Secrets of the Wee Free Men and Discworld

by Linda Washington

  In Discworld you find the “iridescent women”117 also known as the Sisters in Witches Abroad. Granny Weatherwax spots them as the snakes they really are. You might call them a Sisterhood of the Snakes, like the Brotherhood of the Wolf. With the pair of them, we couldn’t help thinking of Si and Am, who created havoc in their household. But unlike those cats, these sisters meet the “mongoose” that is Magrat, who goes all “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” on them (if you’ll pardon our Rudyard Kipling).

  A talking snake makes an appearance in Sourcery, when Rincewind is cast into a snake pit—usually the fate of fantasy heroes, even would-be ones like Rincewind. (Think of the snake pit into which Indiana Jones falls in Raiders of the Lost Ark.) And lastly, there’s a rumor that Vetinari has a snake pit in which prisoners are thrown. But that’s-s-s probably just a rumor.

  Hungry, Hungry Hippos

  If you saw Fantasia (the first one, from 1940), you know that Disney’s “Dance of the Hours” (composed by Amilcare Ponchielli) featured dancing hippos. Très chic. In Discworld, hippos play an important part as well, thanks to Roderick and Keith (Feet of Clay) —heraldic hippos of Ankh-Morpork who also appear on a stamp (Going Postal). Only in Discworld … . And to think some people prefer lions or dragons on their coats of arms.

  Quoth the Raven, Nevermore

  The Corvidae species of birds, of which ravens and crows figure prominently, are seldom birds people in stories want to have around. Isn’t it always the evil wizards who have a crow hanging from their shoulders or use crows to do their bidding (Saruman)? Even in Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous poem, the raven is a figure of mystery. But Pratchett, as usual, takes even an archetypal harbinger of doom and has fun with it. Quoth does come with death, since he is the self-proclaimed mouthpiece and noble steed of the Death of Rats and seems fixated on eyeballs. But at least he works for the heroes (the Death of Rats, Susan).

  If you happen to read The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, you read of another Quoth—Kvothe to be exact. But he isn’t a raven.

  The Dogs of War

  By this we mean the grimhounds from The Wee Free Men, rather than the 1981 flick directed by John Irvin (based on the book by Frederick Forsyth). This makes the huge phosphorous-dusted hound in The Hound of the Baskervilles (Arthur Conan Doyle) look like something out of Scooby-Doo. Come to think of it, that hound business was a precursor to the unmaskings in Scooby-Doo. But we digress … . Getting back to the grimhounds, maybe in your mind you picture the most vicious dog you can ever imagine—massive, snarling, a super-size junkyard dog with a hangover. The grimhounds have a resemblance to the hound in Doyle’s masterwork, with their “eyes of fire,”118 massive build, and black fur. But the ghostly grimhounds’ flaming eyes are the real thing, unlike those of the hound in Doyle’s book. And their orange eyebrows? To die for.

  The grimhounds are so fearsome, they get an honorable mention in Going Postal as one of the items you shouldn’t ask about. Don’t believe us? Look at chapter 2 of that book.

  Amped-up Amphibians

  In many fairy tales, frogs or toads talk and turn out to be princes or some other titled person in disguise. There’s “The Frog Prince” (major clue there) of Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales, “The Princess and the Frog” in The Door in the Hedge (Robin McKinley), and Gogu the faithful frog friend (guess what he really is?) in Wildwood Dancing (Juliet Marillier). Unlike the master of Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows, the toad in The Wee Free Men wasn’t always a toad. He isn’t a prince, however—he’s a lawyer. Well, we won’t touch that one. You can insert your own joke. But another amphibian hits the royalty circuit—the frog Duc of Witches Abroad. Too bad he’s a pawn of Lily Weatherwax and meets up with a zombie on a quest for revenge.

  Staggering About

  The hunting of the white stag has been the key to an adventure in or out of Faerie in many a story. Think of the ethereal White Stag the Pevensies discover in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which leads them out of Narnia. Pwyll, son of Dyyed, a prince in one of the stories of the Mabinogion, tries to steal a stag from Arawn, a King of Annwvyn—one of the kings of the Otherworld—and winds up having to serve him as punishment for his impertinence. Robin McKinley carries on the tradition in her short story “The Hunting of the Hind,” in The Door in the Hedge, by showing a hunt that nearly kills a prince.

  The stag Tiffany sees in The Wee Free Men isn’t graceful or ethereal. It’s a wild animal that happens to be part of the nightmarish, wintry landscape of Fairyland like the Bumblebee women (the big women with the little wings). It’s also a signal to Tiffany that she’s not in Kansas anymore.

  Unintelligent Unicorns

  We’ll end this chapter with unicorns. Picture a unicorn running blithely through a forest or sniffing buttercups. That’s their usual posture in books. Pratchett and Mercedes Lackey (well, in her 500 Kingdoms series, at least) have a similar idea in that the unicorns of their worlds are rather unintelligent, vapid even. In Lords and Ladies, the unicorn is a wild beast that can’t talk and doesn’t seem to want to heal anything, but instead kills like a cornered animal. This is contrary to the way unicorns are usually portrayed in fantasy—you know, as majestic, magical talking beasts dripping with wisdom, which kill only when threatened by evil beings. They would prefer to heal, rather than kill. Like elves, they’re piercingly beautiful and mysterious. Think of the female unicorn—you know, the unnamed one (except when she’s given a fake name—Lady Amalthea) who searched for other unicorns in The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (the novel and screenplay) or the one foolish Princess Lily dares to touch to the detriment of the world in Legend, the old Tom Cruise movie from 1985. But in Discworld, you don’t want to get too close to one. And you can’t, unless you’re like Granny Weatherwax and certainly not Nanny Ogg. (And the answer to that riddle is … )

  In Obsidian Trilogy, the unicorns Shalkan and Calmeren have cloven hooves and a deerlike appearance, as does the unicorn in The Last Unicorn. What we know about the unicorn in Lords and Ladies is that he is huge and heavy like a horse, rather than deerlike.

  Hmm. Maybe we can make a case for The Sound of Music, instead of Les Mis. You know how the Sound of Music song goes, “Do—a deer?” Picture the unicorn … .

  Okay. Maybe not.

  Part Three

  Power, Police, and Paraphernalia: The Way Things Work in Discworld

  14

  It’s Magic

  Oh ho, ho, it’s magic, you know

  Never believe it’s not so.119

  EIGHT WONDERS OF DISCWORLD

  There were seven wonders of the ancient world: the Great Pyramid in Giza, the Temple of Artemis, the Statue of Zeus (Olympia), the Hanging Gardens in Babylon, the Mausoleum of Maussollos, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse/Pharos of Alexandria. They were monoliths to human ingenuity. Yet only one exists today—the Great Pyramid.

  Imagine what it was like to see those wonders. Seeing anything amazing always begs the question, “How’d they do that?”

  A place like Discworld is beyond one of the wonders of the world, because it is magical and magic is the very stuff of the Disc—part of the fabric of daily life. And isn’t magic the reason why we read fantasy—the wonder of it all? So let’s take a sightseeing tour of Discworld to see the eight magic wonders of that world. Why only eight? As we said before, eight is an important number in Discworld. Better bring a camera. You don’t want to miss these shots.

  DISC-CLAIMER:

  Plot spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk. Although we picked the following, you may have a different idea of the magic wonders of Discworld. Also, their order does not indicate order of importance.

  1. The Chalk

  The Chalk? you may balk. You may have expected us to say something like Fairyland, the Fairy Queen’s realm, since Tiffany Aching takes a journey through it in The Wee Free Men. But Fairyland is part of the Otherworld, which tries to intrude upon Tiffany’s world in The Wee Free Men. We’ll get to that in a minute. Meanwhile, we picked the Chalk
because at first glance it might seem like an ordinary region akin to a quaint English farming community. But consider the fact that Miss Tick talked about the impossibility of growing a witch on chalk. However, the Chalk not only produced Tiffany, but Sarah Aching (Granny Aching) as well.

  In “Cult Classic,” an essay in Meditations on Middle-Earth, Pratchett remarked that the land was very much a character in The Lord of the Rings. He could tell that by the loving details Tolkien added to make the setting prominent. In The Wee Free Men, Pratchett takes that aspect a step further by making the Chalk actually rise up against the Fairy Queen. Like we said, the Chalk is a magical wonder.

  2. The Dancers

  We’re probably back in your good graces with this selection. The Dancers, a ring of stones up in the Ramtops, figure heavily in Lords and Ladies. It’s like Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, or the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney, Scotland—the kind of Neolithic trilithons in existence for thousands of years; a place where stories start and mysteries abound. You can find stone formations like this all around the United Kingdom. Legends are built around such places.

  We can’t help thinking of Celtic mythology, particularly the Mabinogion—the myths of Wales—which contains stories like “Pwyll son of Dyyed,” “Branwen the daughter of Llyr,” “Manawyddan the son of Llyr,” and “Math the son of Mathonwy.” In these stories, white stags run about, hunted by Welsh kings, and magical wars happen. You know, the usual Otherworld happenings.

  In Discworld, the Dancers are a gateway to Fairyland, which is a nightmare place, as The Wee Free Men clearly shows. (We have to wonder if the Dancers are the trilithons Tiffany sees at a distance from the Feegles’ mound in The Wee Free Men.)

  Trilithons such as the Dancers are also “weather computers” operated by druids in the days before Doppler radar, as we learn in Lords and Ladies and The Light Fantastic. Belafon, the druid and “computer hardware consultant”120 in The Light Fantastic, operates a piece of rock “software.” This is fitting, since the real-life Druids were known to frequent stone circles.

  3. Holy Wood

  Holy Wood is the Hollywood of Discworld captured in Moving Pictures, where movie magic happens literally. But like most of the seven wonders of the ancient world, this is a place you can’t visit anymore. It’s buried under tons of rubble, like Pompeii in the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in A.D. 79 or the fall of the mythical cities of Atlantis or Númenor in Tolkien’s trilogy. Like most places with a thin line between reality and the “twilight zone” of Faerie (the fairy world), what you see is sometimes difficult to believe.

  This background look at the Discworld “clicks” is all about the silent movie era, which began just before the turn of the last century and lost steam in 1929. During this era, such actresses as Theda Bara, Clara Bow, and Mary Pickford, and actors such as Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton reigned supreme. But since Moving Pictures is an homage, you can find allusions to several different movie genres as well as to silent and “talkie” movies, such as Gone with the Wind (Pratchett’s Blown Away), Lassie, Conan the Barbarian (Pratchett’s Cohen the Barbarian), The Gold Rush (Pratchett’s The Golde Rushe), The Gold Diggers of 1933 (Pratchett’s The Golde Diggers of 1457), The Third Man (Pratchett’s The Third Gnome), The Fog, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, King Kong, Valley of the Dolls (Pratchett’s Valley of the Trolls), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and others.

  But beyond the movie magic is the horror of the Chaos-causing “Others” who want to take over Holy Wood and the world. See, that’s what happens when the line between reality and the nightmarish Otherworld is crossed by the unwary (The Grudge/Grudge 2 or any other horror film). Sadly, many places around the Disc are gateways to the Dungeon Dimension.

  The Others are not to be confused with the Chaos-causing “Them” of Equal Rites—another group out to take over the world or even the Chaos-causing “Them” that Nanny Ogg uses as a euphemism for the Lords and Ladies (the elves) in Lords and Ladies.

  4. Jason Ogg’s Smithy

  A much happier place is Jason Ogg’s smithy. Jason Ogg is part of the legion of fairy-tale blacksmith/farriers. Amazing things can happen at a blacksmith’s forge. In Smith of Wooton Major, by J. R. R. Tolkien, a boy who swallows a fairy star tucked away in a slice of cake later becomes a blacksmith of incredible skill and a traveler in the land of Faery. In Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley, Narl is the fairy prince turned blacksmith—nearly a physical impossibility since fairies can’t stand the touch of iron. The Brothers Grimm included some stories involving blacksmiths, namely “The Three Brothers,” in which one brother, a blacksmith/farrier, is so skilled at his trade, he can shoe horses even while they were running. In “The Master-Smith,” 121 a folktale from one of the collections of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe (see chapter 1), a blacksmith makes a deal like the one Jabez Stone (a character in “The Devil and Daniel Webster”) makes with the devil (who is sometimes known as Death in some versions of the tale) to become the best blacksmith (and farrier) of all. Although he can’t duplicate the wonders he sees a stranger perform at the forge, he is given three wishes from the stranger (who is possibly God and travels with Saint Peter) to help him trick the devil, and keeps his soul.

  As Pratchett mentions in Equal Rites, “Any halfway competent blacksmith has more than a nodding acquaintance with magic, or at least likes to think he has.”122 Jason Ogg may not be the magic practitioner that wizards are or his mother, Gytha Ogg, is. But, as we learn in Lords and Ladies, he can shoe anything—magic in itself. Unlike the master-smith of that story, Jason doesn’t try to trick Death. He instead keeps to the code of being the best at anything. And being the best means you have to keep working at the trade of which you’re the best.

  5. Fourecks

  Remember The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (and the movie)—the South American country where dinosaurs still walked the Earth in a pre–Jurassic Park way? (Not to be confused with The Lost World by Michael Crichton, where dinosaurs still walk the Earth in a post–Jurassic Park way.) And how about The Island of Dr. Moreau by Jules Verne—where a mad scientist goes gene-splicing crazy by making animal-human hybrids? And then there’s Lost Horizon by James Hilton (and the movie) where two men find a Tibetan lamasery—Shangri-La—after crash landing in the Himalayas. And last but not least, there’s the ultimate castaway story: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, which inspired the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks and a volleyball named Wilson.

  Fourecks, the so-called “last continent” of Discworld, is a lost world in transition, part Shangri-La, part Crocodile Dundee (G’day, mate), part Island of Dr. Moreau and Robinson Crusoe with a touch of Aztec history and South Pacific, thanks to wizard and housekeeper castaways from Ankh-Morpork. Mrs. Whitlow can’t seem to wash those men right out of her hair, but goes for island wear with a flair. The minor god encountered by the wizards is the Dr. Moreau who makes creatures that evolve. Alas, the wizards’ utopia crumbles at the first sign of an argument and danger. But there are no T. rexes, sadly, or lamaseries—just a version of Unseen University (BU instead of UU). It’s not Shangri-La, but it’s home.

  6. The Library of Unseen University

  If you checked out those Librarian movies on cable (The Librarian: Quest for the Spear; The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines), you saw a librarian in a more active state than those at your local branch, thus proving that a library can hold wonders beyond those in books.

  The library at Unseen University is one of the most magical and dangerous places on the Disc, thanks to L-space and such magical books as The Summoning of Dragons by Tubal de Malachite, which is a point of contention in Guards! Guards! and Necrotelicomnicon—an evil book by Achmed the Mad, a Klatchian Necromancer. Supposedly, every book ever written or yet to be written appears in this library. (We wonder if this book is there.) In L-space, creatures such as the Kickstool crabs and the Thesaurus loiter. The Librarian is the steward of this realm and one who handles the books like a lion tam
er.

  We can’t help thinking of Merlin in The Sword in the Stone, with his magical library of books, again some of which hadn’t yet been written. The Beast in Robin McKinley’s novel Beauty, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast story, has a similar impossible library.

  7. The Post Office of Ankh-Morpork

  A post office isn’t exactly what you would call a place of magic, not in our world anyway, where years seem to pass while you wait in line and the check’s always in the mail. (Maybe that is magic.) But magic happens at the Post Office of Ankh-Morpork. And we’re not just talking about the sorting engine created by Bloody Stupid Johnson (see chapter 19). We mean the mystical link between the Postmaster, Moist von Lipwig, and the mail. He can hear the letters speak. (But “can he hear the letters sing” à la Les Mis?)

  Moist von Lipwig is no Henry Chinaski, the disgruntled postal clerk in Post Office, an autobiographical novel by German writer Charles Bukowski; yet they share the same desire to get out of Dodge. But Pratchett adds a touch of mythology with Moist’s Hermes-like gold getup, not to mention the visions Moist sees of the Post Office of the past. Kind of reminds us of the ghosts Jack Torrance saw in the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, the 1977 novel by Stephen King, which came out in film form in 1980 and as a miniseries in 1997. Of course, Jack was going crazy when he saw the ghosts, and wound up trying to kill his family. But it brings up a point about atmosphere. Just as being in the hotel changed Jack for the worse, the Post Office helps change Moist for the better. Now, that’s magic.