WHEN IT COMES TO BEING A NAC MAC FEEGLE, YOU CAN TAKE YOUR PICT
Irish playwright J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan and the subject of Finding Neverland, created Tinker Bell, a small, mischievous fairy “no longer than your hand,”107 who scatters fairy dust everywhere. You might also think of her as a pixie, but not like the Cornish pixies in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (who are stupid and mean) or the ones in the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer, where every fairy-tale creature tends to be on the tough side, due to the nature of the series. Because of Tinker Bell, Wendy and her brothers could fly.
As with everything else, Pratchett sets mythology on its ear. His pixies are Pictsies, a cross between pixies and Picts—tribal groups (possibly Aborigines or their descendants) living in northeastern Scotland before Scotland was … well, Scotland. The Picts were invaded by the Romans, the Gaels, and later, the Vikings. “Pict” means “painted” and probably refers to tattoos sported by some. (Bet you’re thinking of Braveheart right now.) Although their history still remains somewhat shrouded in mystery, the Picts are known for their elaborately carved stones and brooches and their kings. If you happen to have read The Bridei Chronicles by Juliet Marillier, starting with The Dark Mirror, you read about the Picts and the kingdom of Fortriu, which only exists now as part of history.
According to Marillier’s Web site, the Romans saw the Picts as “tiny, dark people who darted under stones for concealment.”108 Not exactly a PC description you’d want to add to a travel brochure. We can’t help wondering whether this fanciful view inspired Pratchett in the creation of his Pictsies—the Nac Mac Feegles or the Wee Free Men. The Feegles have skin almost blue with tattoos, wear kilts, have red hair, and talk in a dialect reminiscent of Scottish. They’re literally a family—a large family, since a kelda, the female leader of the clan, can have hundreds of children. They’re like ants in a way, if ants could get drunk and liked to fight. But they mirror an ant’s ability to lift objects far bigger and heavier than they are. And they can get in and out of impossible places.
You can see echoes of the Picts’ struggle for survival in the Feegles’ battles with the invading Fairy Queen and her dromes (for more about them, see chapter 12 of this book) and grimhounds (see chapter 13) in The Wee Free Men, the hiver (A Hat Full of Sky), and the bogles (Wintersmith; we call them boggles or boggarts). Through it all, they seem to enjoy themselves. They’re like the men of Rohan who sing in battle in Return of the King (the book). And why shouldn’t the Feegles feel relaxed about the fight? They’re dead, after all—or so they believe.
Everyone probably has their favorite Feegle. We’re partial to Daft Wullie, “Big Man” Rob Anybody, and Not-as-Big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-Bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock. At a book signing in Naperville, Illinois, in 2006, Pratchett confessed to a partiality for Daft Wullie, the brother of Rob Anybody—a name that’s a job description, if anything. Maybe that’s why Daft Wullie gets the best lines. The other Feegle names like Awf’ly Wee Billy Bigchin and Slightly Mad Angus are extremely descriptive as well. The female Feegles—the clan leaders—have normal names (Jeannie, Fion), and the most common sense, according to them.
It’s fitting that the females are the leaders, since kings of the Picts supposedly succeeded to the throne based on their mothers’ family line. Tiffany Aching is a temporary kelda after the death of the kelda in The Wee Free Men, until she surrenders the position by avoiding marrying Rob Anybody (to their mutual relief).
FEROCIOUS FAIRIES
Of course, Discworld has to have fairies as well. After all, the Fairy Queen has to have subjects. The fairies are the elves (see chapters 5 and chapter 12). They’re part of the Fairyland ambience. And they’re not nice; they’re annoying like mosquitoes and just as intent on blood. There must be something about having an address in Fairyland that causes a bad attitude.
Fairies have the ability to change their size, which is why we’re mentioning them in this chapter. Although smaller than the Feegles, their cruel intent makes up for any height lack. The wasp-size ones with dragonfly wings that Tiffany and the Feegles encounter aren’t your Tinker Bells, or the colorful and delightful, but mischievous flower fairies Anodos encounters in Phantastes (George MacDonald), or the human-size and hot fairies Finvarra and Midir in The Hunter’s Moon (O. R. Melling), who also are mischievous. Discworld fairies are closer to the goblin-fairies who chase Anodos, and would make Brian Froud’s Bad Faeries list for sure. Thankfully, they’re defeated by poetry, just as the goblins were in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin.
IMP-POSSIBLE
If you read The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, which features a correspondence between the demon Screwtape and his nephew, Wormwood; or Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory’s Obsidian Trilogy (and plan to read the follow-up books to that series), you probably have a different concept of imps than those found in Discworld; Princess Mononoke—the groundbreaking 1999 movie by Hayao Miyazaki—or other anime features (e.g., Howl’s Moving Castle—also by Miyazaki); or other fantasy books such as Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. In Discworld, imps are tolerated rather than feared or loathed. Although they’re still considered demons, they’re servants, like golems. They run the Dis-organizers and iconographs. How small are they? Small enough to fit in an organizer that fits in Vimes’s pocket. Although many of them don’t have names, some do (e.g., Sidney and Rodney—picture-painting imps).
Maybe the imp-in-the-box setup sounds familiar if you’re into thermodynamics. Back in chapter 3, we talked about the second law of thermodynamics. To refresh your memory: “The total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.”109 Back in the day—1867 to be exact—a physicist named James Clerk Maxwell came up with a theory that apparently violated the second law of thermodynamics. Suppose, Maxwell says, there was a demon guarding a small trapdoor between two connected boxes (box 1 and box 2) or a box divided in half (halves 1 and 2), both boxes or halves of which are filled with gas. If a molecule from box 1/half 1 moving faster than the ones in box 2/half 2 was allowed into box 2/half 2, well, the second law of thermodynamics would technically be broken. Why? Because the average speed and temperature of the molecules in the second box or half will have increased while decreasing in the first.
Imps even differ in concept from the dhlangs—the evil spirits Lobsang and Lu-Tze discuss in Thief of Time—the pure evil (an oxymoron if ever there was one) kind. But according to Susan Sto Helit, dhlangs are, as Pratchett describes, a “substition”—something people don’t really believe in, unlike a superstition. But the dhlangs, we learn, are the Auditors. How fitting.
That concludes our little look at “Little” Discworld. If “It’s a Small World After All” is running through your mind right now, well, don’t blame us.
11
Home of the Brave
It, uh, seems to me that what you need is a hero.
—Hercules in the 1997 Disney movie Hercules, written and codirected by Ron Clements
DISC-CLAIMER:
Plot spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk.
DO THE RIGHT THING?
You know the hero or heroine (especially a superhero or superheroine) is about to enter the scene or perform a heroic deed just by the way the music swells. You know—lots of clear, noble-sounding horns. Dun-dun-dun-dun! Like the musical version of Ta-da! or Voilà! or Eureka!
The world of literature (including movies) has a heaping helping of heroes, heroes who fit the archetype described by Christopher Vogler as “someone who is willing to sacrifice his own needs on behalf of others, like a shepherd who will sacrifice to protect and serve his flock.”110 Risk and sacrifice are expected behaviors of the hero. It’s part of the “Code”—but not the code referred to in The Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. Pratchett refers to the Code in The Last Hero.
You remember those heroic moments long after you close the book or leave the movie theater: Sydney Carton’s “far, far bett
er” act of giving his life in place of Charles Darnay, the man who looks like him in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Luke Skywalker taking the one-in-a-million shot to blow up the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope. Neo fully realizing that he is “the One” in the first Matrix. Trinity’s amazing leap off a building and through a doorway in the same movie. Peter Parker saying, “Who am I? I’m Spider-Man,” at the end of the first Spider-Man movie. Bruce Wayne as Batman gliding across the city at the end of Batman Begins. They’re heroes larger than life, like the ultimate heroes from Greek mythology—Hercules/Herakles, Achilles, Jason, and Odysseus.
But what about Moist von Lipwig (Going Postal), Windle Poons (Reaper Man), or Roland de Chumsfanleigh (Wintersmith)? Or, for that matter, what about Adora Belle Dearheart, the chain-smoking golem advocate in Going Postal or Renata Flitworth, the elderly farm owner whom Death, as Bill Door, romances in Reaper Man? They don’t look anything like your typical hero.
In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (volume 1 of that series), and countless other epic fantasies, you meet an unlikely hero—the one you never expect to save the day. Discworld is full of the most unlikely savers of the day you’ll ever find.
So, how do you spot the hero or heroine?
Follow the liver pills.
If you saw Troy, Braveheart, or 300, you saw a bunch of buff, amazingly heroic types (and some wimps like Paris). But in The Light Fantastic, up pops Cohen the Barbarian, who makes return visits in Interesting Times and The Last Hero, with his Silver Horde. Cohen is like Conan and Genghis Khan, with his conquering, takeno-prisoners panache. Cohen and Company have been heroes for many, many decades. They may be as old as the hills, but they’re still bold enough to conquer an army and take on the gods of Discworld. And they seem to have no trouble finding willing women. Guess they’re the geriatric James Bonds of their day.
With The Last Hero, we can’t help thinking of Cocoon, the 1985 movie in which a group of retirees goes on a last adventure. But the Silver Horde, which includes Vena the Raven-Haired, are a little misguided in their efforts and have to be steered back by one of the true heroes of the story—Carrot. More on him later.
And then there’s Windle Poons, the wizard who doesn’t let his one hundred and thirtieth birthday or death stop him from becoming a hero. It’s only fitting that his adventure take place in the same book (Reaper Man) as that of feisty Mrs. Flitworth, who risks her life to help the old Death defeat the new Death after the old Death (the one we know and love) is fired by the Auditors, who are living proof of the Peter Principle.
Even his fellow wizards discount Windle. After all, Windle is supposed to be dead. But as a zombie, Windle becomes an unlikely hero, one who has to help the other wizards and lead a ragtag group of “Fresh Starters”—Reg Shoe’s support group for the undead—to victory against the parasitic life force threatening Ankh-Morpork. Helping save human lives is something you never expect a zombie to do.
Look for the uniform.
By this we don’t mean the Watch. Yes, they’re heroic. (Well, some of them are. We talked all about Vimes in chapter 2. We’ll talk about Carrot and Angua in a minute.) But we’re talking about the average joe like Maladict, Polly Perks, Igor, Lofty, Tonker, and the rest of the “men” of the Tenth Foot Light Infantry (the Ins-and-Outs) under the command of Sergeant Jackrum (Monstrous Regiment)—the kind who sacrifice their lives to run off to fight a war.
Polly is half-Fa Mulan, half-Rosalind (see chapter 5) in that she takes a man’s name and garb to join the regiment (à la Mulan), but not his place (à la Rosalind, who impersonated a man, but did not assume the identity of someone else in the story). Instead, she joins up to search for her brother. As it turns out, there are a number of “Rosalinds” in the regiment. Unlike Joan of Arc, who saw war as a holy cause, Polly is a realist who doesn’t really fight in the name of the god Nuggan or the Duchess—the semireligious figure of the book. She fights for the Duchess—the inn her family owns.
Look for the sword.
Although each member of the Watch carries a sword (standard equipment according to Men at Arms), not every member is a hero. A hero needs a sword. As Rob Anybody says in Wintersmith, “Who ever heard o’ a Hero wi’oot a sword?”111 You’ll find a sword in many fantasy epics—Minneyar (Memory Year), Sorrow, and Thorn—three lost swords used to fight evil (Tad Williams); the famed sword of Jerle Shannara in the Shannara series; the Sword of Truth that only the Seeker of Truth can wield (Terry Goodkind); Narsil/Andúril in Lord of the Rings; Godric Gryffindor’s sword (J. K. Rowling); and the grandfather of epic swords—Excalibur.
Captain Carrot fits the hidden king archetype because of his kingly bearing, parentage, and the heirloom sword he brings with him when he joins the Watch. We talked about that a bit in chapter 1. Now consider other hidden kings, such as Aragorn in Lord of the Rings and Arthur—men whose swords also have legacies.
Because Carrot follows the hero’s code closer than the Silver Horde in The Last Hero (a title that always reminds us of Last Action Hero—the 1993 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie), he is able to save the day, along with Rincewind, the reluctant volunteer on the mission, and Leonard of Quirm.
Awkward, not-quite-a-man Roland, the son of the baron, takes up the sword in Wintersmith. (He’s probably sixteen at this point.) We talked about him in chapter 1. He’s the hero called in by Granny Weatherwax to help save the day. But since this is a Pratchett creation, the sword he wields to victory isn’t the one he brings from home, but one from his vivid imagination—one that really works. Sort of like playing air guitar or Guitar Hero—only with a sword.
Never underestimate a woman.
Heroines aren’t only found in the Lancre witch and Tiffany Aching books. There’s Adora Belle Dearheart, golem advocate. Moist von Lipwig calls her “Spike,” while her brother goes for the more affectionate “Killer.” Sweet. She’s not a Mary Jane Watson—tough, but in need of rescuing in every movie. She’s more along the lines of a Rose Tyler (played by Billie Piper on the Doctor Who TV series), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) or Rachel, Katie Holmes’s character in Batman Begins. Yes, these characters occasionally had to be rescued. But Rose had to rescue the Doctor occasionally and help save the world on practically every show. Rachel knew how to wield a Taser or a gun when a mugger threatened or Scarecrow and a vicious mob tried to harm a child. And Princess Leia had fighting skills. (The book series goes into her story more.)
Adora Belle’s weapon of choice is a pair of well-sharpened stilettos, which she operates like Dirty Harry, the magnum-toting homicide detective (Harry Callahan) played by Clint Eastwood in the 1971 film of the same name, whose words she parodies in Going Postal.
Speaking of weapons, Conina is a weapon herself, thanks to the genes she inherited from her dad, Cohen the Barbarian. (Her mother was Bethan, a woman Cohen met in The Light Fantastic. She’s no shrinking violet, either.) She’s a warrior, able to handle weapons along the lines of a warrior like Shu Lien, Michelle Yeoh’s character in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—the Oscar winner for best foreign language film in 2000—or Ziyi Zhang’s character in the same movie—Jen, the vicious disciple of Jade Fox, a vengeful woman.
And then there’s Lady Myria LeJean, the Auditor turned human, who fights against her own beings. She’s also known as Unity. The concept of an enemy becoming an ally is one you see played out in books and movies. We can’t help thinking of the Terminator who killed humans in the first movie, but sacrificed himself for the greater good in Terminator 2. Guess reprogramming helps. Also, there’s something about tasting humanity for the first time, which causes some to see the light. The last unicorn, after becoming a human and experiencing human love in The Last Unicorn, found humanity difficult to give up. (But that doesn’t mean she didn’t give it up.)
But getting back to Lady LeJean, the pseudonym she takes upon taking on flesh, the human experience is simply too much to bear, as she discovers simply by eating chocolate. Maybe that’s why she
decides to go out with a bang as Thelma and Louise did in the 1991 movie that bears their names. Perhaps if a large vat of chocolate had been available, Thelma and Louise would’ve jumped into that instead of going off that cliff.
And how about that Sybil Ramkin Vimes—the richest woman in Ankh-Morpork? She’s like socialite Veronica Vreeland in the old Batman animated series, in that she has a high social status and deeply cares about animals. Those animals just happen to be swamp dragons. But she’s unlike Veronica, in that she’s humble rather than bored and spoiled. She is there when the biggest dragon of all—the draco nobilis—attacks (Guards! Guards!). It’s what brings Vimes and her together. (Some people prefer Internet dating services in their quest for a love connection.) And in The Fifth Elephant, she keeps her head when threatened by kidnappers, captured by werewolves, and bullied by politically minded dwarfs. It’s hard to keep a good woman down.
Speaking of not keeping a good woman down, here we’ve gotta give props to Cheery Littlebottom, the dwarf who comes out of the closet, if you will, by admitting that she is a female. She’s the Kay Scarpetta/Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) of the Watch and tremblingly places herself in the danger zone when necessary.
Don’t worry. We’re not leaving out Angua, the werewolf on the Watch. She may look like a helpless female à la Conina and many other heroines in fantasy fiction (such as Kahlan Amnell in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series). But she’s not the type you’d want to meet in a dark alley or even a lighted one. And like Conina and Kahlan, she frightens most men. Like Vivian, the werewolf main character in Blood and Chocolate, she accepts without any existential arguments the fact that she is a werewolf, and can choose to avoid hunting humans, except in her capacity as a member of the Watch.
Secrets of the Wee Free Men and Discworld Page 13