The Folklore of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars, until I die.

  It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

  And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

  Though much is taken, much abides; and though

  We are not now that strength which in old days

  Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are:

  One equal temper of heroic hearts,

  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  Cohen and the Silver Horde would have understood.

  Chapter 13

  LORE, LEGENDS

  and TRUTH

  THE FOUNDATION LEGENDS

  ANY SELF-RESPECTING CITY has to have a legend about its own foundation. Ankh-Morpork, as is right and proper for the oldest and greatest city on the Disc, has two.

  The first is the official one. According to this, there were once two orphaned brothers, mere babies, who had been left on the shores of the Ankh to die. There they were found by a she-hippopotamus, who suckled them. When they grew up, they decided to build themselves a home, and so founded what must at the time have been a very small city indeed. In memory of this, the shield on the coat of arms of Ankh-Morpork has as its supporters deux Hippopotâmes Royales Bâillant, un enchainé, un couronné au cou. Which, stripped of its aristocratic herald-speak, means two royal hippos yawning, one wearing a chain and the other with a crown round its neck. The conventions of heraldry do not permit the sex of the beasts to be clearly indicated, but in view of the tale we can safely state that at least one of them is female. The legend is also commemorated by eight hippo statues on the city’s Brass Bridge, facing out to sea. It is said that if danger ever threatens the city they will run away.

  Some people have expressed doubts over this ancient and uplifting tradition. Why and how, they ask, would a she-hippo suckle human babies? And how could they thrive on this eccentric diet? Did they but know it, these doubters could find a tale on Earth proving that such things are perfectly possible. It tells of twins, Romulus and Remus, who were the sons of Mars the God of War and a human princess. Their evil great-uncle, having just usurped his brother’s throne, seized the boys and threw them into the Tiber, for fear they might grow up to challenge him.11 But the river washed them safely to the bank, where a she-wolf fed them with her milk until a kindly shepherd found them. Later, they built the city of Rome. Considering what wolves normally eat, this tale is even more wondrous than that of the hippo, but the Romans had no difficulty in believing it. And, naturally, making a statue about it.

  The second legend is not told quite so often by the citizens of Ankh-Morpork, but is surprisingly widespread in other towns. It is said that way back in the fogs of time there was once a great flood sent by the gods, and that a group of wise men survived by building a huge boat into which they crammed two of every type of animal then existing on the Disc. After a few weeks the combined manure was beginning to weigh the boat low in the water, so – the story runs – they tipped it over the side and called the heap Ankh-Morpork. Anybody who doubts the truth of this should go and stand on one of the bridges over the Ankh, preferably on a warm day, and breathe deep.

  SUNKEN CITIES AND VANISHING ISLANDS

  There is also the legend of the Lost City, the City-before-the-City. It is not an uncommon tale – indeed, there are variants in all the cities of the Sto Plains – but hardly anyone takes it seriously.

  There had been a city once, in the mists of pre-history – bigger than Ankh-Morpork, if that were possible. And the inhabitants had done something, some sort of unspeakable crime not just against Mankind or the gods but against the very nature of the universe itself, which had been so dreadful that it had sunk beneath the sea one stormy night. Only a few people had survived to carry to the barbarian peoples in the less advanced parts of the Disc all the arts and crafts of civilization. [Moving Pictures]

  According to the dreaded grimoire Necrotelecomnicon, there had been a hill at the edge of the city:

  … and in that hill, it is said, a Door out of the World was found, and people of the City watched what was Seen therein, knowing not that Dread waited between the universes … for Others found the gate of the Holy Wood and fell upon the world, and in one nighte All Manner of Madnesse befell, and Chaos prevailed, and the Citie sank beneath the Sea, and all became one with the fishes and the lobsters, save for a few who fled.

  The hill is still there, on a lonely stretch of coast about thirty miles from Ankh-Morpork. It is not very high, yet high enough to be visible for miles, standing out from the wind-blown sand dunes all around. It is covered with wretched scrubby trees. People call it Holy Wood. And they say that if you stand on the beach at Holy Wood on a stormy night, you can still hear the bells of old temples ringing under the sea. The events chronicled in Moving Pictures would suggest that there is after all rather more than a grain of truth in these old tales.

  There are many, many legends about sunken cities on Earth, where islands bob up and down like the chorus in HMS Pinafore. The oldest on record was told by the Greek philosopher Plato about 2,400 years ago, and according to him it was true, and had happened some 9,000 years before that. And it was not just one city that had sunk, but the whole large island of Atlantis – rich, civilized, with many mighty cities, harbours and palaces. There, men had at first been wise and virtuous, but in time they became obsessed with wealth and power, so the gods destroyed their land in a single day and night.

  There occurred portentous earthquakes and floods, and one grievous day and night befell them when the whole body of warriors was swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner was swallowed up by the sea and vanished; wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal of mud which the island created as it settled down. [Plato, Timaeus, transl. R. G. Bury]

  Plato does not mention any door or gate, for the large-scale destruction he describes must have involved some great natural disaster – an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a tsunami – and was the direct work of the gods. There are other, more recent traditions along the sea-coasts of western Europe telling of lands and towns submerged by the foolish or treacherous act of someone who opened a sluice gate. In Wales, for instance, they talk of the lost land of Cantre’r Gwaelod under the waters of Cardigan Bay – forty miles long by twenty wide it was, with sixteen fine towns on it. There was a great dyke protecting it from the sea, but Seithenhin, the keeper of the dyke, was a drunkard, and one night forgot to close the sluice gates. The way others tell it, Seithenhin was lord of the land, and it was his daughter who let in the sea, curses upon her! Or it was God’s doing, because Seithenhin was a proud and presumptuous ruler. Whatever, you can still see the pebble ridge which was once the protecting wall; you can still hear bells ringing underwater.

  Then there is the Breton tale of the drowning of Kêr-Is. This, they say, was a magnificent city built on land reclaimed from the sea in what is now the Bay of Douarnenez in Brittany, and ruled by a King Grallon or Gradlon. He himself was a virtuous man, but his courtiers and subjects were drunken and debauched, though a holy man warned them that there would be a reckoning:

  After happiness, grief!

  Anyone who eats the meat of the fish,

  By the fish he will be eaten.

  And anyone who swallows will be swallowed.

  And anyone who drinks wine and mead

  Will drink water like a fish;

  And anyone who doesn’t know will learn.

  [Livaden Geris, transl. James Doan]

  Yet the king let the revellers go on feasting, while he took himself quietly to bed. Now, the king had a daughter named Dahut, and she had a lover (some say he was the Devil himself, but they always say that sort of thing) who coaxed her into stealing the golden key which her father wore on a chain round his neck
as he slept. This was the key to the gate in the dykes protecting the city from the sea. They were opened, and the ocean swept in and submerged everything; only Grallon himself escaped, thanks to the saint’s warning and to his fine horse. Dahut tried to mount behind him, but the saint miraculously appeared and struck her with his crozier, so that she fell into the raging waters and drowned. As for the sunken city, its buildings can sometimes be glimpsed when the sea is calm and clear, and its bells are heard ringing. Legend loves the sound of sunken bells.

  In Cornwall, tradition tells of the lost land of Lyonesse, which once stretched all the way from Land’s End to the Scilly Isles, though no one now remembers just why it sank. The strange rocky outcrop of St Michael’s Mount overlooks Mount’s Bay, where the lost land once began and where one can still, at very low tides, find fossilized bits of wood from the trees which once grew there. In the Cornish language, four hundred years ago, the Mount was called Carrack Looz en Cooz, ‘The Grey Rock in the Wood’. The drowned forest was important, once. Maybe it was a Holy Wood.

  Such legends have always been particularly popular among fishermen. They are the ones who, peering down through unusually clear water, sometimes glimpse curious structures that look more like streets and ruined buildings than simple rocks; they are the ones whose nets sometimes snag on underwater obstacles where, according to their charts, no obstacles should be. Oddly, the fishermen of Ankh-Morpork do not have such legends. So it came as a total surprise to Solid Jackson and his son, out fishing by night in the middle of the Circle Sea, when a sound came from below the surface, the sound of a bell or gong slowly swinging … followed by a weathercock … a tower … a surge of huge, weed-encrusted buildings … a whole malevolent-looking city on an oozy, weedy island rising up out of the sea. They had discovered the Lost Island and City of Leshp.

  They did not like it. In fact, it gave them the willies. Partly, this was because of the smell of sulphur and rotting seaweed. Partly, because of nasty little ripples and soft splashing noises in the dark pools that lingered in the deeper cellars. But mainly it was because of the city itself. There were some buildings which looked more or less as human buildings should, with pillars and arches and steps and suchlike, and nice tiled floors with patterns of shells and squid and octopuses. But besides these, there were the remains of massive structures which had nothing to do with human architecture. It came as a relief when the island, after a few weeks, settled back down on to the seabed.

  Some faint awareness of these events, chronicled in Jingo, may have reached parts of the Earth. There is talk there of a ‘Green Land of Enchantment’ which occasionally rises to the surface in the Bristol Channel, and then vanishes again. A certain Captain Jones had a curious experience in the 1890s which was reported in the Pembroke County Guardian:

  Once when trending up the Bristol Channel and passing Grassholm Island, in what he had always known as deep water, he was surprised to see to windward of him a large tract of land covered with a beautiful green meadow. It was not, however, above water, but just a few feet below, say two or three, so that the grass waved and swam about as the ripple flowed over it, in a way quite delightful to the eye, so that as one watched it made one feel quite drowsy. ‘You know,’ he continued, ‘I have heard old people say there is a floating island off there, that sometimes rises to the surface, or nearly, and then sinks down again fathoms deep, so that no one sees it for years, and when nobody expects it comes up again for a while. How it may be, I do not know, but that is what they say.’

  There are similar tales of intermittent islands off the coasts of Norway and Ireland. If you want to make them stay permanently above water (since they offer good grazing), the thing to do is to throw a knife, or a burning torch, or a lit tobacco-pipe on to them before they can sink again, but this is very hard to achieve. The largest and loveliest Norwegian one is called Utrøst, inhabited by kindly beings; it only becomes visible to humans if their lives are in deadly danger, when its harbour offers them safety. Those who shelter there will have good luck all their lives.

  These are nice islands, of course, even if they are imaginary. One that was undoubtedly real and very Leshpian in its effects appeared in July 1831. It was a pumice island, and it rose to the surface off the coast of Sicily, due to volcanic action. A British fleet landed on it and claimed it for Britain, naming it Graham Island, but the Italians also claimed it, naming it Ferdinandea. The French and Spaniards showed interest too. The ensuing diplomatic dispute was still not settled when the island sank back into the sea in December of the same year, which was rather a shame, but averted a possible war.

  Finally, it should be noted that an island which pops up and then sinks again is, as Leonard of Quirm remarked, rather like a certain type of folklore current among sailors on the Discworld:

  ‘It puts me in mind,’ said Leonard, ‘of those nautical stories of giant turtles that sleep on the surface, thus causing sailors to think they are an island. Of course, you don’t get giant turtles that small.’ [Jingo]

  In our world, in the absence of any turtles larger than, say, a decent-sized dining-table, traditional nautical lore warns instead of the risks involved in landing on a really, really big fish or whale which happens to be dozing on the surface. In particular, it is very unwise to light a small fire and start cooking breakfast. St Brendan the Navigator, who was Abbot of Clonfert in Ireland in the sixth century, is said to have done just that while sailing far out in the Atlantic. Suddenly what he’d thought was an island began to twitch, and then to sink. Brendan and his crew were lucky to get back to their ship in time.

  Exactly the same thing happened to Sindbad the Sailor on his first voyage in the Indian Ocean, as is told in The Thousand and One Nights. The ship came to a little island which seemed as fair as the Garden of Eden, where the passengers disembarked; some wandered off to explore, while others busied themselves cooking, eating and drinking.

  While we were thus engaged we suddenly heard the captain cry out to us from the ship: ‘All aboard, quickly! Abandon everything and run for your lives! The mercy of Allah be upon you, for this is no island but a gigantic whale floating on the bosom of the sea, on whose back the sands have settled and trees have grown since the world was young! When you lit the fire it felt the heat and stirred. Make haste, I say; for soon the whale will plunge into the sea and you will all be lost!’ [transl. N. J. Dawood]

  According to the poet Milton, the enormous creature is none other than Leviathan, mentioned in the Bible –

  … that sea-beast

  Leviathan, which God of all his works

  Created hugest that swim the Ocean stream.

  Him, haply slumbering on the Norway foam,

  The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff,

  Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,

  With fixèd anchor in his scaly rind

  Moors by his side under the lee, while night

  Invests the sea, and wishèd morn delays.

  Atlantic, Indian Ocean, seas off Norway … the monster (or the story) certainly does get around.

  In Cambridge University Library and in the British Library there are manuscripts of a Latin Bestiary (that is, a Book of Beasts) dating from the early twelfth century. It includes a section about the sea-monster which gets mistaken for an island, beginning thus:

  There is an ocean monster which is called an aspido delone in Greek. On the other hand, it is called an aspido testudo in Latin. It is also called a Whale … This animal lifts its back out of the open sea above the watery waves … [transl. T. H. White]

  Testudo is Latin for ‘tortoise’. Delone makes no sense, and must be a mistake for chelone, which is indeed a Greek word, meaning ‘turtle’. Why on earth should English monks a thousand years ago get the traditional whale mixed up with tortoises and turtles? Some echo from the Discworld, maybe? As for aspido, this must refer to a snake of some sort, so it would seem that the Sea Serpent has somehow got into the mix. It makes a good yarn even better.

&nbs
p; KINGS AND HEROES

  A certain legendary glow surrounds the (rather vague) memory of the Kings of Ankh, a dynasty which came to an end some 2,000 years ago. They are said to have been thoroughly wise, just, charismatic, and so on, plus being of course extremely powerful. As for the later Kings of Ankh-Morpork, they are remembered in many a merry anecdote, for recurrent lunacy, sadistic cruelty, and general bloody-mindedness. (These anecdotes, being factually accurate, do not count as folklore.) If a ruler made himself too disagreeable to the rest of the aristocracy, the Guild of Assassins would eventually be contacted, and he would be discreetly inhumed. Curiously, this tactful and civilized procedure is seen by some as the survival of something extremely archaic:

  There was a tradition once, far back in the past, called the King of the Bean. A special dish was served to all the men of the clan on a certain day of the year. It contained one small hard-baked bean, and whoever got the bean was, possibly after some dental attention, hailed as King. It was quite an inexpensive system and it worked well, possibly because the clever little bald men who actually ran things and paid some attention to possible candidates were experts at palming a bean into the right bowl.

  And while the crops ripened and the tribe thrived and the land was fertile, the King thrived too. But when, in the fullness of time, crops failed and the ice came back and animals were inexplicably barren, the clever little bald men sharpened their long knives, which were mostly used for cutting mistletoe.

  And on the due night, one of them went into his cave and carefully baked one small bean.

  Of course, that was before people were civilized. These days, no one has to eat beans. [Night Watch]

  That, at any rate, is a theory of kingship put forward by speculative folklorists in Ankh-Morpork, and enthusiastically adopted by people who feel tradition must always be bloodthirsty, or about sex, or (preferably) both. Naturally, when dealing with such a remote period one can’t expect to find documentary evidence to back up one’s hypothesis (cave-dwelling clans don’t keep diaries or committee minutes). But Quoth the Raven, who is a member of an occult species with links to the gods and therefore knows what he’s talking about, does mention a midwinter custom, thousands of years ago, which sounds rather similar. It involved some poor bugger finding a special bean in his food at the Hogswatch feast. It made him king, but also meant he’d be killed off a few days later. A merry reign, but a short one. (We have more to say about this in the section on the Hogfather.)