The Folklore of Discworld Read online

  ‘They say,’ said Gulta, ‘she can turn herself into a fox. Or anything. A bird, even. Anything. That’s how she always knows what’s going on. They say there’s a whole family over Crack Peak way that can turn themselves into wolves. Because one night someone shot a wolf and next day their auntie was limping with an arrow wound in her leg, and …’

  ‘I don’t think people can turn themselves into animals,’ said Esk, slowly.

  ‘Oh yes, Miss Clever?’

  ‘Granny is quite big. If she turned herself into a fox what would happen to all the bits that wouldn’t fit?’

  ‘She’d just magic them away,’ said Cern.

  ‘I don’t think magic works like that,’ said Esk.

  But occasionally, very occasionally, Granny does shape-shift, or appears to do so. This happened during her confrontation with Archchancellor Cutangle of Unseen University, as described in Equal Rites. The Archchancellor had unwisely hurled white fire at her, and she had deflected it towards the roof. Then:

  Cutangle vanished. Where he had been standing a huge snake coiled, poised to strike.

  Granny vanished. Where she had been standing was a large wicker basket.

  The snake became a giant reptile from the mists of time.

  The basket became the snow wind of the Ice Giants, coating the struggling monster with ice.

  The reptile became a sabre-toothed tiger, crouched to spring.

  The gale became a bubbling tar pit.

  The tiger managed to become an eagle, stooping.

  The tar pit became a tufted hood …

  This is what students of folklore on the Earth have labelled The Transformation Combat. A typical instance would be the battle recorded in the medieval Icelandic Saga of Sturlaug Starfsama, between an Icelandic youth and a Lapland wizard. To the bewilderment of the observers:

  They set upon one another and fought fiercely, so swiftly that they could not be followed with the eye, but neither managed to wound the other. When men looked again, they had vanished, and in their place were two dogs, biting one another furiously; and when they least expected it, the dogs disappeared too, and they heard a noise going on in the air. They looked up and saw two eagles flying there, and each tore out the other’s feathers with claws and beak so that blood fell onto the earth. The end was that one fell dead to the ground, but the other flew away, and they did not know which one it was.

  That was a well-matched fight, but sometimes one of the magicians is simply trying to escape. A medieval Welsh tale tells how the witch Ceridwen has spent a year and a day boiling a magic potion. She sets a boy called Gwion to keep the fire going under the cauldron. But the potion splutters, and three scalding drops splash Gwion’s finger, so he automatically sucks it – and all the magic power becomes his. He flees, in the form of a hare. The furious Ceridwen turns into a greyhound. He runs to the river, and changes into a fish. She chases him, as an otter. He becomes a small bird, she a hawk. He becomes a grain of wheat, and she a high-crested black hen – and swallows him. And that, Ceridwen must have thought, was that. But not so. The grain of corn made her pregnant, and the son she bore (who was really Gwion) grew up to be the great seer and poet Taliesin.

  It is interesting that in her contest with Cutangle, Granny Weatherwax does not counter-attack aggressively, but chooses forms which restrain and control. For the snake, an Indian snake charmer’s basket; for the dinosaur, a coating of ice; for the tiger, sticky tar; for the eagle, a falconer’s hood. Granny is always a careful minimalist in the magic arts.

  CHANGING THE SHAPES OF OTHERS

  Throughout the multiverse, there is a persistent story that if you annoy a witch she will utter a curse which turns you into some small and unpleasant animal, probably a frog. And an animal you will be for ever, unless somebody finds a way to break the spell. This idea is common in fairy tales and old ballads, where the witch is quite often the victim’s Wicked Stepmother. In this world, there used to be people who seriously believed that a witch might change you temporarily into a horse, if she wanted to ride to a sabbat. At Pendle in Lancashire in 1633, according to the records of a witch trial there, a young boy accused a neighbour of having done this to him. He later admitted he was lying.

  The annals of the Discworld record only three clear instances of such a transformation. One occurred when the malicious witch Lilith of Genua turned two coachmen into beetles, and trod on them, as told in Witches Abroad. The second case concerns the talking toad which is the familiar of Miss Perspicacia Tick, a witch of the Chalk Country (see The Wee Free Men); though initially suffering from memory loss, he later recalls that he was once a human lawyer, who foolishly took a witch to court for supplying substandard magic. The third was when Tiffany, under the influence of the hiver, turned a useless wizard, Brian, into a frog, as described in A Hatful of Sky. Admittedly, there have also been one or two occasions when Granny Weatherwax messed with someone’s head, causing him to believe that he was a frog, but she knew the effect would wear off fairly soon.

  What is far more common on the Disc is the reverse process, where a witch uses her power to transform an animal’s outward appearance (and, to a lesser extent, its behaviour) into that of a human. But here too the result is unstable. The three witches of Lancre encountered some nasty examples of this type of magic when they travelled to Genua (as told in Witches Abroad) – the work of Lilith (real name Lily), whose hobby was to enslave the wills of those around her and force them to re-enact the plots of fairy tales, whether they wanted to or not. She, meanwhile, kept all true power in her own hands, because she was the one in charge of the stories. As part of her plans, she had turned a swamp frog into a prince – but the spell held only during daylight hours, so at night he turned back into his old shape, and had to have a pond in his bedroom. Lilith also turned two snakes into apparent women, to guard the potential heroine of the tale she was concocting, and mice into horses to draw her coach.

  Faced with this cruelty, Nanny Ogg persuades the other two that it is right to fight fire with fire, using her own beloved one-eyed cat, Greebo, who she thinks is nearly human anyway. ‘And it’ll only be temp’ry, even with the three of us doing it,’ she said. And so the three of them concentrated.

  Changing the shape of an object is one of the hardest magics there is. But it’s easier if the object is alive. After all, a living thing already knows what shape it is. All you have to do is change its mind.

  Greebo yawned and stretched. To his amazement he went on stretching.

  Through the pathways of his feline brain surged a tide of belief. He suddenly believed he was human. He wasn’t simply under the impression he was human; he believed it implicitly. The sheer force of the unshakeable belief flowed out into his morphic field, overriding its objections, rewriting the very blueprint of his self.

  In his human form, Greebo is a grinning, swaggering, six-foot bully-boy in black leather, with a broken nose, an eye-patch, and an excitingly lascivious smile. He is just as keen on fighting and love-making as when he was in cat-shape. And there can still be claws on his hands, if he so wishes. A few hours later he reverts to his natural felinity, but it turns out that he has been left with a problem seldom encountered by cats. It is one of the laws of magic that no matter how hard a thing is to do, once it has been done it becomes a whole lot easier, and will therefore be done a lot. For the rest of his life, part of Greebo’s soul knows that he has one extra option for use in a fight, and that is: Become Human. He has become a spontaneous shape-changer, even if the effect never lasts long – fortunately for him, and for others.

  THE DIS-ORGANIZATION OF WITCHES

  There have been times and places in the multiverse when people got really paranoid about witches. For about three hundred years in most countries of Europe, they felt sure that there was a huge conspiracy of malevolent women, hundreds of whom would gather to hold sabbats where they worshipped the Powers of Evil, plotted magical murder and mayhem, and held unimaginably sexy orgies. German and Swedish witches we
re said to choose the peak of a bare mountain for these gatherings.

  In England, early in the twentieth century, one scholar (Margaret Murray) maintained that witches had indeed been members of a real secret society, but that they did no harm – all they were doing was to keep an old religion going, honouring gods and goddesses of earth and moon, of sex and seasons and crops. She claimed that they were tightly organized into covens of thirteen, and had been holding exactly the same ceremonies to mark the seasons on the same dates all over Europe for hundreds of years. Nobody seems to have reminded her that spring in, say, Italy doesn’t come in on the same date as in, say, Sweden, weather being rather more relevant to the idea of a ‘season’ than the mathematics of the calendar.

  Nowadays, historians and folklorists think Murray’s theory is an elaborate house of cards built up on hardly any evidence at all. On the other hand, a whole new religion called Wicca sprang up in England in the mid twentieth century, based on her ideas. Wiccans worship the powers of nature as personified by a Triple Goddess and a Horned God, and yes, many of them do gather in groups of thirteen. They tend to say that it doesn’t matter too much what the facts of history may have been. What matters is whether their magic works for them.

  Whatever may or may not have happened on this planet, the true witches of Lancre don’t form covens and secret societies, and they don’t go in for sabbats. They are totally dis-organized, though they do hold periodic competitive Witch Trials, where each can display her skills. Each is an individual, working in her own way, and often alone, though when she grows old she will probably take on a girl and train her (in exchange for a bit of help with the housework), so as to hand over the area to her when she dies. Even those witches who act as a threesome only do so on the understanding that the arrangement is entirely voluntary and non-hierarchical. Except, naturally, that Granny Weatherwax gives the orders, and Magrat makes the tea.

  Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There’s a conflict of dominant personalities. There’s a group of ringleaders without a ring. There’s the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is ‘Don’t do what you will, do what I say.’ The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can’t avoid it. [Witches Abroad]

  Yet something of the notion of a coven has leached into the Discworld, particularly affecting the minds of beginners in the craft. In her younger days, Magrat yearned for one:

  It had seemed such a lovely idea. She’d had great hopes of the coven. She was sure it wasn’t right to be a witch alone, you could get funny ideas. She’d dreamed of wise discussions of natural energies while a huge moon hung in the sky, and then possibly they’d try a few of the old dances described in some of Goodie Whemper’s books. Not actually naked, or skyclad as it was rather delightfully called … that wasn’t absolutely necessary …

  What she hadn’t expected was a couple of crotchety old women who were barely civil at the best of times and simply didn’t enter into the spirit of things. [Wyrd Sisters]

  Occasionally, there were Lancre girls who preferred a more intellectual and ritualistic kind of magic, more like wizardry – the kind which involves chalk circles and Cones of Power and candles and Tarot cards, and which promises spectacular displays (on Earth, it’s often called High Magick). Such a girl has had an education. She probably wears a big floppy black hat, and black lace, and lots of occult silver jewellery. She paints her fingernails black. She adopts a new, flamboyant name. Arrogant and domineering, she creates a coven which she runs entirely to suit herself, bullying and mocking her followers. One such girl was Diamanda (real name Lucy Tockley), who thought she could challenge Granny Weatherwax, and became dangerously involved with elves, as is told in Lords and Ladies.

  THE TOOLS OF THE CRAFT

  Young witches tend to attach too much importance to their tools. Magrat, for instance, at the start of her career, used to read grimoires, drew sigils on her cottage walls, and owned a fine assortment of wands, robes, crystals, grails, crucibles, magical knives, mystic coloured cords, candles, incense, and occult jewellery, including bracelets bearing the hermetic symbols of a dozen religions. (She would have felt quite at home among the Wiccans and Neo-Pagans of Earth today, in a society where a pentacle is just another ornament; fifty years ago most people would simply think you were Jewish but hadn’t thought to count the points on your star.)

  But older witches avoid showy items of magical equipment. Crystal balls, for example. Granny Weatherwax loathes crystal balls, especially big expensive quartz ones (‘Never could get the hang of this damn silicon stuff. A bowl of water with a drop of ink in it was good enough when I was a girl’). Instead, both she and Nanny Ogg use old green glass ones, which had once been buoys for fishing nets.

  Pondering on this fact, young Agnes Nitt sees that there are good historical reasons for it.

  A glass fishing float, five hundred miles from the sea. An ornament, like a shell. Not a crystal ball. You could use it like a crystal ball, but it wasn’t a crystal ball … and she knew why that was important … Witches hadn’t always been popular. There might even be times – there had been times, long ago – when it was a good idea not to advertise what you were, and that was why all these things on the table didn’t betray their owner at all. There was no need for that any more, there hadn’t been in Lancre for hundreds of years, but some habits get passed down in the blood.

  In fact things now worked the other way. Being a witch was an honourable trade in the mountains, but only the young ones invested in real crystal balls and coloured knives and dribbly candles. The old ones … they stuck with simple kitchen cutlery, fishing floats, bits of wood, whose very ordinariness subtly advertised their status. Any fool can be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple-corer. [Carpe Jugulum]

  There are practical reasons too. If you believe that a spell will only work if you wear your robes and use the right coloured ink on the right kind of parchment while burning the right kind of incense on the right day of the week, you will be helpless if an emergency arises and you don’t have all your paraphernalia at hand. The three Lancre witches once needed to invoke a demon, but as they were in Nanny Ogg’s washhouse at the time Magrat protested:

  ‘Oh, but you can’t. Not here. You need a cauldron, and a magic sword. And an octogram. And spices, and all sorts of stuff.’

  Granny and Nanny exchanged glances.

  ‘It’s not her fault,’ said Granny. ‘It’s all them grimmers she was bought.’ She turned to Magrat.

  ‘You don’t need none of that,’ she said. ‘You need headology.’ She looked around the ancient washroom.

  ‘You just use whatever you’ve got,’ she said. [Wyrd Sisters]

  And in fact the demon was successfully summoned by means of a copper, its paddle, a scrubbing brush, a washboard, and a lump of soap. Magrat learned the lesson well, and not long afterwards was able to bring surging life back into the long-dead timbers of a dungeon door, by sheer force of imagination and will, with no artificial aids whatsoever.

  Yet tools can be very, very useful for impressing the client, especially when combined with a few little white lies. Take healing, for example. Magrat is a good healer because she knows a lot about herbs, but Granny is an even better one because of her skill in stage-management and the use of props. She gives people a bottle of coloured water, tells them they feel better, and they do. As she explains to young Esk:

  ‘I saved a man’s life once. Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I’d bought it from the dwarves. That’s the biggest part of doct’rin, really. Most people’ll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.’ [Equal Rites]

  Similarly on Earth, the village healers who were known as ‘cunning folk’ or ‘wise women’ knew just how important it was to add a touch of drama. In County Clare in Ireland in the nineteenth century there was a woman called B
iddy Early with a great reputation as a healer. She used all sorts of herbal brews, but what impressed people most was the small blue bottle which she kept always at hand, and used as a focus for her Second Sight when she was scrying (which is the same as crystal-gazing, only without the crystal). When a sick person came to consult her she would shake it, stare fixedly into its cloudy depths, and then tell him what ailed him, and what he must do to get well. Some said this bottle had been given to her by fairies. It is said, too, that on her death-bed she made her family swear to throw it into a lake, on pain of some terrible curse if they disobeyed. So they did, but as soon as she was dead they hurried down to the lake to fish it out again – after all, she hadn’t expressly told them not to, had she? But they never found it, and though many people have tried, no one has yet. At least, that is one story; another is that the parish priest threw it into the lake. And there is another, which says that later on, a dark stranger appeared in the village, went to the lake and—

  But that’s another story, and stories cling to Biddy like iron filings to a magnet. There is a consensus that she was born in County Clare in 1798 and died in Kilbarron, near Feakle, in 1874. In between, she has become folded and moulded by narrativium, and defined by the kind of accounts that begin, ‘I heard tell when I was a boy’. In short, for the purposes of this book, she could be thought of as Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg rolled into one. By all accounts she had a fine grasp of practical psychology as well as some expertise in folk medicine, and was famous for her cures; she was said to have got her powers from the fairies or some similar ‘sponsor’ and probably did nothing to discourage this belief. She liked a drink, too, and when it came to payment she was on the Whiskey and Chickens standard. She must also have liked men, because she had four husbands.