The Folklore of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  She is brilliant at stage-setting too. Her all-black cottage is thick with cobwebs, though there are no spiders to be seen. The black candles by the loom are set in two skulls, and dribble wax all down them; one skull is carved with the Greek word for ‘guilt’, the other with the Greek for ‘innocence’. This is the kind of thing people expect of her, and it all helps to build her reputation. But the skulls hold a secret. There is a label underneath, and it says:

  Ghastly Skull No. 1 Price $2.99

  The Boffo Novelty and Joke Shop

  No. 4, Tenth Egg Street, Ankh-Morpork

  “If it’s a Laugh … it’s a Boffo!”

  The cobwebs also came from there, and Boffo does masks and warts and green bubbling cauldrons too.

  So, where is the difference between Miss Treason buying skulls from Boffo’s catalogue and Mrs Earwig buying silver pendants and crystals at Zakzak’s shop? The point is this. Mrs Earwig thinks that power comes from elaborate devices, and to think this is to misunderstand the whole essence of the craft. But Miss Treason knows that you don’t need a wand or a shamble or even a pointy hat to be a witch, but that it helps a witch if she puts on a show. Give people what they expect to see. It’s all a form of ‘headology’, like the hat or Granny Weatherwax’s bottle of coloured water. That way, you get respect.

  Looking back on her life’s work as death approaches, Miss Treason muses:

  ‘Oh, my silly people. Anything they don’t understand is magic. They think I can see into their hearts, but no witch can do that. Not without surgery, at least. No magic is needed to read their little minds, though. I’ve known them since they were babes … I see their lies and excuses and fears. They never grow up, not really …’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll miss you,’ said Tiffany.

  ‘Ha! I’m the wicked ol’ witch, girl. They feared me, and did what they were told! They feared joke skulls and silly stories. I chose fear. I knew they’d never love me for telling ’em the truth, so I made certain of their fear. No, they’ll be relieved to hear the witch is dead.’

  As a Roman general said long ago, Oderint dum metuant – ‘Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.’

  If you want to be remembered for generations in folk tradition, whether as a hero, a saint, or a sage, a good death scene is vitally important. Now, one of the minor benefits of being a witch is that you know, months or even years in advance, exactly when you are going to die, so you can stage-manage the event to perfection. (On Earth, legend says that exceptionally holy people have this privilege too.) Having done all the obvious things (cleaned the cottage, made a will, destroyed any embarrassing old letters or spells still lying around), you can throw a really good ‘going-away party’. This is like a wake, but with yourself as guest of honour, still taking a keen interest. People, especially other witches, come from miles around to enjoy the food (as Nanny Ogg says, you cannot go wrong with a ham roll) and to let it be discreetly known that they have always rather admired your brass candlesticks, or your big carving-dish with the blue-and-gold border. It saves a great deal of squabbling if you, the soon-to-be-late witch, can organize the distribution of these little mementoes yourself.

  And then, when everyone has gone home and there’s been a few hours of peace and quiet, you just head for the garden, where some helpful neighbour has dug a neat grave (in Miss Treason’s case, it was the Nac Mac Feegles who did the job), climb down into it (watched by an awed but appreciative audience of village folk), lie down carefully, and wait … It is a fine thing to be able to organize your own Rite of Passage, and Miss Treason pulls it off perfectly.

  And she succeeds in her aim of turning herself into a myth. Within a few weeks of her death, her grave was covered with scraps of paper pegged down with sticks, each bearing a message:

  ‘Miss Treason please keep my boy Joe save at see.’

  ‘Miss treason, I’m goin bald please help.’

  ‘Miss Treason, please find our girl Becky what run away I’m sorry.’

  Even though there was a new young witch dispensing justice – and quite impressively too, in her own way – people still put their trust and hopes in what they knew. They brought their small prayers to Miss Treason’s grave, just as the shepherds of the Chalk left packets of Jolly Sailor tobacco where Granny Aching’s old shepherding hut used to stand:

  They didn’t write their petitions down, but they were there, all the same, floating in the air:

  ‘Granny Aching, who herds the clouds in the blue sky, please watch my sheep. Granny Aching, cure my son. Granny Aching, find my lambs.’

  And so a witch, or a shepherdess, can indeed turn into a myth – a local saint – maybe even a goddess. It’s been known before, and it still goes on, and not just on the Discworld. Go visit Biddy Early’s cottage.

  9 Regrettably, some things don’t change. Terry recalls a case in the USA some years ago when a somewhat New Age lady got a visit from her local sheriff after a neighbour reported that she was ‘saying spells’ in her garden. She’d been singing a Christian hymn – in Latin.

  10 But in the languages of Earth it comes from the same Greek root as ‘epiphany’, meaning ‘revelation of god”.

  Chapter 11

  THE CHALK

  THE LAND

  THE REGION KNOWN TO ITS PEOPLE simply as ‘the Chalk’ lies on the Sto Plains about fifty miles from Lancre. It is a land of gentle, rolling, turf-covered hills with occasional patches of woodland, small villages and scattered farmsteads. Above all, it is good land for sheep.

  No other place on Discworld is so patently a thinly disguised part of Earth. The Tiffany Aching/Wee Free Men books are, whatever other splendid things they may be, a hymn to a time and a landscape. And here it’s found as it was in the time of our great-grandfathers – open country, unfenced, unploughed, turf-covered, a land fit for sheep.

  Green downlands roll under the hot midsummer sun … the flocks of sheep, moving slowly, drift over the short turf like clouds on a green sky. Here and there sheepdogs speed over the turf like comets.

  And then, as the eyes pull back, it is a long green mound, lying like a great whale on the world … [The Wee Free Men]

  In both worlds, these lands are full of memories of distant times:

  Men had been everywhere on the Chalk. There were stone circles, half fallen down, and burial mounds like green pimples where, it was said, chieftains of the olden days had been buried with their treasure. No one fancied digging into them to find out.

  There were odd carvings in the chalk, too, which the shepherds sometimes weeded when they were out on the downs with the flocks and there was not a lot to do. The chalk was only a few inches under the turf. Hoofprints could last a season, but the carvings had lasted for thousands of years. They were pictures of horses and giants, but the strange thing was that you couldn’t see them properly from anywhere on the ground. They looked as if they’d been made for viewers in the sky.

  The oldest and most magical of the carvings on the Chalk is the White Horse, on a steep hillside at the head of a little valley (on Earth, the place is called Uffington, in Berkshire, and it is on the north slopes of the Berkshire Downs). It was cut out of the turf way back in the earliest times, perhaps by the same folk who raised the stone circles and buried their dead in the mounds, and for generation after generation people have kept it clear of grass and weeds. It doesn’t look much like a horse, not unless you look at it in the right way. It’s just lines – long, flowing lines that don’t even join up – but, as Granny Aching told Tiffany’s father when he was only a little boy, ‘’Tain’t what a horse looks like, it’s what a horse be.’ And if the Chalk has a guardian spirit, this is it.

  The landscape is full of stories. A hill near Tiffany’s home, for instance:

  There was a flat place at the top where nothing ever grew, and Tiffany knew there was a story that a hero had once fought a dragon up there and its blood had burned the ground where it fell. There was another story that said there was a heap of treasure unde
r the hill, defended by the dragon, and another story that said a king was buried there in armour of solid gold. There were lots of stories about the hill; it was surprising it hadn’t sunk under the weight of them.

  In our world, there is just such a Dragon Hill, with just such a flat, bare top where a dragon’s blood was spilled – in that case, by St George. It is at Uffington, alongside the White Horse. Elsewhere, on the South Downs, there are many hills and burial mounds in which, according to local tales, there are pots of gold, or dead men lying in their golden armour.

  Interesting things can be found in or on the Chalk. There are small sharp flint arrowheads, made by men thousands of years before (on the Discworld, though alas not on our Chalk, shepherds still have the skill of chipping flints into very sharp little knives, for their own amusement; it is said that a good flint is sharper than a scalpel). Occasionally, one can pick up a stone with a hole in it; these are called ‘dobby stones’, just as they are in the Yorkshire Dales, and are said to be lucky. Tiffany keeps one in her pocket, though she is unsure what use it is; if she lived in Yorkshire, she would know you can hang them at your door or window to keep evil spirits out, and over your bed to prevent nightmares. She also keeps a fossilized sea urchin, which she once used as part of a shamble; it is the sort which looks like a bun with grooves on it making a five-pointed star, which on the Sussex Downs is called a ‘shepherd’s crown’. It’s said that if you put them on the kitchen windowsill they will keep thunderstorms away and prevent milk from going sour.

  THE SHEPHERDS’ LIFE

  Iron-wheeled shepherding huts like the one Granny Aching used were once common all along the South Downs, and indeed in other sheep-rearing regions too. Shepherds lived in them at lambing time, when it was essential to stay near the ewes day and night; they were also used at other times of year, but less regularly. They were sturdy wooden structures, warmed by a small stove, with a chair, a table, a simple bunk bed, and plenty of shelves, boxes and hooks to hold the shepherd’s gear – a horn lantern, crooks, shears, knives, a hay fork, a feeding bottle for sickly lambs and a saucepan to warm the milk for them, tins and bottles of sheep medicines, one or two spare sheep bells, and so on. The huts would be set up close to the lambing-fold; farm horses could draw them from place to place, if need be. The stove made the hut very cosy indeed, though sheep tended to creep under it on cold nights, their stomachs gurgling and rumbling till the dawn – but the shepherd would probably snooze in his chair at busy times, and be too tired to notice.

  To count their flocks, Discworld shepherds have special words and a special way of reckoning, known only to them (and to the Nac Mac Feegle). It begins with ‘yan tan tethera’ for ‘one two three’, and goes up as far as ‘jiggit’ for twenty. There it stops. The same system was used by English shepherds, and sometimes also by fishermen reckoning their catch and women counting the stitches of their knitting. Bits of it are still remembered by children when they are ‘counting out’ to start a game. The names of the numbers vary a bit, but they are always grouped in fives and make a kind of rhyme; for instance:

  Yan, tan, tethera, pethera, pimp;

  Sethera, lethera, hovera, dovera, dick;

  Yaner-dick, taner-dick, tether-dick, pether-dick, bumfit;

  Yaner-bumfit, taner-bumfit, tether-bumfit, pether-bumfit, jiggit.

  Maybe one reason children have remembered this ditty is that some of the words do sound a bit rude.

  When he reached ‘jiggit’, the shepherd would cut a notch on a stick, or put a stone in his pocket, and start over again. When all the sheep were counted, he would reckon up his notches or stones; suppose there were 123 sheep, this would mean six notches, plus three extra beasts – ‘six score sheep and three’.

  It sounds cumbersome, but in fact comes easily to any creature that has two hands, with five fingers on each hand. The idea of reckoning by twenties has left traces on the English language even where the special words are not used, as when a psalm says: ‘The days of our age are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength but labour and sorrow.’ In French too, the word for ‘eighty’, quatrevingts, means literally ‘four twenties’. Come to that, in English currency there used to be twenty shillings to the pound.

  At lambing time, shepherds are extremely busy, too busy to come down off the hills. And so they are at sheep-dipping time, sheep-washing time, sheep-shearing time, and in the run-up to sheep fairs. This rather gets in the way of regular religion, and may cause offence to some of the more touchy gods, who dislike being neglected. To make sure there were no unwelcome consequences in the afterlife, precautions were taken at the funerals of Discworld shepherds:

  Granny Aching had been wrapped in a woollen blanket, with a tuft of raw wool pinned to it. That was a special shepherd thing. It was there to tell any gods who might get involved that the person being buried there was a shepherd, and spent a lot of time on the hills, and what with lambing and one thing and another couldn’t always take much time out for religion, there being no churches or temples up there, and so it was generally hoped that the gods would understand and look kindly on them. [The Wee Free Men]

  This was done on Earth, too: in some villages of the South Downs up to the 1930s shepherds were buried with a lock of wool in their hands, so that at the Last Judgement they could prove what their work had been, and why they had so often missed church on Sundays. Occasionally, a crook, shears and a sheep-bell were also put in the coffin. It all added up to the same thing: a hope and also perhaps a belief that one Good Shepherd would recognize another.

  Granny Aching’s grave was dug on the hill, alongside her hut, and after the funeral there was an additional and very unusual ceremony – the hut was burned. There wasn’t any shepherd, anywhere on the Chalk, who would use it after her. This was a mark of respect, almost unparalleled on Earth, where only Gypsies would think of making such a gesture.

  THE WATCHING OF THE DEAD

  A newly dead corpse must be carefully prepared, watched over, protected – and treated with caution, for it might become dangerous.

  People died. It was sad, but they did. What did you do next? People expected the local witch to know. So you washed the body and did a few secret and squelchy things and dressed them in their best clothes and laid them out with bowls of earth and salt beside them (no one knew why you did this bit, but it had always been done) and you put two pennies on their eyes ‘for the ferryman’ and you sat with them the night before they were buried, because they shouldn’t be left alone.

  Exactly why was never properly explained, although everyone had been told the story of the old man who was slightly less dead than everyone thought and rose up off the spare bed in the middle of the night and got back into bed with his wife. [Wintersmith]

  Things were done in much the same way on Earth, in the days when people died at home (not in a hospital) and were laid out at home (not in an undertaker’s parlour). Laying out the corpse was both a practical necessity and a social duty; it was a woman’s task, and was often done by the local midwife. It involved washing the body, plugging its orifices, and closing the eyes and mouth – and ensuring that they remained closed, by laying a penny on each eye, and tying up the jaws with a bandage under the chin which was knotted on top of the head. A man would be shaved, a woman would have her hair braided. Then the body would either be dressed in good clothes or wrapped tightly in a winding-sheet, with its legs straightened and tied at the ankles and its arms crossed over the chest. The face would not be covered. That way, everything looked clean and decent when family and neighbours came to ‘view the body’ before it was coffined.

  These actions were not just practical. Washing the body could be seen as a purification which echoes baptism, like the Catholic custom of sprinkling a corpse with holy water; a Suffolk woman who used to lay out the dead told the social historian Ruth Richardson in 1980 that ‘the washing is so you’re spotless to meet the Lamb of God’.

 
The pennies had once had a mythical meaning too. In England in the seventeenth century, the antiquarian John Aubrey reported that some old-fashioned people still put a coin in the mouth of the dead ‘to give to St Peter’ at the gates of Heaven. Way back in Ancient Greek and Roman times people used to put a coin into the dead person’s mouth ‘to pay the ferryman’; his name was Charon, and he would row the dead across the river Styx, which was the boundary of the Underworld. And so too in the Discworld there is also (sometimes) a Styx to be crossed, and a cowled ferryman to be paid.

  ‘I have the money,’ Roland repeated. ‘Two pennies is the rate to cross the River of the Dead. It’s an old tradition. Two pennies to put on the eyes of the dead, to pay the ferryman.’ [Wintersmith]

  Nobody had given Tiffany any explanation for the bowls of salt and earth which she had to set down beside the corpse. In many countries on Earth the same thing was done, and various reasons were offered. The most common was that it prevents the body swelling – which might well work, if the dishes were heavy enough and were laid actually on the chest or belly, as they generally were. As one Welsh woman said, ‘There’s no weight so heavy as salt gets when it is on the dead.’ Other people gave a religious explanation. In Highland Scotland in the mid eighteenth century, people said the earth was an emblem of the corruptible body, and the salt of the immortal spirit. In nineteenth-century Sussex, they said that to sprinkle a good handful of salt over the body would prevent the Devil flying away with it. It is common for salt to be used in religion and magic to drive away evil spirits; this may be because it resists decay – salted meat and fish last much longer. (Western people now, who worry that too much salt is bad for one’s health, might find it hard to believe how important the getting and keeping of salt was to their ancestors.)