The unspoken reason behind much of the ritual, on the Disc and on Earth too, is the need to prevent any demons who might be around from getting at the corpse before it is safely buried, and to stop the corpse itself from reviving as a malevolent zombie or vampire. So the dead must never be left alone; someone should sit with them, night and day, and there must always be candles or lamps burning. These keep the evil spirits and ghosts away, and light up the deceased’s journey to the otherworld. And they keep the watcher safe.
Because sitting up with the dead is – well, just a little strange. Sometimes the body makes little noises in the night, or moves just a bit, and you have to remind yourself firmly that it’s simply because it’s cooling down. And there are so many stories of worse things. Suppose the candle goes out, and the corpse sits up, saying, ‘Isn’t it fun in the dark?’ They say that happened once in Iceland; luckily the watcher was a strong man, who flung himself on the corpse, forced it on to its back, and held it down till daybreak. Or suppose the Devil gets into the house and tries to carry off the body? Or suppose that, as Petunia tells Tiffany, a thousand vampire demons arrive, each with enormous teeth? (Never chronicled, as far as we know.)
All things considered, it’s not surprising that in many parts of the multiverse people prefer to do their corpse-watching in groups and make a proper wake of it, with cards, tobacco, and a nip of whisky to get them through the night. And a prayer or two doesn’t come amiss.
AN INCURSION OF MONSTERS
All regions of the Discworld are at risk of invasion by predatory races from elsewhere in the multiverse, since one universe quite often collides with another. When this happens, the roaming predators may well find some weak or ‘thin’ place, where people are off their guard, and where they can open a door between the worlds. In the case of the Chalk, as we learn from The Wee Free Men, it is the Queen of the Fairies who finds a way through from her own small and icy world, where nothing grows and no sun shines, and everything has to be stolen from elsewhere. And with her come the monsters.
‘D’you know what’ll be turning up?’ asked Miss Tick. ‘All the things they locked away in those old stories. All those reasons why you shouldn’t stray off the path, or open the forbidden door, or say the wrong word, or spill salt. All the stories that give children nightmares. All the monsters from under the biggest bed in the world.’
The first to arrive is Jenny Greenteeth, erupting out of a shallow stream, and trying to snatch Tiffany’s little brother. She has long skinny arms, a thin face with long sharp teeth, huge eyes, and dripping green hair like waterweed. She is, as Miss Tick explains, nothing more than a Grade One Prohibitory Monster – that is to say, a creature deliberately invented by adults to scare children away from dangerous places. But though the adults don’t believe they’re real, the children do, and so they become real. (This also happens in Ankh-Morpork, as we shall see later.)
On Earth too, adults have invented many Prohibitory Monsters (also called Nursery Bogeys), including a Jenny or Ginny Greenteeth who lurks in deep pools of stagnant water, hiding under the duckweed. She was well known in Lancashire, Cheshire and Shropshire. Even in the 1980s, elderly people remembered being warned against her as children. In his Plant Lore (1995) the botanist and folklorist Roy Vickery records what one Merseyside woman told him:
‘As I recall, Ginny only lived in ponds which were covered in a green weed of the type that has tiny leaves, and covers the entire surface of the pond. The theory was that Ginny enticed little children into the pools by making them look like grass and safe to walk upon. As soon as the child stepped on to the green, it of course parted, and the child fell through into Ginny’s clutches and drowned. The green weed then closed over, hiding all traces of the child ever having been there. This last point was the one which really terrified me and kept me well away from ponds. As far as I know Ginny had no known form, due to the fact that she never appeared above the surface of the pond.’
But another Merseyside woman knew exactly what the Jenny Greenteeth who inhabited two pools in Fazakerley looked like: ‘pale green skin, green teeth, very long green locks of hair, long green fingers with long nails, and she was very thin with a pointed chin and very big eyes’. Jenny was not the only creature of this species in England. In Leicester there was a Polly Long Arms hiding in the green murky water of the canal, waiting to drag in any child that came near the edge.
The next menacing creature to arrive in the Chalk country is a dark rider, a horseman who has no face – since he has no head to hang a face on. Now, ghosts that appear as headless horsemen are quite common in the Earthly world, but this creature might be something worse than a mere ghost. Especially as it breathes through the windpipe it hasn’t got, making a wheezy whistling noise which one really would rather not be hearing. Earthbound headless horsemen tend to be more spectral.
Later, the Queen sends three of her grimhounds – big heavy-built black dogs with orange eyebrows, eyes of red fire, and teeth like razor blades. They are said to haunt churchyards. This would imply a connection with the Church Grim, a sinister animal which, according to Earthly tradition, patrols graveyards and is an omen of death for anyone who sees it. In Britain the Grim is a Black Dog; in Scandinavia, there are also Grims which are lame grey horses, three-legged lambs or black pigs. They are said to be the ghosts of real animals deliberately killed when a churchyard was established and buried on the north side, to be its guardian. If this wasn’t done, people thought that the first person buried there would not enter Heaven but would have to remain on duty as a ghostly sentinel till the end of the world.
Most of the Black Dogs of our world are grim creatures, in nature if not in name; some are ghosts (of humans or of dogs), but the majority are demons and devils in animal form. Indeed, the Black Dog or Hell Hound is a universally recognized image of evil in European and American folklore. They are generally large, shaggy creatures with huge fiery eyes (unless they happen to be headless); they may wear collars of flame, or drag heavy clanking chains. However, their eyebrows are never mentioned. Only in the folklore of Estonia is it said that a dog (a real flesh-and-blood one, not a demon) which has patches of different colour on its eyebrows has ‘four eyes’, and can detect and attack beings that are invisible to humans. This would appear to be a good thing. Nevertheless, the principle ‘Never trust a dog with orange eyebrows’, discovered on the Discworld, is so self-evidently true and useful that it will surely spread.
FOUND IN A FISH
And then there was that odd business with the fish, as told in Wintersmith. You would really think that if someone drops or throws into deep water something small but too heavy to float (a ring, say, or a key), that’s the last he or she will ever see of it.
In fact you probably wouldn’t, depending on your childhood reading. You might already know that a powerful narrative drive decrees that it will be swallowed by a fish, and one day that fish will be caught, and when it’s being gutted something glittery will be found in its belly, and will be brought to the very person who lost it in the first place. Which is precisely how Tiffany’s precious silver horse pendant returned to her, although she had thrown it into a river.
Here on Earth, such things have been happening, off and on, for many centuries. Polycrates, who ruled in Samos some two-and-a-half thousand years ago, was so rich and had such constant good luck that they say a friend warned him that the gods would soon be jealous, and advised him to create some deliberate bad luck by losing something he really valued. So Polycrates took a magnificent seal-ring, the finest of his jewels, and threw it into the sea. But a few days later someone sent a beautiful big fish as a gift for the king’s table, and in its belly … It was not long before Polycrates was treacherously captured and killed.
Or again, in Ireland in St Patrick’s time, there was a robber called Macaldus who tried to trick the saint and make a fool of him, but then repented, and promised to do whatever penance was fitting. St Patrick wrapped a chain round him and padlocked it and thr
ew the key in a river, and then set Macaldus adrift in a small boat, telling him to go wherever God sent him, and to wear the chain until the key was returned to him. The boat floated out to sea, and finally came to the Isle of Man, where Macaldus was taken into the Bishop’s household and led a holy life. One day the Bishop’s cook was puzzled to find a key inside a fish he was cleaning … so Macaldus was able to take the chain off. He eventually became Bishop of Man himself, and is reckoned to be a saint. There was also St Egwin, founder of Evesham Abbey and Bishop of Worcester from 692 till his death in 711. Falsely accused of crimes, he put fetters on his legs, threw the key into the Avon, and set off on pilgrimage to Rome to convince the Pope of his innocence. And there, in the market, he happened to buy a fish … The Pope duly cleared him of all charges and restored him to his diocese.
It is particularly striking that the fish which swallowed Tiffany’s pendant should be a pike, for in the Yorkshire town of Pickering people say it got its name because Pendirus, a legendary king of the Britons who is alleged to have reigned there about 270 BC, lost his ring while bathing in the river Costa, but later recovered it from the belly of a pike. Everyone knows pikes will swallow just about anything. So will some people. Nevertheless, there is a comfort in these stories, even for the godless. They suggest a kind of cosmic rightness. And they still turn up, every few years.
PS: An odd thing happened to Terry once. He bought a ring in a small shop in Pike Place Market, Seattle. It was slightly over-sized and he soon lost it, and couldn’t find it anywhere. A year later he was back in the city, went to the same shop to buy a replacement, and in reaching into his jacket pocket (a jacket which, of course, he’d worn many times during the year) for some loose change, he put a finger through the very same ring. How could it have been otherwise? Rings try to find their way back to their owner. Someone ought to write a book about it.
THE DANCE OF WINTER AND SUMMER
It has long been believed, and may very well be true, that the whole multiverse moves in one perpetual dance, though almost all its motions are either too swift or too slow for the human mind to grasp. Whirling electrons, wheeling galaxies, cycles of time, cycles of energy, the pulsations of the blood, angels in the skies or on the head of a pin – all make patterns in the cosmic dance. This is not a matter of couples moving independently (like a waltz), nor of a group simply dancing hand-in-hand in a ring; it involves complicated figures in which dancers change places and partners, advance and retreat, meet and part and meet again.
Many poets have written about this. Sir John Davies in his Orchestra (1596) declared that everything in heaven and earth dances:
Kind nature first doth cause all things to love,
Love makes them dance, and in just order move.
And so the sun dances with the earth, flowers with the wind, the tides with the moon:
And lo the sea, that fleets about the land
And like a girdle clips her solid waist,
Music and measure both doth understand;
For his great crystal eye is ever cast
Up to the moon and on her fixèd fast.
And as she danceth in her pallid sphere,
So danceth he about his centre here.
In John Milton’s Comus (1637), a magician boasts that by dancing while others sleep, he and his companions are echoing the dance of time and nature:
We that are of purer fire
Imitate the starry choir,
Who, in their nightly watchful spheres
Lead in swift round the months and years.
Oceans and seas, with all their finny drove,
Now to the moon in wavering morrice move …
Others too have sensed that the Morris has a particular affinity with the cycles of nature. T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker (1940) of glimpsing ghostly Morris Men round a bonfire on a summer midnight, with their ‘music of the weak pipe and the little drum’,
Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
In Wintersmith we learn more about the Dark Morris, first brought to our attention in Reaper Man, when Tiffany is taken one icy midnight to a clearing in a leafless wood, where six men, their faces blacked and wearing black clothes, dance to the powerful beat of a silent drum, while shadowy forms look on. She already knows the white-clad Morris teams that dance on the village green to bring Summer in, but what is this? Unable to resist the beat, she runs forward and jumps into the dance, weaving to and fro in the space where a team’s Fool should go, and becoming aware for a few seconds that someone other than human is dancing with her.
What she has seen is part of the never-ending Dance of the Seasons, in which the Wintersmith and the Summer Lady meet and change places in spring and autumn. Explaining this, Miss Treason shows her a picture in Chaffinch’s Ancient and Classical Mythology of a tall, blonde, beautiful Summer, carrying a cornucopia and dancing with old grey Winter, who has icicles in his beard.
‘The year is round! The wheel of the world must spin! That is why up here they dance the Dark Morris, to balance it. They welcome the winter because of the new summer deep inside it!’
The spring and autumn Morris dances are a way of marking the moment when the season of ice and the season of fire meet briefly to exchange their dominion over the world. In our world, other ways have been found of bringing Summer in – a young man dressed in leaves and flowers fights and defeats an older man dressed in furs; girls carry an ugly straw figure called Winter or Death out of the village, tear it to bits or throw it into a river, and come back carrying leafy branches; people bring in the maypole. Frazer’s The Golden Bough has much to say about all this. At the other end of the year, the secrets are better kept, yet even so one can guess that in the season of bonfires and fireworks, nuts and apples, beer, beef, and new wine, there is an underlying celebration that Winter is taking over the power that is rightfully his – for a while. And at midwinter, there is guising, feasting, mummers’ plays, and yes, Morris dancing again. The wheel spins.
But Tiffany has made a serious mistake by entering the dance herself. She has taken the place of the Summer Lady, attracting the attention of the Wintersmith, and now is trapped in her role. She is turning into a goddess, or at least an avatar, or an anthropomorphic personification.
The first symptom is that she develops ‘Fertile Feet’ – wherever she treads with bare feet, flowers spring up. Even the floorboards in Nanny Ogg’s cottage, being wood, start sprouting leaves. Much the same thing happened to Prince Teppic of Djelibeybi as soon as the spirit of his father, a recently deceased pharaoh, entered into him, as is told in Pyramids. Even on the cobbled streets of Ankh-Morpork grass appeared where he put his feet, and in the bakers’ shops loaves cracked open and grew wheat.
On Earth too, avatars of Spring or Summer are, very understandably, credited with the gift of Fertile Feet. In the medieval Welsh tale of ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ in the Mabinogion, it is said of the lovely young heroine that ‘four white trefoils sprang up behind her wherever she went, and for that reason was she called Olwen’ – which means ‘white track’. The Italian painter Botticelli represents Primavera (Spring) as a beautiful woman walking across a flower-filled glade, throwing down more flowers as she goes, which is the closest a painter can get to the idea that they spring up as she passes. And then there are four famous lines from a poem written by Alexander Pope in 1704, when he was only sixteen:
Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;
Where’er you tread, the blushing flowers shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.
The poem is one of a set of four seasonal love-poems, and is entitled ‘Summer’. These particular lines are so famous because Handel set them to music in his opera Semele, as a song addressed by the god Jupiter to the human girl he loves. They are so appropriate to Tiffany’s situation that they cross over into the Discworld and into the mind of the schoolmistressy witch, Miss Tick:
‘The myth of the Summer Lady says that flowers grow wherever she walks,’ said Granny Weatherwax.
‘Where e’er,’ said Miss Tick primly.
‘What?’ snapped Granny, who was now pacing up and down in front of the fire.
‘It’s where e’er she walks, in fact,’ said Miss Tick. ‘It’s more … poetical.’
‘Hah,’ Granny said. ‘Poetry!’ [Wintersmith]
The next sign of Tiffany’s new status is that a Cornucopia (aka Horn of Plenty) crash-lands in the garden. It is a curly shell-like object, of magically variable size, containing every kind of fruit, vegetable and grain – in fact, it turns out, anything and everything one can eat or drink. These things it produces on request, in lavish quantities. It is a definitely mythological object:
‘According to Chaffinch,’ [Tiffany] said, with the Mythology open on her lap … , ‘the god Blind Io created the Cornucopia from a horn of the magical goat Almeg to feed his two children by the Goddess Bisonomy, who was later turned into a shower of oysters by Epidity, god of things shaped like potatoes, after insulting Resonata, goddess of weasels, by throwing a mole at her shadow. It is now the badge of office of the Summer Goddess.’
The corresponding myth in Ancient Greece is not quite so complicated. As a baby, the god Zeus had to be hidden from his murderous father in a cave in Crete, where he fed on the milk of a nanny-goat called Amalthea (unless this was the name of the nymph who owned her). Later, when he became ruler of the gods, he showed his gratitude by placing the goat among the stars as the constellation Capricorn. But first he broke off one of her horns; it became the Cornucopia, which supplies whatever food or drink one desires. This horn later belonged to Demeter, also called Ceres, goddess of the harvest, and was sometimes carried by Flora, the flower goddess, who scattered corn and wine and fruit and flowers from it. Painters and sculptors are very fond of it, it’s such a pretty shape.
The Folklore of Discworld Page 22