The Folklore of Discworld Read online

  Tiffany struggles to cope with these rather embarrassing attributes, and the even more embarrassing compliments lavished on her by the Wintersmith. But where, meanwhile, is the real Summer Lady? It turns out that, like many a goddess before her, she is trapped in the Underworld, powerless to return. Without her presence, the Disc will suffer permanent and catastrophic discal cooling, with incalculable environmental repercussions. It is, in short, time for a Hero and a Descent into the Underworld.

  This Descent is one of the most powerful stories in the multiverse. On Earth, for example, it can be found in one form or another in at least a dozen mythologies from ancient Babylonia onwards. Sometimes it is a god or goddess who descends, sometimes a human. Sometimes the purpose is to gain foreknowledge by questioning the dead; sometimes it is to learn the secret of immortality, or to carry off a magical object; but most often, it is to rescue a captive. There have been missions that were entirely successful, as when Odysseus went down to consult the dead seer Tiresias or when Herakles (Hercules) brought Queen Alkmene back from the dead; and others that failed, most famously when Orpheus lost his beloved Eurydice when they had very nearly reached the land of the living, because he looked back at her.

  And some myths tell of partial successes – and these, curiously, are linked to the cycle of the seasons, just like the rescue of the Disc’s Summer Lady. The oldest comes from ancient Sumeria, about 2000 BC, and tells how the great goddess Ishtar went into the Underworld,

  To the Land of No Return, the realm of Ereshkigal,

  To the house which none leaves who has entered it,

  To the road from which there is no way back,

  To the house wherein the entrants are bereft of life,

  Where dust is their fare and clay their food,

  Where they see no light, residing in darkness,

  Where they are clothed like birds, with wings for garments,

  And where over door and bolt is spread dust.

  [Ishtar’s Descent, transl. John Gray]

  She was seeking her human lover Tammuz, who had apparently been kidnapped by Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, and was now among the dead. Ishtar fought Ereshkigal, but was defeated, tortured, and held captive in a corpse-like condition. Without her, there was nothing but famine and sterility on earth, so the High Gods forced Ereshkigal to sprinkle Ishtar with the water of life and let her go free. Tammuz too was revived and freed, but not entirely; every year he died again during the long sterile drought season, and the people wept for him. But then, with the coming of the rains, he returned to life.

  Similarly in Classical Greece and Rome, myths told how Demeter (Ceres), the goddess of fertile crops and harvest, was distraught with grief when her daughter Persephone (Proserpina) was kidnapped. Neglecting her divine duties, Demeter went searching everywhere for Persephone, until she found her girdle floating in a pool near a great crevice which was known to be an entrance to the Underworld. This remarkably fortuitous clue proved that it was Hades (Pluto), god of death, who had carried her off. Demeter did not descend into the Underworld herself, but appealed to Zeus for justice. Zeus knew that without Demeter’s care all crops would fail, so he decreed that Persephone could return to earth, provided she had eaten nothing while in the realm of Hades. But, alas, she had eaten – a mere trifle, just six pomegranate seeds – but because of this Zeus ruled that she must spend six months of the year in the Underworld, though she could come back to earth for the other six. Which is why there are six months of summer and six of winter.

  ‘They are ancient stories. They have a life of their own. They long to be repeated. Summer rescued from a cave? Very old,’ said Granny Weatherwax.

  So Tiffany’s friend Roland de Chumsfanleigh (pronounced Chuffley) makes the Descent, accompanied by Feegles, and passes through a cave into a gloomy land of shadows and mindless people whose memories have been stolen by bogles. There is a dark river and a dark ferryman who as we have seen has to be paid with two pennies from the eyes of the dead, just as in Earthly myth there is the river Styx and Charon the ferryman who takes coins from the mouths of the dead. And then:

  There was a big pile of bones on the path. They were certainly animal bones, and the rotting collars and lengths of rusted chain were another clue.

  ‘Three big dogs?’ said Roland.

  ‘One verrae big dog wi’ three heids,’ said Rob Anybody. ‘Verrae popular in underworlds, that breed. Can bite right through a man’s throat. Three times!’ he added, with relish. ‘But put three doggy biscuits in a row on the groound and the puir wee thing sits there strainin’ and whinin’ all day. It’s a wee laff, I’m tellin’ ye!’

  In the classical myths of Earth, the representative of this three-headed breed is called Cerberus. It is his task to guard the entrance of the Underworld so that no one alive may enter, nor may any of the dead escape – but his attention can be distracted by throwing him soft cakes sweetened with honey (and, preferably, also laced with poppy juice). He was also once lulled by the music of Orpheus, and once he was overwhelmed by the physical strength of Herakles. But mostly he is just sitting there, on guard.

  Despite all perils, Roland brings the Summer Lady back to the upper world, and Tiffany finds a way to dismiss the Wintersmith. The Dance of the Seasons resumes, in which Summer and Winter must each die and sleep and wake again, year after year. No one should meddle with it.

  ‘Here is the heart of the summer,’ hissed the voice of the Summer Lady. ‘Fear me as much as the wintersmith. We are not yours, though you give us shapes and names. Fire and ice we are, in balance. Do not come between us again …’

  Chapter 12

  HEROES!

  WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT SMALL-H HEROES, here. Given a smidgeon of courage and a suitable crisis, practically anybody could turn out to be a small-h hero. But a capital-h Hero is a star in the firmament of myth and legend, a precious asset to any bard or storyteller who happens to meet him. People hoping for a quiet life are less enthusiastic, since a considerable amount of mayhem erupts wherever a Hero passes, even one who is seeking justice rather than, say, the green eye of the little yellow god.

  Heroes come in two main types: the Heir to the Kingdom, and the Barbarian. Both are recognizable by certain signs, well known to anyone who knows anything about folklore and the power of narrativium, and abound in the semi-historical legends of many nations. Less common is the First (or Culture) Hero, found on the Discworld and in certain Earthly mythologies. Yet since he is the most ancient of the three, it is only right to begin with him.

  THE FIRST HERO

  In the myths and folklore of some lands there are tales of a First Hero who walked the earth at the dawn of time, bringing mankind essential gifts and skills without which society could not survive. Such a hero is more than human, but he is not a god; indeed, he may be acting in defiance of gods who wish to keep men helpless and ignorant. In one way he is the opposite of the Barbarian Hero, since he brings civilization, not mere pillage and carnage; some therefore call him the Culture Hero. His courage is the courage of endurance.

  On the Disc, the First Hero’s name is Mazda – a remarkable coincidence, since on Earth there is a morally admirable deity called Mazda who is the god of light, truth, and justice in Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of Persia (Iran). He is the Power of Good, locked in combat with the evil Ahriman, whom he will defeat at the Last Day. The Discworld’s Mazda is not so exalted, but he too worked for good, and suffered for it. Of course, much depends on the point of view, since an unsympathetic mind would say that what he did was theft. He stole fire from the gods.

  ‘I thought I’d start off with the legend of how Mazda stole fire for mankind in the first place,’ said the minstrel.

  ‘Nice,’ said Cohen.

  ‘And then a few verses about what the gods did to him.’

  ‘Did to him? Did to him?’ said Cohen. ‘They made him immortal!’

  ‘Er … yes. In a way, I suppose.’

  ‘What do you mean, “in a
way”?’

  ‘It’s classical mythology, Cohen,’ said the minstrel. ‘I thought everyone knew. He was chained to a rock for eternity and every day an eagle comes and pecks out his liver.’

  ‘I’m not much of a reader,’ said Cohen. ‘Chained to a rock? For a first offence? He’s still there?’

  ‘Eternity isn’t finished yet, Cohen.’

  ‘He must’ve had a big liver!’

  ‘It grows again every night, according to legend,’ said the minstrel.

  Cohen stared at the distant clouds that hid the snowy top of the mountain. ‘He brought fire to everyone, and the gods did that to him, eh? Well … we’ll have to see about that.’ [The Last Hero]

  This is indeed, as the minstrel says, a classical myth. In Ancient Greece, it was the story of Prometheus, the benefactor of mankind – maybe even the creator of mankind, for some old writers claimed that he formed the bodies of the first men and women from water and clay, after which the goddess Athene breathed life into them. Whether that is true or not, all agree that he brought them civilization, teaching them the skills he had himself learned from Athene – metal-working, building, mathematics, astronomy, medicine – to the great anger of Zeus, who had intended them to remain ignorant. And then, to cap it all, Prometheus stole fire from the gods. He lit a torch from the chariot of the sun, broke off a smouldering ember, hid it in a hollow stalk of fennel, and so carried it down to the earth as a gift to humanity.

  Furious, Zeus had Prometheus stripped naked and chained to a rock in the Caucasian mountains. Every day at dawn a monstrous bird, part griffin and part vulture, would fly down and tear his body open, pecking out and eating his liver; every night, as he lay freezing, his liver would grow again, ready for the dawn. Yet he knew he would be released one day. And so it was. When Prometheus had spent a thousand years fettered to the rock (or, some say, ten thousand), Herakles, a hero of the wild and monster-slaying type, persuaded Zeus to let him shoot the griffin-vulture through the heart and set Prometheus free. The Barbarian Hero came to the rescue of the Culture Hero, on Earth as on the Disc.

  THE ROYAL HEIR

  The people of Ankh-Morpork know all about heirs who arrive incognito to claim their rightful kingdom and turn out to be ideal rulers, brave, wise and just:

  The throne had been empty for more than two thousand years, since the death of the last of the line of the kings of Ankh. Legend said that one day the city would have a king again, and went on with various comments about magic swords, strawberry birthmarks, and all the other things that legends gabble on about in these circumstances. [Sourcery]

  What is more, pretty well all of them know the rumour that such an heir is currently living in the city, as a mere watchman. And they can put a name to him: Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson (a conspiracy to groom Nobby Nobbs for the role failed utterly). In fact, the only person who seems unaware of the rumour is Carrot himself. He is a foundling; he has a strong sword, well-used, though quite unmagical and lacking any mysterious inscriptions; he has an oddly shaped birthmark, rather like a crown. But still he resists the pressures of narrativium, and goes around ignoring his manifest destiny in a most irritating manner.

  Perhaps there have been Carrots on Earth, but if so, their strategy has been so successful that nobody has ever heard of them. In that universe, the nearest thing to Carrot’s attitude is the naïve simplicity of the teenage Arthur. As is well known, he had no idea he was a dead king’s son, and was simply acting as squire to his elder foster-brother Sir Kay. Kay needed a replacement sword to use in a tournament, and sent Arthur to find one. Arthur wandered off into a churchyard, where he noticed something which he thought would come in useful. As Malory writes in his Morte D’Arthur:

  there was seen in the churchyard … a great stone four square, like unto a marble stone, and in the midst thereof was like an anvil of steel a foot on high, and therein stuck a fair sword naked by the point, and letters there were written in gold about the sword that said thus:– Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England.

  Without bothering to read the inscription, Arthur casually pulled the sword out and took it to Kay. When people realized where it had come from, and also that when it was put back nobody but Arthur could get it to move at all, he was acknowledged to be the Long-Lost Heir.

  One might easily assume that this was the famed Excalibur which Arthur always bore in battle, but Malory says not – according to his account, the sword drawn from the stone was broken two or three years later in a duel between Arthur and Pellinore, but Merlin promised to find him another:

  So they rode till they came to a lake, the which was a fair water and broad, and in the midst of the lake Arthur was ’ware of an arm clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword in that hand. Lo! said Merlin, yonder is that sword that I spake of. With that they saw a damosel going upon the lake. What damosel is that? said Arthur. That is the Lady of the Lake, said Merlin … speak ye fair to her that she will give you that sword … And so they went into the ship, and when they came to the sword that the hand held, Sir Arthur took it up by the handles, and took it with him, and the arm and the hand went under the water.

  This is the true Excalibur, the one which the dying Arthur ordered Sir Bedivere to throw into a lake:

  Then Sir Bedivere [took up the sword and] went to the water side; and there he bound the girdle about the hilts, and then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might; and there came an arm and an hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.

  Whether King Arthur ever really died is a mystery. True, there was a tomb for him in the medieval Glastonbury Abbey, but it was a fake, and rumours abounded. As Malory wrote:

  Some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of Our Lord Jesu into another place, and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the Holy Cross. I will not say it shall be so, but rather I will say, here in this world he changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam Rexque futurus[‘Here lies Arthur, former King and future King’].

  This is no longer the tale of a Lost Heir. This is a Hero of another sort: the Sleeping King under the Mountain, the King who will come back from ‘another place’ to save his people and achieve heroic feats – a tale we have met already in Lancre and elsewhere. It is a powerful narrative pattern, widely scattered through the multiverse as a consolation and a source of inspiration and hope.

  THE BARBARIAN HERO

  There was no mistaking that shape. The wide chest, the neck like a tree trunk, the surprisingly small head under its wild thatch of black hair looking like a tomato on a coffin … Hrun was one of the Discworld’s more durable heroes: a fighter of dragons, a despoiler of temples, a hired sword, the kingpost of every street brawl. He could even speak words of more than two syllables, given time and maybe a hint or two. [The Colour of Magic]

  Hrun dresses only in a leopard-skin loincloth and numerous gold arm-bands and anklets. It goes without saying that he is totally fearless and unimaginative, while being at the same time as alert to any danger as a cat and as lithe as a panther. His life is one long string of adventures, which don’t surprise him in the least:

  ‘Oh,’ said Hrun, ‘I expect in a minute this dungeon door will be flung back and I’ll be dragged off to some sort of temple arena where I’ll fight maybe a couple of giant spiders and an eight-foot slave from the jungles of Klatch and then I’ll rescue some kind of princess from the altar and then kill off a few guards or whatever and then this girl will show me a secret passage out of the palace and we’ll liberate a couple of horses and escape with the treasure.’

  Hrun leaned back on his hands and looked up at the ceiling, whistling tunelessly.

  ‘All that?’ said Twoflower.

  ‘Usually.’

  Earth too knows heroes of this type
, notably Conan the Barbarian from Cimmeria, whose many adventures as pirate, mercenary, and eventual war-lord and emperor were chronicled in America in the 1930s by the fantasy writer Robert E. Howard and others. An admirer wrote: ‘Conan is a true hero of Valhalla, battling and suffering great wounds by day, carousing and wenching by night, and plunging into fresh adventures tomorrow.’ Besides ordinary human enemies, he is forever attacking, or being attacked by, evil lords, sorcerers, witch-queens, magical monsters, dark gods. An indestructible stone toad-thing as bulky as a buffalo, with seven green-glowing eyes, crouching on an altar in a temple of lustreless black stone whose geometry obeys no human laws, is just the kind of thing he would meet. He always wins.

  A Barbarian Hero, like his Kingly counterpart, often possesses a remarkable sword. Hrun’s is called Kring, and he stole it from the impregnable palace of the Archimandrite of B’Ituni. It is forged from black meteoric iron, with highly ornate runes on the blade and rubies on the pommel. Not only does Kring have a name of its own, it has a soul; it talks incessantly in a voice like a claw being scraped across glass, and it has a very irritating personality. In the course of its multidimensional existence it has of course starred in numerous battles, and at one point belonged to a pasha who used it to cut silk handkerchiefs in mid-air; on the other hand, it once spent two hundred years at the bottom of a lake, which was not really fun. Can this possibly mean that Kring has existed on Earth too – that Kring and Excalibur are aspects of a single entity? And is that why Kring remarks, when stuck in a tree branch, that ‘it could have been worse, it could have been an anvil’?