The Disc is a lucky world in that the sensible arrangement of its sun, its disc, and its supporting elephants has ensured that the dates of its solstices can be easily observed without any need for complicated maths – unlike Earth, where the hours of sunrise and sunset stay apparently the same for three or four days around midsummer and midwinter, giving rise to muddled arguments over whether Midsummer Day is 21 June or 24 June, and why the Romans chose 25 December rather than the 21st as the Feast of the Unconquered Sun. It is also lucky for the inhabitants of Lancre, Ankh-Morpork and the Sto Plains that some sensible ruler in ancient times decided that the night of the winter solstice, Hogswatchnight, would also count as New Year’s Eve. Would that all calendars were as simple and rational! As a result, it is both the time of the darkest shadows, and the time when all the old year’s occult rubbish has piled up and must be cleared away, and the time for the largest, loudest feast of the year.
The name ‘Hogswatch’ makes perfectly good sense for the Discworld, where the festive fare at midwinter is centred on pig-meat in one form or another – roast boar, pork joints, pork pies, sausages, hams, pigs’ heads, black puddings – and where the Hogfather, the seasonal gift-bringer, gallops across the skies in a sledge drawn by wild boars. This is a world where pigs (at least, certain special pigs on a certain special night) can and do fly. Oddly, in Scotland and northern England there is a rather similar-sounding name for New Year’s Eve, Hogmanay – a word which has been known since the sixteenth century, but which nobody has managed to explain. Moreover, British Methodists call Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve the Watch Nights, and hold midnight services. There are parts of Europe (notably Romania, Serbia, Sweden and Norway) where roast pig or a pig’s head is the thing to eat at Christmas. All this surely proves that echoes of the great Discworld festival drifted across the dimensions and became fruitfully confused in receptive Earthly minds.
Be that as it may, there is a good practical reason why midwinter feasting is so lavish – it’s the season for a mass slaughter of livestock. Why use up large amounts of fodder keeping all your animals alive through the winter? Come the spring, a single young healthy bull, ram and boar will be enough to service all your cows, ewes and sows. So, kill off the surplus males, and for once everyone can eat as much fresh meat as they like, and then salt or smoke the rest, and with luck they’ll have enough to last all winter. Farmers have been doing this for thousands of years. The people who built Stonehenge, about 2500 BC, left enormous piles of half-eaten bones littering a village some two miles away – bones of cattle, and many, many pigs. The pigs’ teeth show they were young beasts, killed at about nine months old, just right for the winter solstice. And there were so many bones that people must have been gathering from miles around for this annual feast. Whatever its name may have been, it was the Hogswatch of its time.
Very likely, it went on for more than just one night and day. There’s not much work needed on farms at midwinter, so why not spread the fun out for as long as possible? Many peoples have had this idea. The Ancient Romans managed to turn most of December into one long festive season. First came the Saturnalia, a period of five or six days of revelry beginning on 17 December and honouring Saturn, god of new-sown crops. Shops were closed, work was forbidden (except cooking and baking), people gave one another presents, and everyone was expected to be full of jests and japes and jollity. There were parties, at which men drew lots to see who would preside as ‘king’ of the feast; his word was law, and he could order the guests to do all kinds of ridiculous things – dance naked, for instance, or pick up the flute-girl and carry her three times round the room. Often, social distinctions were turned topsy-turvy: slaves sat at table and gorged, while their masters waited on them. We suspect that the slaves were magnanimous in office, though; tomorrow the masters would be the masters again.
Then came the Feast of the Unconquered Sun on the 25th, a relatively sober affair. And then the wild three-day celebration of the Kalends, beginning on New Year’s Day, 1 January. All Romans, rich or poor, ate and drank the best they could afford. Adults gave one another presents yet again (children are not mentioned). Houses were decked inside and out with evergreens – holly, ivy, laurel, branches of conifers, whatever was still alive and green in the dead season. There were torches and lamps everywhere. People hardly went to bed, but roamed the streets disguised in masks and weird costumes of animal skins. A great deal of wine was consumed.
So powerful were these traditions that when the Roman Empire became Christian most of its midwinter customs were adapted so as to fit in with the new religion. Christ’s birth was being celebrated on 25 December in Rome as early as the year 354, while in 567 a Church Council at Tours laid down that the whole period of twelve days from 25 December to 6 January (feast of the Epiphany) would be one long festal cycle, during which all but the most essential work must cease. And so the Twelve Days of Christmas were born.
There are echoes of all this on the Disc. There are songs about what gifts one’s true love sends on the Twelve Days of Hogswatch, involving partridges and pear trees, and others about the rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Homes are decorated with special Hogswatch trees, not to mention holly, ivy, mistletoe. The mistletoe is felt, obscurely, to be especially significant, even in Unseen University, where there can be no question of anyone kissing anyone:
‘Well, er … it’s … well, it’s symbolic, Archchancellor.’
‘Ah?’
The Senior Wrangler felt that something more was expected. He groped around in the dusty attics of his education.
‘Of … the leaves, d’y’see … they’re symbolic of … of green, d’y’see, whereas the berries, in fact, yes, the berries symbolize … symbolize white. Yes. White and green. Very … symbolic.’
He waited. He was not, unfortunately, disappointed.
‘What of?’
‘I’m not sure that there has to be an of,’ he said.
‘Ah? So,’ said the Archchancellor, thoughtfully, ‘it could be said that the white and green symbolize a small parasitic plant?’
‘Yes indeed,’ said the Senior Wrangler.
‘So mistletoe, in fact, symbolizes mistletoe?’
‘Exactly, Archchancellor,’ said the Senior Wrangler, who was now just hanging on.
‘Funny thing, that,’ said Ridcully, in the same thoughtful tone of voice. ‘That statement is either so deep that it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?’ [Hogfather]
Not tosh, probably. Plants which insist on staying green, and even bearing white berries or red berries, when others are bare and dry are, in their own way, as unconquered as the midwinter sun. They are life, and they refuse to die.
Unseen University observes another age-old custom at Hogswatch, the appointment of a Boy Archchancellor. A first-year student is selected to be the Archchancellor for a whole day, from dawn till dusk. During this period he can exert the full powers of that office, and there are many tales of japes played on senior members of the College Council. Yet inevitably, inexorably, dusk will come. For this reason the student selected for the honour is usually the most unpopular boy in the University, and his life expectancy the following day is brief.
On Earth too there are traces of this urge to turn normal authority upside down during midwinter and New Year celebrations. At the Roman Saturnalia, as we have said, slaves feasted while masters acted as servants. In medieval France, low-ranking clergy sometimes took charge of the services in cathedrals on New Year’s Day or Twelfth Day and turned them into a Feast of Fools or Asses’ Feast. Their leader would call himself ‘bishop’ or ‘pope’ for the day. Theologians in Paris in 1445 complained that these clerical revellers came into church dressed up in ridiculous costumes and masks, pretending to be women and minstrels; they ran up and down the aisles, leaping and dancing; worse still, they sat round the altar eating black puddings, gambling, and singing wanton songs, and the
n went out into the streets to entertain the crowds with their foolery.
There was another medieval ‘reversal ritual’ known in towns all over western Europe, but this one was absolutely respectable, well controlled, and full of charm – the custom of the Boy Bishop. Either on 6 December, the feast of St Nicholas (the patron saint of children), or on 28 December, the feast of the Holy Innocents (the babies Herod killed), the choirboys had a day off, and chose one of their number to be the Boy Bishop. He held office until Twelfth Night. Dressed in full episcopal robes, he could sit in the bishop’s throne and preside at certain services, while the rest of the boys also wore fine robes and sat in the chapter stalls; the real bishop (if present) and the other higher clergy had to go and sit in the choir-stalls. The custom was especially popular in England, where it spread to abbeys, some Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and many wealthy parish churches. Henry VIII forbade it, but it survived (or was revived) in some places. It is still done in Hereford Cathedral, where the Boy Bishop preaches a sermon on St Nicholas’s Day.
Meanwhile, out in the countryside, people have their own little ways, as Albert explains when Death talks about the ‘real meaning’ of Hogswatch:
‘What, you mean that the pigs and cattle have all been slaughtered and with any luck everyone’s got enough food for the winter?’
WELL, WHEN I SAY THE REAL MEANING—
‘Some wretched devil’s had his head chopped off in a wood somewhere ’cos he found a bean in his dinner and now the summer’s going to come back?’
NOT EXACTLY THAT, BUT—
‘Oh, you mean that they’ve chased down some poor beast and shot arrows up into their apple trees and now the shadows are going to go away?’
THAT IS DEFINITELY A MEANING, BUT I—
‘Ah, then you’re talking about the one where they light a bloody big bonfire to give the sun a hint and tell it to stop lurking under the horizon and do a proper day’s work?’
YOU’RE NOT HELPING, ALBERT.
‘Well, they’re all the real meanings that I know.’
It is amazing how much of all this used to happen in our world too, in the days when farming was farming, and no one had invented Health and Safety Regulations and Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Bonfires blazed; burning barrels and cartwheels were rolled down steep hills into watching crowds; men ran through the streets carrying barrels of flaming tar on their heads. In regions where cider apples were grown, villagers would come at midwinter to ‘wassail’ the trees. This meant they would beat the trunks with sticks, fire guns up into the branches, pour ale over the roots, yell, howl, and blow horns. And they told the trees what was expected of them:
Here stands a jolly good old apple tree.
Stand fast, root; bear well, top.
Every little bough, bear an apple now;
Every little twig,
Bear an apple big!
Hats full, caps full,
Three-bushel-sacks full!
Whoop, whoop, holloa!
Blow, blow the horns!
The trees had better take notice, or else …
Apple-tree, apple-tree,
Bear good fruit,
Or down with your top
And up with your root!
As for ‘chasing down some poor beast’, there was plenty of that too. In the nineteenth century, bricklayers from Sussex towns would get a day off at the end of November, and go in gangs to the nearest woods armed with short, heavy sticks which they would hurl at squirrels and any other small animals they saw. If they did manage to hit a squirrel, they took it home to eat. Foxes, on the other hand, are quite inedible. Which has never discouraged generations of English from going fox-hunting on 26 December, a date called Boxing Day or St Stephen’s Day.
Then there was the very curious custom of hunting the wren, which was once widespread in England, France, the Isle of Man, Wales, and especially in Ireland; it happened on St Stephen’s Day, or Christmas Day, or Twelfth Day. One would hardly think this tiny bird worth hunting, even though it is nicknamed ‘king of the birds’. What makes it odder still is that on any other date it would be extremely wicked to kill one, a crime which only the lowest coward would stoop to, and which would bring terrible bad luck.
But on the right day, a dead wren was the luckiest thing in the world. The young men who had hunted and killed it would make a big display of it. Some fastened it to a long pole, with its wings extended; others hung it by the legs between two crossed hoops garlanded with greenery; others carried it on a little bier decorated with ribbons. Then they formed a procession and solemnly carried it from house to house, chanting:
We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
We hunted the wren for Jack the Can,
We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
We hunted the wren for everyone.
and:
The wren, the wren, the king of the birds,
On Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze.
Although he is little, his family’s great,
I pray you, good lady, give us a treat.
Those who did give the ‘wren-boys’ money or a drink would get one of the wren’s feathers to keep for luck, and as a charm against shipwreck.
What can all this mean? Was it just a way of getting beer and money? Or a joke (for the humans, if not for the bird), making fun of upper-class huntsmen who are so proud of trophies? Or was it a survival of some incredibly ancient magic ritual involving the sacrifice of a sacred animal at midwinter? On the Discworld, there’s no doubt at all, as Quoth the Raven explains:
‘Blood on the snow, making the sun come up. Starts off with animal sacrifice, y’know, hunt some big hairy animal to death, that kind of stuff. You know there’s some people up on the Ramtops who kill a wren at Hogswatch and walk around from house to house singing about it? With a whack-fol-oh-diddle-dildo. Very folkloric, very myffic.’
‘A wren? Why?’
‘I dunno. Maybe someone said, hey, how’d you like to hunt this evil bustard of an eagle with his big sharp beak and great ripping talons, sort of thing, or how about instead you hunt this wren, which is basically about the size of a pea and goes “twit”? Go on, you choose.’
But killing a bird or beast, however sacred, is not half as impressive as killing a human, especially an important one, especially a king. The Raven says that once, long ago, that’s what used to happen, up to a point – the king was not a real king, presumably because real kings don’t take kindly to being killed off after just one year on the throne, and have bodyguards to see no one tries it.
‘Then they start this business where some poor bugger finds a special bean in his tucker, oho, everyone says, you’re king, mate, and he thinks “This is a bit of all right” only next thing he’s legging it over the snow with a dozen other buggers chasing him with holy sickles so’s the earth’ll come to life again and all this snow’ll go away.’
This is a very remarkable piece of information, which probably explains what happened when Sir James Frazer, that most famous of Victorian speculative folklorists, turned his attention to a cheerful, innocent little Christmas custom, and came up with a splendidly melodramatic theory. In England and France, from Tudor times onwards, people used to round off the Twelve Days of Christmas with a lavish party on Twelfth Night. There was a big, rich cake. In that cake was a bean. Whoever got the slice with the bean in it would be ‘King of the Bean’ for the rest of the day, and would preside at the celebrations. It was simply a bit of fun – no violence, no sinister implications. But Frazer decided that it was really the survival of a bloodthirsty primitive ritual, long, long ago, in which the King of the Bean had been put to death when the revels were over. He had no shred of evidence, just a powerful hunch that mock kings must somehow also be sacred sacrificial victims. In the light of what we now know to be the case on the Discworld, it seems certain that Frazer’s mind had been invaded by some drifting inspiration from that distant universe.15
Way back in the early centuries of
the Disc’s existence, the Hogfather had been a sacred victim, hunted and slaughtered in animal or human form so that the sun would rise and the snows melt. He had been the boar, the wren, the Bean King. But times change, and old gods must find new jobs. Nowadays, the Hogfather is the Midwinter Visitor, the Gift-Bringer, and Hogswatch is meant to be, on the whole, just for kids. Toys, stockings on the end of the bed, crackers and puddings, holly and cards, jolly little figures of elves and fairies. But he still lives in a Castle of Bone, far away in the icy regions near the Hub. People still make offerings to him, of a sort – the glass of sherry and the pork pie left on the mantelpiece, the carrots for the boars that pull his sledge. His colours are red and white, even if nobody now thinks about blood on the snow. And he is, still, just a little scary, even when he is handing out toys in a sparkly grotto in Crumley’s Emporium:
HAPPY HOGSWATCH AND BE GOOD. I WILL KNOW IF YOU’RE GOOD OR BAD, YOU KNOW. HO. HO. HO.
‘Well, you brought some magic into that little life,’ said Albert.
IT’S THE EXPRESSION ON THEIR LITTLE FACES I LIKE, said the Hogfather.
‘You mean sort of fear and awe and not knowing whether to laugh or cry or wet their pants?’
YES. NOW THAT IS WHAT I CALL BELIEF.
The Hogfather’s duties include moral judgement. Has the child been good or bad, naughty or nice? A good little boy gets, say, a model Klatchian war chariot with real spinning sword blades. A bad little boy traditionally gets nothing but a bag of smelly old bones, though modern and enlightened parents are beginning to back off from this practice, on the grounds that (a) it causes a nasty complex, and (b) you really do not want to be woken up by all this weeping and wailing at six in the morning.
On Earth, supernatural midwinter visitors have been around in Europe for centuries. They are a very mixed lot – saints and angels and even the Child Jesus on the one hand, hags and goblins and mock-terrible monsters on the other – and they turn up on various dates from November through to Twelfth Night. One of the first to arrive is St Martin (11 November), who comes to Antwerp, Ypres, and other Flemish towns. He wears a red cloak, and rides a white horse. Children hang up stockings stuffed with hay in their bedrooms; by morning the hay has disappeared, replaced by apples, nuts, and little cakes shaped like horseshoes. That’s assuming the children have been good, naturally; if they haven’t, all they find is a cane to beat them.
The Folklore of Discworld Page 30