Come to think of it, even the tree could be significant. The Volsungs, a family of Norse and Germanic heroes, had as their heirloom a sword which came to them by way of a test very like Arthur’s. Odin, the God of War, had driven it up to the hilt into a tree-trunk, challenging kings and warriors to pull it out: ‘Whoso draweth this sword from this tree shall have the same as a gift from me, and shall find in good sooth that never bare he better sword in hand than this.’ Sigmund the Volsung was the only one who could draw it out, and it served him well until in his last battle it broke against the spear-shaft of Odin himself. But when Sigmund’s son grew up (he is called Sigurd in Iceland, and Siegfried in Germany), he reforged the blade that was broken, naming it Gram, and became an even greater hero than his father had been. Perhaps this too is something Kring knows about.
Many heroes undertake adventures just for the fun of it, while others (young Nijel in Sourcery, for instance) see themselves as ruled by a special kind of destiny called a ‘geas’. This is a form of the Irish word geis, and has nothing at all to do with large, waddling, grey or white birds. It means an obligation, enforced by magical penalties, to do or not to do some particular thing. A hero may be born with a geis (or more than one), or someone may lay it on him. Either way, it usually spells trouble, especially if he gets into a situation where two of his geissa clash. One great Irish warrior, Cú Chulainn, was trapped in this way. He was under two obligations: one was never to eat dog’s flesh, which seems simple enough, but the other was never to refuse an offer of food and hospitality. So when an enemy, knowing this, invited him to a meal of dog-stew he was forced to break either one rule or the other, and was doomed. Nijel, luckily, has no such dilemma.
The greatest by far of the Discworld’s Barbarian Heroes is Cohen. Anything others have done, he has done better, faster, more often. He is the bravest, the most famous. He has been an Emperor in the Counterweight Continent, and during this phase of his career was respectfully referred to as Genghis Cohen. There is just one small problem – he is now somewhere around ninety years old. Most of the friends and foes of his younger days are dead. His surviving companions are now known as the Silver Horde. Like him, they suffer a variety of age-related afflictions (piles, deafness, toothlessness, stiff joints), and like him they will never cease to be Heroes.
And yet, in the long run, what does the life of a Hero amount to? Standing on a mountain peak, Cohen surveys the kingdoms of the world as he sets out on his last and greatest enterprise, accompanied by the Silver Horde and a very puzzled minstrel.
‘I bin to everywhere I can see,’ said Cohen, looking around. ‘Been there, done that … been there again, done it twice … nowhere left where I ain’t been.’
The minstrel looked him up and down, and a kind of understanding dawned. I know why you are doing this now, he thought. Thank goodness for a classical education. Now, what was the quote?
‘ “And Carelinus wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer”,’ he said.
‘Who’s that bloke? You mentioned him before,’ said Cohen.
‘You haven’t heard of the Emperor Carelinus?’
‘Nope.’
‘But he was the greatest conqueror that ever lived! His empire spanned the entire Disc! … Well, when he got as far as the coast of Muntab, it was said that he stood on the shore and wept. Some philosopher told him there were more worlds out there somewhere, and that he’d never be able to conquer them. Er … that reminded me a bit of you.’
Cohen strolled along in silence for a moment.
‘Yeah,’ he said at last. ‘Yeah, I can see how that could be.
Only not as cissy, obviously.’ [The Last Hero]
And later, trying to explain why he and his companions mean to blow up the mountain of the gods, though they themselves will be killed doing it, Cohen remembers the rage and frustration of Carelinus that the unjust gods have granted such short lives to men:
‘I ain’t much good with words, but … I reckon we’re doing this ’cos we are goin’ to die, d’yer see? And ’cos some bloke got to the edge of the world somewhere and saw all them other worlds out there and burst into tears ’cos there was only one lifetime. So much universe, and so little time. And that’s not right.’
Carelinus, the mighty conqueror of distant kingdoms, has a counterpart in the history of Ancient Greece. His name was Alexander the Great, and there are strange similarities in the careers of these two great men. The Knotty Problem, for one. Carelinus once came to the Temple of Offler in Tsort, where there was a huge, complicated knot tying two beams together, and it was said that whoever untied it would reign over the whole continent; Carelinus simply sliced right through it with his sword, and went on to build a huge empire. Was this cheating? Cohen thinks it wasn’t:
‘It wasn’t cheating, because it was a good story. I can just imagine it, too. A load of whey-faced priests and suchlike standin’ around and thinkin’, “That’s cheatin’, but he’s got a really big sword so I won’t be the first to point this out, plus this damn great army is just outside.” ’
Amazingly, exactly the same thing happened to Alexander. As a young general, he led his army into the town of Gordium (near modern Ankara, in Turkey), where there was an ancient ox-cart which their first king had dedicated to Zeus after tying up its axle tree with a weirdly knotted rope. It was prophesied that anyone who could untie it would rule all Asia, but nobody had managed it in over a hundred years. Alexander tried, failed, and then drew his sword and cut it. That night there was a terrible thunderstorm. The priests of Zeus wisely decided this showed the approval of the gods.
Another story told of him (if properly understood) shows that he felt just the same way as Carelinus and Cohen did about the limits of his achievements.
It is popularly said that Alexander, at the height of his power, stood on the shores of the Indian Ocean and ‘wept to think that there were no worlds left for him to conquer’. Like so much that is popularly said, this is nonsense; it is a medieval legend, not to be found in any ancient source. Alexander was no fool. He knew perfectly well that though he had conquered Afghanistan, reached the borders of Kashmir, and then marched down the Indus Valley to the sea, there remained many more kingdoms in Asia and India which he had not defeated. Come to that, there were large tracts of Europe itself, to the north and west of Greece, where his armies had never set foot. No way could he have thought there was nothing left for him to conquer.
This medieval legend distorts an older and more subtle anecdote, which is to be found in the Ancient Greek author Plutarch – not in his full-scale Life of Alexander, but in an essay ‘On Contentment of the Mind’ in his collection of Moralia. Among the members of Alexander’s court was a philosopher named Anaxarchus, who by pure reasoning achieved a remarkably modern understanding of the nature of the multiverse. According to Plutarch, ‘Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus speak about the infinite number of worlds in the universe. One of Alexander’s friends asked him what was the matter, and he replied: “There are so many worlds, and I have not yet conquered even one.” ’
Cohen is not alone in sharing the frustration of Carelinus and Alexander. So, in a different way, does the normally cheerful tourist Twoflower, standing at the rim of the Disc and staring out at the stars.
‘Sometimes I think a man could wander across the disc all his life and not see all there is to see,’ said Twoflower. ‘And now it seems there are lots of other worlds as well. When I think I might die without seeing a hundredth of all there is to see it makes me feel,’ he paused, then added, ‘well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course.’ [The Colour of Magic]
It is also intriguing to note how Fortune (Lady Luck) decided the fate of both Alexander and Cohen by a throw of the dice. Writers in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages argued about the influence of Fortune on the life of Alexander – he had been amazingly successful as a conqueror and ruler, yet he was only 33 when he unexpectedly died, struck down by sickness or, some believed, treacherously poison
ed. So was Fortune on Alexander’s side or not? Did he owe his achievements to her, or to his own virtues? Did she turn against him in the end? In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Monk is certain that she did. He laments over the long list of great men who first enjoyed Fortune’s favours, but whom she then betrayed. One of them is Alexander, at one time ‘the heir of her honour’, till she destroyed him in a game of dice where she magically transformed his winning throw, a six, into the lowest possible one.
O worthy, noble Alexander, O alas
That you should ever fall in such a case!
Poisoned by people of your own you were.
Your six did Fortune change into an ace,
And yet she never wept for you one tear.
In the Discworld, Cohen accepts a challenge to roll dice against the harsh god Fate (not against Fortune, the Lady). Fate throws a six, and tells Cohen that to win he must throw a seven – though the die is a perfectly normal one with only the regulation six sides.
‘So … seven and I win,’ said Cohen. ‘It comes down showin’ seven and I win, right?’
‘Yes. Of course,’ said Fate.
‘Sounds like a million-to-one chance to me,’ said Cohen.
He tossed the die high in the air, and it slowed as it rose, tumbling glacially with a noise like the swish of windmill blades.
It reached the top of its arc and began to fall.
Cohen was staring fixedly at it, absolutely still. Then his sword was out of its scabbard and it whirled around in a complex curve. There was a snick and a green flash in the middle of the air and …
… two halves of an ivory cube bounced across the table. One landed showing the six. The other landed showing the one. [The Last Hero]
The situation is not without precedent on the Discworld (a five thrown by the Lady turns into a seven in The Colour of Magic), or even in our own world, where it is said that King Olaf of Norway played dice against the King of Sweden for a disputed island, and won when his die accidentally split in half, one face showing the six and the other the one. Nevertheless Fate accuses Cohen of cheating, and would have reneged on the bargain if the Lady – whom none of the gods ever opposes – had not intervened on Cohen’s behalf. But Cohen does not appreciate the favour.
‘And who are you?’ snapped Cohen, still red with rage.
‘I? I … am the million-to-one chance,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’ said Cohen, less impressed than the minstrel thought he ought to be. ‘And who are all the other chances?’
‘I am those, also.’
Cohen sniffed. ‘Then you ain’t no lady.’
‘Er, that’s not really—’ the minstrel began.
‘Oh, that wasn’t what I was supposed to say, was it?’ said Cohen. ‘I was supposed to say, “Ooh, ta, missus, much obliged”? Well, I ain’t. They say fortune favours the brave, but I say I’ve seen too many brave men walkin’ into battles they never walked out of. The hell with all of it.’ [The Last Hero]
Nothing, not even a marvel that has saved his own life, can persuade Cohen to give up his fury at the injustice of old age and inevitable death.
Those who want a happy ending every time had better steer clear of epic poetry and heroic sagas, for the wages of heroism is death. True, there are a few legendary heroes who vanish into fairyland, but the great majority die by violence, and their deaths are at least as memorable as their lives. Some fall in battle against overwhelming odds, as did Charlemagne’s noble warriors Roland and Oliver facing a Saracen army at Roncevalles; some, like the Irish Cú Chulainn and the Danish Hrolf Kraki, die because the enemy host is strengthened by the spells of evil magicians and malevolent deities; some are murdered by the treachery of trusted relatives or comrades, as were Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer and Robin Hood.
On the other hand, death is what offers a Hero the finest chance to display his mettle. An Anglo-Saxon poet put these words into the mouth of an ageing English warrior facing certain defeat and death in battle against Vikings at Maldon in Essex in 991:
Our minds shall mount higher, our hearts beat harder,
Our spirits grow stronger, as strength dwindles.
Always at the last there is the burial mound, the funeral pyre, the death ship – which may be set on fire, or simply pushed out to sea, as was done for Scyld Scefing, a legendary Danish king:
The prince’s ship with curving prow,
Glinting with hoar-frost, eager to leave,
Lay in the harbour. They laid their dear lord,
Their ring-giver, in the ship’s bosom, beside the mast,
And treasures too, from far-off lands.
High over his head a banner hung,
Gold embroidered. They let the waters bear him away,
Trusted him to the ocean. Sad were their hearts. [Beowulf]
Or, as Cohen puts it, remembering one of his old comrades,
‘Where would he have been if we weren’t there to give him a proper funeral, eh? A great big bonfire, that’s the funeral of a hero. And everyone else said it was a waste of a good boat!’ [The Last Hero]
And where was the boat heading? Well, there was always the possibility of Valhalla or the Elysian Fields or the Happy Isles, but ancient epics and sagas have little to say on this point. What mattered far more was that the hero should be remembered. It was said of Sigurd that ‘his name will last as long as the world endures’, and the same was – or should be – true of every hero. As the Old Icelandic poem Hávamál puts it,
Cattle die, kinsmen die,
And each man too shall die.
I know one thing that never dies,
A dead man’s reputation.
An eye-catching grave is useful publicity too; not for nothing did Beowulf’s people cover his ashes with a large mound, high on a headland where every passing ship would see it. But the centuries roll on, and memories fade. We can make a fair guess at who lies in the royal barrow at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, but there are dozens upon dozens of mounds along the South Downs and on Salisbury Plain that were raised for men whose names and deeds are now utterly forgotten. Which is wrong. Which is why Cohen is found one day sitting on an ancient burial mound and refusing to come back into camp for dinner, because he ‘hadn’t finished’.
‘Finished what, old friend?’
‘Rememb’rin’,’ said Cohen.
‘Remembering who?’
‘The hero who was buried here, all right?’
‘Who was he?’
‘Dunno.’
‘What were his people?’
‘Search me,’ said Cohen. ‘Did he do any mighty deeds?’
‘Couldn’t say.’
‘Then why—?’
‘Someone’s got to remember the poor bugger!’
‘You don’t know anything about him!’
‘I can still remember him!’ [The Last Hero]
Time also creates a problem for the rare hero who does not die young. Is it fitting for him to settle down quietly, while Old Age, the enemy he can never conquer or outwit, advances steadily upon him? Is he to lie in his bed, old and sick, meekly waiting for death – a straw death, as Vikings would mockingly call it? Of course, Fate might send him, even in old age, the chance of a last good fight; Beowulf had been a king for fifty years when he went to face the dragon. But if not … well, it is in the nature of heroes to rage against the dying of the light.
In history, one of the great medieval warlords of Asia was the Mongolian Timur-I-Lenk, called Tamerlane by westerners, who was descended on his mother’s side from Genghis Khan. His empire was centred in Samarkand, and stretched from Turkey to the Ganges valley and the borders of China; he died a natural death in 1405 at the age of seventy-two, while making plans to invade China itself. According to legend, as told by the Elizabethan playwright Marlowe (who called him Tamburlaine), on his deathbed he declared war on the gods for striking him down:
What daring god torments my body thus,
And seeks to conquer mighty Tamburlaine?
Shall sic
kness prove me now to be a man,
That have been termed the terror of the world?
Techelles and the rest, come, take your swords,
And threaten him whose hand afflicts my soul.
Come, let us march against the powers of heaven,
And set black banners in the firmament,
To signify the slaughter of the gods.
He may not have been the only one who refused to go quietly. Odysseus may have done the same, though less fiercely. In Homer’s Odyssey we hear how this resourceful hero, whose cleverness led to the Greek victory in the Trojan War, eventually got home to his island kingdom of Ithaca after ten years of struggling against monsters, enchantments, and shipwrecks. And there Homer leaves him, happily reunited with his wife Penelope, to grow old in peace. But did he?
A thousand years later Dante (who, like all Italians, called him Ulysses) thought his story ended differently. The bonds of family and homeland could not overcome his passion to learn more about the world. So he set sail with a small band of his faithful comrades, all grown old, urging them on towards the lands beyond the sun; men were not made to live like brutes, he said, but to pursue knowledge and excellence. They sailed through the straits of Gibraltar and out into the deep ocean, past the equator, and far southwards, till they saw a towering mountain – which, though they did not know it, was the Mount of Purgatory crowned with the Earthly Paradise. But there came a whirlwind from this unknown land, and spun their ship three times round, and sank it. And thus ended the life of Ulysses.
In Victorian times, Tennyson took up the theme. In his poem ‘Ulysses’ the aged hero looks back on a life spent ‘always roaming with a hungry heart’, and resolves never to pause, never to make an end, but still
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
He gathers his former comrades, urging them to defy the years and the approach of death, and join him on a last voyage into the unknown:
For my purpose holds
The Folklore of Discworld Page 24