Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion ... So Far

by Terry Pratchett

  He probably didn’t like hitting people. It was just something he did. According to the dictates of an obscure potato-venerating religion, vaguely remembered from a troubled childhood, it would all be all right in the end if he still had a potato and was sorry for everything bad that he’d done. It may have worked. [TT]

  Tumult, Gammer. A witch who taught Granny Weatherwax. But Granny also claims to have been taught by Nanny Gripes. Given the impatient nature of Esme Weatherwax, the truth of the matter is that she probably pumped all the local witches for as much instruction as they could give her. [ER]

  Turnipseed, Adrian. (See DRONGO, BIG MAD.) [SM]

  Turtle Movement. A secret society in OMNIA which believes that the Disc is flat and is carried through space on the backs of four elephants and a giant turtle. Their secret recognition saying is ‘The Turtle Moves’. Their secret sign is a left-hand fist with the right hand, palm extended, brought down on it. Most of the senior officials of the Omnian church are members of the ‘movement’, but since they all wear hoods and are sworn to absolute secrecy each thinks he is the only one. [SG]

  Turtle, the Great. (See A’TUIN, GREAT.)

  Turvey, Hubert. Nephew of Topsy LAVISH and inventor of the Glooper. Rightly or wrongly, Hubert is one of those names you put a shape to. There may well be tall, slim Huberts, but this Hubert is shaped like a proper Hubert, which is to say, stubby and plump. He has red hair, unusual in the standard model Hubert. It grows thickly, straight up from his head, like the bristles of a brush; about five inches up, someone has apparently cut it short with the aid of shears and a spirit level. You could stand a cup and saucer on it. Hubert wears a long white coat, with a breast pocket full of pencils. [MM]

  Twoflower. The Disc’s first tourist. Originally, he was a small, bald and skinny man, but he soon put on weight if not hair under the influence of Ankh-Morpork’s robust cuisine. He had false teeth and wore glasses, which led many of the Disc’s inhabitants to assume that he had four eyes (both of these innovations were subsequently very popular in Ankh-Morpork).

  He came from BES PELARGIC, the major seaport of the AGATEAN EMPIRE on the COUNTERWEIGTH CONTINENT, where he used to work at a desk job.

  Twoflower was oddly dressed in knee-length breeches and a shirt in a violent and vivid conflict of colours. Central to his personal philosophy was the very strong belief that no harm could come to him because he was a visitor. A likeable, friendly and innocent man, his travels around the continent were marked by mayhem and sudden death. The fact that he was the original owner of the LUGGAGE has much to do with this. By the time he was encountered in Interesting Times, he had matured a little and grown a wispy beard, but still had that big, beaming, trusting smile. His wife was killed by soldiers, leaving him with their two daughters, Lotus Blossom and Pretty Butterfly. [COM, LF, IT]

  Tyrant, The. The elected ruler of EPHEBE. The current ruler is a little fat man with skinny legs, which gives the impression that an egg is hatching upside down. [SG]

  Überwald. Large kingdom, some five or six times the size of the Sto Plains. Its florid crest incorporates the Überwaldian double-headed eagle.

  Überwald stretches all the way to the Hub. It is so thickly forested, so creased by little mountain ranges and beset by rivers that it is largely unmapped and unexplored.

  Historically Überwald was dominated by warring factions of werewolves and vampires. In recent times, since the Diet of Bugs, dwarfs and humans play a much bigger part in the country’s organisation.

  By and large, however, it is still a series of fortified towns and fiefdoms with no real boundaries and a lot of forest in between. Historically, there has always been a great deal of feuding and no laws apart from whatever the local lords chose to enforce. Banditry is rife and large areas are still controlled by feuding vampire and werewolf clans. In many areas, dwarfs and trolls have still not resolved their old grievances. There are huge tracts of Überwald with much higher than normal background magic.

  Überwald, Angua von. See ANGUA.

  Überwald, Guye von. The Baron is ANGUA’S father and he is a werewolf. In human form, he is enormous – not fat, not tall, just built to perhaps one tenth over scale. He doesn’t so much have a face with a beard as a beard with, peeking over the top of the narrow gap between the moustache and the huge eyebrows, small remnants of a face. He makes therefore an imposing figure in his tattered dressing gown, smelling vaguely of old carpets. He has a strong handshake and a tendency to speak in short, sharp sentences. In wolf form (wolf name Silvertail) he is also large and heavy-set. The von Überwalds live in a rugged castle just outside Bonk. The family crest incorporates the Überwaldian double-headed bat and their motto is Homo Homini Lupus – Every Man is a Wolf to Another Man. [TFE]

  Überwald, Serafine von. The Baroness is ANGUA’S mother and she is a werewolf. She looks a little like Angua, but padded somewhat by the years. During the events of The Fifth Elephant, she wears a long loose green gown which is very old-fashioned by Ankh-Morpork standards. She is a bit of a snob and, as Mme Serafine Soxe-Bloonberg of Genua, she went to finishing school with Lady Sybil Ramkin (now VIMES). Her wolf name is Yellowfang. [TFE]

  Überwald, Wolfgang von. Wolf was Angua’s brother. He was a strong werewolf. In wolf form, he had pale gold hair like a sort of mane – he looked a little like ANGUA, but heavier set. As a human, he was a heavily-built man with long blond hair growing thickly on his head and down his shoulders, too. He liked to be naked, and to exercise regularly to demonstrate his fitness. When he did wear clothes, he favoured black uniforms with nickel insignia depicting wolf heads biting lightning. Wolf was a murderous idiot who believed that werewolves were born to rule. He led a movement with these beliefs and their banner was a red flag with, in the middle, a wolf’s head, its mouth full of stylised flashes of lightning. Even his father was afraid of him and he was known to have killed one sister (Elsa) and driven his brother Andrei away because they were not classic biomorph werewolves but YENNORKS.

  He was a head-butting, eye-gouging, down-and-dirty bastard who was good at thinking ahead and with a delight in ambushes. He was a traditionalist when it came to nastiness. [TFE]

  Underschaft, Dr. Chorus Master at the Ankh-Morpork OPERA HOUSE. A single-minded old man in half-moon spectacles who believed that music is all that matters in opera, not the acting, or the shape of the singers. Had a fairly final encounter with the Opera Ghost. [M!!!!!]

  Unggue. Goblin religion. The goblin experience of the world is the cult or perhaps religion of Unggue. In short, it is a remarkably complex resurrection-based religion founded on the sanctity of bodily secretions. Its central tenet runs as follows: everything that is expelled from a goblin’s body was clearly once part of them and should, therefore, be treated with reverence and stored properly so that it can be entombed with its owner in the fullness of time. In the meantime the material is stored in Unggue pots, remarkable creations of which I shall speak later.

  A moment’s distasteful thought will tell us that this could not be achieved by any creature, unless in possession of great wealth, considerable storage space and compliant neighbours.

  Therefore, in reality, most goblins observe the Unggue Had – what one might term the common and lax form of Unggue – which encompasses earwax, finger- and toenail clippings, and snot. Water, generally speaking, is reckoned not Unggue, but something which goes through the body without ever being part of it: they reason that there is no apparent difference in the water before and after, as it were (which sadly shines a light on the freshness of the water they encounter in their underground lairs). Similarly, faeces are considered to be food that has merely undergone a change of state. Surprisingly, teeth are of no interest to the goblins, who look on them as a type of fungus, and they appear to attach no importance to hair, of which, it has to be said, they seldom have very much.

  The Unggue is stored in Unggue Pots. These are traditionally crafted by the goblin itself, out of anything from precious minerals to leather, wood or bone. A
mong the former are some of the finest eggshell-thin containers ever found in the world. The plundering of goblin settlements by treasure-hunters in search of these, and the retaliation by the goblins themselves, has coloured human–goblin relationships even to the present day.

  Goblins live on the edge, often because they have been driven there. When nothing else can survive, they do. Their universal greeting is, apparently, ‘Hang’ which means ‘Survive’. Sometimes dreadful crimes are laid at their door. Those who live their lives where life hangs by less than a thread understand the dreadful algebra of necessity, which has no mercy. That is the time when the women make the Unggue pot called ‘returning’, the most beautiful of all the pots, carved with little flowers and washed with tears. [SN]

  Ungulant, S.T. Ungulant the Anchorite. Sevrian Thaddeus Ungulant – hence ‘St’. A saint, possibly of the Omnian church but probably just a generic saint. He lives on a cartwheel nailed to the top of a slim pole in the desert between EPHEBE and OM.

  S.T. Ungulant is a very thin man with long hair and beard and skin almost blackened by the desert sun. He wears a loincloth, and he has an imaginary friend called Angus. He is in fact almost completely and utterly mad, due to the sun and a continuous diet of the strange desert mushrooms. But the tiny core of reason left within him is aware that being completely insane is the only way to survive the desert existence. Besides, it means that he can enjoy the nebulous sumptuous meals and insubstantial carnal delights put before him by the small gods that swarm in the desert. His belief in all of them is possibly the only thing that keeps him alive. [SG]

  Unseen University. Motto: NVNC ID VIDES, NVNC NE VIDES. Coat of arms: a livre des sortilèges, attaché en cuivre, sur un chapeau pointu, on a field, azure.

  There is a UU scarf, basically burgundy and midnight blue with some tasteless thin yellow and purple stripes. The stripes are extremely symbolic, although not of anything very specific. The University likes to pretend that their eye-watering clash is an attempt to portray OCTARINE,15 but in reality it graphically illustrates the importance of not letting someone like the current Bursar choose a colour scheme after eating half a bottle of dried frog pills. The stripes have been retained anyway, because of Tradition.

  UU is the Disc’s premier college of magic, whose campus is the occult, if no longer the actual, centre of Ankh-Morpork.

  The University was founded in AM 1282 (the city count at the time) by Alberto MALICH, but Ankh-Morpork dating is always suspect; suffice to say that it was some 2,000 years before the present. The aim was to force some sort of regulation on wizardry, which at that time was quite chaotic, and to permit the existence of an institution that would allow one wizard to meet another without immediately endeavouring to blow his head off with magical fire, as was then the case.

  Like all really old universities, it is hard to tell where the University begins and the city ends, and in any case the size of UU can only be determined by reference to the kind of physics that you have to be a drunken physicist to understand.

  In a purely mundane sense the main buildings occupy a large part of the river frontage between the ANKH and SATOR SQUARE, with various outbuildings stretching out as far as Esoteric Street. But a mere floor plan would be quite misleading; UU has rooms and floors where logic says they simply could not exist. It has been a home of magic for so long that this is now part of the architectural inventory, like cement.

  There are two ways of getting admitted to UU: achieve some great work of benefit to magic, such as the recovery of an ancient and powerful relic or the invention of a totally new spell, or be sponsored by a senior and respected wizard, after a suitable period of apprenticeship. The eighth son of an eighth son has a right to demand and receive a place.

  Er . . .

  All right, three ways – actual entry can be achieved by anyone of either sex willing to scrub and cook and make beds.

  Er . . .

  Four ways, in fact – possibly the most famous entrance to UU is via the alleyway between the observatory and the Backs, where a few loose bricks in the wall can be removed to make an informal ladder that has been used by students for hundreds of years. Whatever its original name, the alley has been known for years as Scholars’ Entry, which in the hands of those inclined to the obvious is always good for a snigger.

  With one exception (during the Archchancellorship of CUTANGLE), UU has never admitted women. Usually this is said to be on the grounds of plumbing problems, but probably the real reason is an unspoken dread that women, if allowed to mess around with wizardry, would probably be embarrassingly good at it. And less likely to do what they’re told.

  There is theoretically no age limit on students, since obviously it is better to have anyone with magical talent under the aegis of the University than, er, not under it. The normal age of entrants is around sixteen, although in earlier days it was a lot younger and undergraduates as young as four were enrolled. These days, however, few people at UU undertake magical practice clutching a woolly lamb.

  WEALTH

  UU is immensely wealthy, in a nebulous and threadbare kind of way. It owns large sections of Ankh-Morpork, particularly around Sator Square and also in the SHADES, which grew up as a service centre for the new university (a safe distance downstream). However, most of the rents are fixed and tend to be of the half-a-groat-every-Hogswatchnight variety, and the leases are either no longer decipherable or have long since mouldered away.

  Generally speaking, the University survives from day to day by voluntary donations, usually in kind. (If you were a greengrocer, living a few streets away from what you perceive as a group of fat and slightly deranged old men sitting on enough raw magic to blow a hole right through Reality and out the other side, then wouldn’t you see they got the occasional cartload of potatoes?)

  TOWN AND GOWN: UNSEEN UNIVERSITY AND ANKH-MORPORK

  As the University is well aware, Ankh-Morpork owes its entire existence to the presence of Unseen. The Shades were the core of the original city but, as the city began to develop its own momentum, the urban sprawl soon encompassed the villages now known as Dolly Sisters and Nap Hill.

  Not unnaturally, the early ARCHCHANCELLOR resented any suggestion of control by the growing civil power and there were various trials of strength in the first few centuries, which usually ended with someone being turned into some kind of amphibian. Eventually an understanding was reached: UU would be left in peace to manage its affairs on the transtemporal level, and citizens would be allowed to go to bed the same shape as they were when they woke up that morning, whatever shape that had been.

  Strictly speaking, the laws of Ankh-Morpork do not apply within the walls of the University even now, but this is nothing remarkable since they seldom apply outside the walls either. Wizards misbehaving in the city might be locked up by the WATCH for the night, but will then be handed over to the Archchancellors’ Court upon payment of a small fine.

  A list of offences under the rules of the Court, and their attendant punishments, includes:

  Acceptable Waggishness 50p

  High Spirits 60p

  Being a Young Rip 75p

  Having a Fling 75p

  Sowing Wild Oats 33p per oat

  Being found Drunk 80p

  Being found Rascally Drunk 90p

  Being found Objectionably Sober $1.00

  Of course, where there is law there has to be crime, and where there is a court there must be policemen.

  So it is at UU. Although these days they are really little more than porters, the University does have its ‘policemen’, known as the Bledlows (origin unknown) or ‘lobsters’. They tend to be heavy-set, elderly men with nevertheless a good turn of speed and the sort of head that is made to wear a bowler hat. They are of limited yet highly focused intellect; their whole being is founded on the certain belief that all students are guilty of everything.

  They are generally ex-soldiers or watchmen and their traditional cry is ‘I know who you are!’

  UNIVERSIT
Y ORGANISATION

  Despite appearances, UU is not simply a college of magic. There are faculties of medicine, minor religions and lore (history), for example. But these are very small and, in any case, University rules require that faculty members must have trained initially as wizards.

  UU government is headed by the Archchancellor, who also chairs the College Council, or Hebdomadal Board (from the Latatian hebes – sluggish or stupid, and domo – to tame or conquer. Hence the purpose of the College Council is to conquer stupidity. It is, say critics, beginning this activity by making a very careful and personal study of the enemy – really getting under its skin, as it were).

  The Council traditionally consisted of the heads of the eight orders of wizardry. However, since the events chronicled at the end of The Light Fantastic (when the University lost all eight heads but gained some incredibly lifelike statues, most of them now decorating the wall overlooking Sator Square), the ex-officio membership of the heads of orders has ceased and the Council is now directly appointed by the Archchancellor.

  The eight orders, each in theory headed by an eighth-level wizard, are:

  The Ancient and Truly Original Sages of the Unbroken Circle

  The Hoodwinkers

  Mrs Widgery’s Lodgers

  The Ancient and Truly Original Brothers of the Silver Star

  The Venerable Council of Seers

  The Sages of the Unknown Shadow

  The Order of Midnight

  The Last Order, also known as The Other Order

  A new student may apply to join any one of these orders, which combine the functions of ‘houses’ in English public schools with something of the ‘fraternities’ in American colleges. Despite their names, most of them are not at all ancient – there have always been orders, but their names have been lost or mislaid or muddled by wars and time. The current crop are the result of a deliberate ‘re-creation’ of the orders less than a century ago. Apart, that is, from Mrs Widgery’s Lodgers, which is as old as the University; in the very early days of UU the TOWER OF ART (then the only building on campus) was not big enough to hold all the students and they were boarded at the house of Mrs Widgery, on the site of what is now New Hall.