Jack Vance and Ursula Le Guin and Fritz Leiber—hasn’t it? In fact those writers and a handful of others have very closely defined it. There are now, to the delight of parasitical writers like me, what I might almost call “public domain” plot items. There are dragons, and magic users, and far horizons, and quests, and items of power, and weird cities. There’s the kind of scenery that we would have had on earth if only God had had the money.

  To see the consensus fantasy universe in detail you need only look at the classical Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games. They are mosaics of every fantasy story you’ve ever read.

  Of course, the consensus fantasy universe is full of clichés, almost by definition. Elves are tall and fair and use bows, dwarfs are small and dark and vote Labour. And magic works. That’s the difference between magic in the fantasy universe and magic here. In the fantasy universe a wizard points his fingers and all these sort of blue glittery lights come out and there’s a sort of explosion and some poor soul is turned into something horrible.

  Anyway, if you are in the market for easy laughs you learn that two well-tried ways are either to trip up a cliché or take things absolutely literally. So in the sequel to The Colour of Magic, which is being rushed into print with all the speed of continental drift, you’ll learn what happens, for example, if someone like me gets hold of the idea that megalithic stone circles are really complex computers. What you get is, you get druids walking around talking a sort of computer jargon and referring to Stonehenge as the miracle of the silicon chunk.

  While I was plundering the fantasy world for the next cliché to pull a few laughs from, I found one which is so deeply ingrained that you hardly notice it is there at all. In fact it struck me so vividly that I actually began to look at it seriously.

  That’s the generally very clear division between magic done by women and magic done by men.

  Let’s talk about wizards and witches. There is a tendency to talk of them in one breath, as though they were simply different sexual labels for the same job. It isn’t true. In the fantasy world there is no such thing as a male witch. Warlocks, I hear you cry, but it’s true. Oh, I’ll accept you can postulate them for a particular story, but I’m talking here about the general tendency. There certainly isn’t such a thing as a female wizard.

  Sorceress? Just a better class of witch. Enchantress? Just a witch with good legs. The fantasy world, in fact, is overdue for a visit from the Equal Opportunities people because, in the fantasy world, magic done by women is usually of poor quality, third-rate, negative stuff, while the wizards are usually cerebral, clever, powerful, and wise.

  Strangely enough, that’s also the case in this world. You don’t have to believe in magic to notice that.

  Wizards get to do a better class of magic, while witches give you warts.

  The archetypal wizard is of course Merlin, advisor of kings, maker of the Round Table, and the only man who knew how to work the electromagnet that released the Sword from the Stone. He is not in fact a folklore hero, because much of what we know about him is based firmly on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Life of Merlin, written in the twelfth century. Old Geoffrey was one of the world’s great writers of fantasy, nearly as good as Fritz Leiber but without that thing about cats.

  Had a lot of trouble with women, did Merlin. Morgan Le Fay—a witch—was his main enemy but he was finally trapped in his crystal cave or his enchanted forest, pick your own variation, by a female pupil. The message is clear, boys: that’s what happens to you if you let the real powerful magic get into the hands of women.

  In fact Merlin is almost being replaced as the number one wizard by Gandalf, whose magic is more suggested than apparent. I’d also like to bring in at this point a third wizard, of whom most of you must have heard—Ged, the wizard of Earthsea. I do this because Ursula Le Guin’s books give us a very well thought out, and typical, magic world. I’d suggest that they worked because they plugged so neatly into our group image of how magic is ordered. They serve to point up some of the similarities in our wizards.

  They’re all bachelors, and sexually continent. In this fantasy is in agreement with some of the standard works on magic, which make it clear that a good wizard doesn’t get his end away. (Funny, because there’s no such prohibition on witches; they can be at it like knives the whole time and it doesn’t affect their magic at all.) Wizards tend to exist in Orders, or hierarchies, and certainly the Island of Roke reminds me of nothing so much as a medieval European university, or maybe a monastery. There don’t seem to be many women around the university, although I suppose someone cleans the lavatories. There are indeed some female practitioners of magic around Earthsea, but if they are not actually evil, then they are either misguided or treated by Ged in the same way that a Harley Street obstetrician treats a local midwife.

  Can you imagine a girl trying to get a place at the University of Roke?*1 Or I can put it another way—can you imagine a female Gandalf?

  Of course I hardly need mention the true fairy-tale witches, as malevolent a bunch of crones as you could imagine. It was probably living in those gingerbread cottages. No wonder witches were always portrayed as toothless—it was living in a ninety-thousand-calorie house that did it. You’d hear a noise in the night and it’d be the local kids, eating the doorknob. According to my eight-year-old daughter’s book on wizards, a nicely illustrated little paperback available at any good bookshop, “wizards undid the harm caused by evil witches.” There it is again, the recurrent message: female magic is cheap and nasty.

  But why is all this? Is there anything in the real world that is reflected in fantasy?

  The curious thing is that the Western world at least has no very great magical tradition. You can look in
vain for any genuine wizards, or for witches for that matter. I know a large number of people who think of themselves as witches, pagans, or magicians, and the more realistic of them will admit that while they like to think that they are following a tradition laid down in the well-known Dawn of Time, they really picked it all up from books and, yes, fantasy stories. I have come to believe that fantasy fiction in all its forms has no basis in anything in the real world. I believe that witches and wizards get their ideas from their reading matter or, before that, from folklore. Fiction invents reality.

  In Western Europe, certainly, wizards are few and far between. I have been able to turn up a dozen or so, who with the 20/20 hindsight of history look like either con men or conjurors. Druids almost fit the bill, but Druids were a few lines by Julius Caesar until they were reinvented a couple of hundred years ago. All this business with the white robes and the sickles and the oneness with nature is wishful thinking. It’s significant, though. Caesar portrayed them as vicious priests of a religion based on human sacrifice, and gory to the elbows. But the PR of history has nevertheless turned them into mystical shamans, unless I mean shamen; men of peace, brewers of magic potions.

  Despite the claim that nine million people were executed for witchcraft in Europe in the three centuries from 1400—this turns up a lot in books of popular occultism and I can only say it is probably as reliable as everything else they contain—it is hard to find genuine evidence of a widespread witchcraft cult. I know a number of people who call themselves witches. No, they are witches—why should I disbelieve them? Their religion strikes me as woolly but well-meaning and at the very least harmless. Modern witchcraft is the Friends of the Earth at prayer. If it has any roots at all, they lie in the works of a former colonial civil servant and pioneer naturist called Gerald Gardner, but I suggest that it is really based in a mishmash of herbalism, sixties undirected occultism, and The Lord of the Rings.

  But I must accept that people called witches have existed. In a sense they have been created by folklore, by what I call the Flying Saucer process—you know, someone sees something they can’t or won’t explain in the sky, is aware that there is a popular history of sightings of flying saucers, so decides that what he has seen is a flying saucer, and pretty soon that “sighting” adds another few flakes to the great snowball of saucerology. In the same way, the peasant knows that witches are ugly old women who live by themselves because the folklore says so, so the local crone must be a witch. Soon everyone locally KNOWS that there is a witch in the next valley, various tricks of fate are laid at her door, and so the great myth chugs on.

  One may look in vain for similar widespread evidence of wizards. In addition to the double handful of doubtful practitioners mentioned above, half of whom are more readily identifiable as alchemists or windbags, all I could come up with was some vaguely masonic cults, like the Horseman’s Word in East Anglia. Not much for Gandalf in there.

  Now you can take the view that of course this is the case, because if there is a dirty end of the stick, then women will get it. Anything done by women is automatically downgraded. This is the view widely held—well, widely held by my wife ever since she started going to consciousness-raising group meetings—who tells me it’s ridiculous to speculate on the topic because the answer is so obvious. Magic, according to this theory, is something that only men can be really good at, and therefore any attempt by women to trespass on the sacred turf must be rigorously stamped out. Women are regarded by men as the second sex, and their magic is therefore automatically inferior. There’s also a lot of stuff about man’s natural fear of a woman with power; witches were poor women seeking one of the few routes to power open to them, and men fought back with torture, fire, and ridicule.

  I’d like to know that this is all it really is. But the fact is that the consensus fantasy universe has picked up the idea and maintains it. I incline to a different view, if only to keep the argument going, that the whole thing is a lot more metaphorical than that. The sex of the magic practitioner doesn’t really enter into it. The classical wizard, I suggest, represents the ideal of magic—everything that we hope we would be, if we had the power. The classical witch, on the other hand, with her often malevolent interest in the small beer of human affairs, is everything we fear only too well that we would in fact become.

  Oh well, it won’t win me a PhD. I suspect that via the insidious medium of picture books for children the wizards will continue to practise their high magic and the witches will perform their evil, bad-tempered spells. It’s going to be a long time before there’s room for equal rites.

  *1 Of course, if you’ve read the later Earthsea novels you can. But in 1985 that was still to come.

  ROOTS OF FANTASY

  “The Roots of Fantasy: Myth, Folklore & Archetype,” The Book of the World Fantasy Convention, ed. Shelley Dutton Berry, 1989

  I’ve adjusted this slightly and filled in some detail. The stuff about the nuclear pixie is stone-cold true.

  There’s another story about that power station that’s just waiting to happen.

  You see, power stations take a long time to build. Large items of construction plant spend their entire working life on the site, until they break down beyond hope of repair. What can you do with a clapped-out bulldozer? Well, you’ve got lots of spoil and junk anyway, and you need to landscape the place, so you bury it in a huge mound, maybe along with a couple of mechanical diggers to serve it in the Next World.

  People visiting the site now see this and think it’s the Pixie Mound. It isn’t. That is on the other side of the road, and quite unimpressive by comparison.

  But, you know, I’d like to think that on some dark and stormy night lightning will strike both mounds at the same time. It will be that slow, blue, crackling lightning that you only get in movies, of course.

  And then there will be a moment of deep silence that is broken by the muffled yet distinctive cough of a big diesel engine starting up.…

  Now, there’s a press release you wouldn’t want to miss.…

  Last year an American writer told me, “I’m afraid your books won’t sell well over here, because in your books you can’t hear the elves sing.”

  Well, it looks as though time is proving him wrong, but not hearing the elves sing is fine by me. I think they probably do far more interesting things. Besides, if the job of elves is to sing, then the elf I’m interested in is the one who’s tone-deaf. Half of the fun of writing funny fantasy is the search for clichés to bend. But enough of this …

  The roots of fantasy go far deeper than mere dragons and elves, and it’s a shame that writers now spend so much time in the consensus high fantasy universe … you know the one.

  Somewhere down towards bedrock level is the desire to make worlds which, however apparently complex, bizarre, and downright dangerous they may be, have graspable rules and probably also a moral basis. We know the third brother who gives food to the poor old woman is going to win through, we know the last desperate million-to-one chance that might just work will work, we know that any item presented to the main character in mysterious circumstances will be a major plot token. We know the humble swineherd is really the royal heir in disguise because in our hearts we know that we are, too, but in this little secondary world there are understandable imperatives and prohibitions which he, unlike us, can thread through to achieve the … well, the end of the book.

  There is a dark side. Take The Lord of the Rings, which for many of my generation was the first fantasy book they read. My adult mind says that the really interesting bit of LOTR must have been what happened afterwards—the troubles of a war-ravaged continent, the Marshall Aid scheme for Mordor, the shift in political power, the democratization of Minas Tirith. Well, that could be a funny fantasy. Or a satire. But not a straight fantasy, because it’s too close to our reality. What we want is heroes and solutions, and, yes, singing elves.

  We also know in our hearts that the universe isn’t really like that. We always have, ever sin
ce the first little circle of firelight when the shaman told us about Zog, who could kill mammoths. The world isn’t really like that but it ought to be, and if we believe it enough we might get through another night.

  Fantasy imposes order on the universe. Or, at least, it superimposes order on the universe. And it is a human order. Reality tells us that we exist for a brief, beleaguered span in a cold infinity; fantasy tells us that the figures in the foreground are important. Fantasy peoples the alien Outside, and it doesn’t matter a whole lot whether it peoples it with good guys or bad guys. Putting “Hy-Brasil” on the map is a step in the right direction, but if you can’t manage that, then “Here be Dragons” is better than nothing. Better dragons than the void.

  Right at the bottom, at the tip of the root, is the fear of the dark and the cold, but once you’ve given darkness a name you have a measure of control. Or at least you think you have, which is nearly as important.

  The desire to build structures is as strong as ever even now, among brilliant, intelligent us, who know all about Teflon and central heating. For example: reality tells me that, when I’m bored on a long journey, I stop off at a gas station and buy a cassette tape from the rack, and, since these racks are invariably stocked by someone with the musical taste and discernment of a duck egg, I generally play safe and buy a compilation album by a middle-of-the-road group I won’t actually throw up listening to. So odd corners of the car fill up with cheap compilation albums. That’s reality’s story, anyway. But I’d found myself developing the superstition that any tape cassette, if left in a car for about a fortnight, turns into a Best of Queen album. Friends say this is ridiculous. They say their cassettes turn into Bruce Springsteen compilations.

  Okay, it’s a gag. I hardly believe it at all. I’ve found the rational explanation. Like the whispering in our old house; I traced that to starlings roosting under the eaves. If you want a definition of the word susurration, it’s the noise starlings make at night. And the great beast that stood behind me, breathing heavily, while I was reading one day; someone down the street was mowing their lawn with one of those old-fashioned push mowers, and the noise was bouncing around, hitting the corner of the room behind me, and sounded, with the clatter of the cutting stroke and the freewheeling of the chain, like—well, like some horrible beast. The twenty seconds it took for me to analyse the sound without moving my head seemed to last a whole lot longer.