The Folklore of Discworld Read online

  There is another way in which Earthly folk have tamed the notion of the elf, and this too involves children. Adults who have stopped believing in elves can make damn sure that their children are still scared of them, because that way they’ll stay away from dangerous places, and learn to obey the rules. They turn elves and fairies into Nursery Bogeys: ‘Don’t play in the woods after sunset, the hytersprites will get you’ – ‘Don’t stand at the edge of the pond, Jenny Greenteeth will drag you in and gobble you up’ – ‘Behave yourself while I’m out, remember the tomte who lives under the stairs will be watching you’.

  Nanny Ogg understands this principle. Consider the copper in her washhouse:

  The water under the lid was inky black and, according to rumour, bottomless; the Ogg grandchildren were encouraged to believe that monsters from the dawn of time dwelt in its depths, since Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood. [Wyrd Sisters]

  But not entirely pointless. After all, a toddler could drown in a copper.

  However, fashions in child-rearing change. In many parts of the Earth it is now considered quite wicked to deliberately frighten a child, even for its own good, so Nursery Bogeys are an endangered species. Some have reinvented themselves as Funny (but Nice) Fairies in order to survive. In Iceland, children used to be told that in the thirteen nights leading up to Christmas thirteen hideous hobgoblins would come down from the mountains and creep into the house, one by one; they would carry off any child who was naughty, and probably eat it. Nowadays, this simply won’t do. The Thirteen Christmas Lads still look hideous, but that’s just a joke, and nobody is afraid of them. In fact, each of the Lads pops a sweet, or some other little present, under the child’s pillow. Perhaps this delicacy is because we think we know of more complex monsters now? But we always have. The world of the fairy tale is a map of prohibitions: do not open that door/enter that wood … and above all, young lady, don’t talk to the wolf.

  There have been many theories as to what the true home of the elfin races is like, and where it may be found – if indeed they have a home, for they might simply be alien nomads, creating the illusion of a Fairyland in any territory they invade. The Nac Mac Feegle (who ought to know, as they are fairies of a sort themselves) say that there is an elf-world, but it’s a mere parasite. One of them tells Tiffany Aching: ‘It floats around until it finds a place that’s weak on a world where no one’s payin’ attention, and opens a door. Then the Queen sends in her folk. For the stealin’, ye ken.’

  The Wee Free Men is the story of how elves ‘open a door’ between standing stones on the Chalk hills, and how Tiffany crosses into their world to rescue her little brother, kidnapped by the Queen, and also, incidentally, an older boy named Roland. One can’t properly describe this ‘Fairyland’, for it is full of human dreams and nightmares, which keep on changing. But in its true nature, before the illusions begin, it is a cold, snowy land which somehow does not feel like a real place. There is no sun in the sky. The woods are full of dimness and shadows, and no birds sing. Nothing grows older there, because nothing grows at all.

  Yet the Nac Mac Feegles tell Tiffany that ‘Fairyland’ was not always such a terrible place. It has been ruined by a domestic dispute:

  ‘It wasnae so bad then. It wasnae perfect, mark you, but the Quin wasnae as cold in them days. The King was still aroound. She was always happy then.’

  ‘What happened? Did the King die?’

  ‘No. They had words, if ye tak’ my meanin’,’ said Rob.

  ‘Oh, you mean like an argument—’

  ‘A bit, mebbe,’ said Rob. ‘But they was magical words. Forests destroyed, mountains explodin’, a few hundred deaths, that kind of thing. And he went off to his own world. Fairyland was never a picnic, ye ken, even in the old days. But it was fine if you kept alert, an’ there was flowers and burdies and summertime.’ [The Wee Free Men]

  There are mysteries here. Will Shakespeare must have picked up some echo of them, since his Midsummer Night’s Dream tells of a quarrel between the King and Queen of Fairyland, whom he calls Oberon and Titania, ending in reconciliation. Whether there can be the same happy ending elsewhere in the multiverse remains to be seen. But where, meanwhile, has Oberon’s Discworld counterpart disappeared to? And who is he? The witches of Lancre know the answer. He is the powerful antlered figure who lies in the cavern beneath the barrow known as the Long Man, dreaming the days away in his steam-filled sweat-house. One day, maybe, he will return. Meanwhile (as we learn in Lords and Ladies), he occasionally intervenes to frustrate the plans of his Queen.

  When Tiffany asks the Nac Mac Feegles what will become of her brother if she can’t rescue him, they explain that he will probably return one day, but …

  ‘Time passes slower the deeper ye go intae this place. Years pass like days. The Quin’ll get tired o’ the wee lad after a coupla months, mebbe. A coupla months here, ye ken, where time is slow an’ heavy. But when he comes back intae the mortal world, you’ll be an old lady, or mebbe you’ll be deid. So if youse has bairns o’ yer own, you’d better tell them to watch out for a wee sticky kid wanderin’ the hills shoutin’ for sweeties, ’cos that’ll be their Uncle Wentworth. That wouldna be the worst o’ it, neither. Live in dreams for too long and ye go mad, ye can never wake up prop’ly, ye can never get the hang o’ reality again …’

  The grim picture of a sunless land where time does not run true matches some accounts in the folklore which took shape before Shakespeare’s influence was felt. Take the story of Thomas the Rhymer, also called Thomas of Erceldoune, a poet and seer who lived on the borders between Scotland and England at the close of the thirteenth century. Some time in the next couple of hundred years, someone wrote a ballad about him (it is still sung today). It tells how Thomas, resting on a hillside near Edinburgh, saw the Queen of Elfland ride by on a milk-white horse with silver bells on its mane; she summoned him to be her harpist, he kissed her and mounted behind her on her horse.

  O they rade on, and farther on,

  The steed gaed faster than the wind;

  Until they reached a desert wide,

  And living land was left behind.

  In that desert is a place where three paths meet, just as they do in Lancre. One is a narrow path, thick beset with thorns and briars; this, says the Queen, is the Christian Path of Righteousness. The second is a broad path through flowery meadows, and that’s the Path of Wickedness. As for the third:

  ‘And see ye not yon bonny road,

  That winds about the fernie brae?

  That is the road to fair Elfland,

  Where thou and I this night maun gae.’

  But the bonny road among the ferns isn’t so very bonny after all:

  O they rade on, and farther on,

  And they waded rivers abune the knee,

  And they saw neither sun nor moon,

  But they heard the roaring of the sea.

  It was mirk, mirk night, there was nae starlight,

  They waded thro’ red blude to the knee;

  For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth

  Runs through the springs o’ that countrie.

  Finally they reach a garden, where the Queen gives Thomas an apple as his wages, and with it the unwelcome gift of ‘a tongue that can never lie’. He eats (one should never eat the food in Elfland),

  And till seven years were gane and past,

  True Thomas on earth was never seen.

  It could have been worse. He was away only seven years, after all, and when he returned he became a famous seer and prophet, thanks to his truth-telling tongue.

  People who are kidnapped by elves can be rescued, but this needs courage and a cool head, as there won’t be a second chance. Sometimes the rescuer has to go deep into Elfland (as Tiffany does). Sometimes, according to our own tales, it is enough to go back a year later to the place where the person was taken – a fairy ring, perhaps, where elves gather to dance, or some crossroa
ds which they pass when they ride out hunting – and wait and watch. When they appear, their human captive will be seen among them. The rescuer must drag him or her out of the dance, or off the horse, and hold on tight, no matter what monsters and terrifying illusions the elves call up. Another method, known in Scotland, is to throw a dagger over the captive’s head. Some would-be rescuers have lost their nerve, but others do not:

  ‘I remember a folksong about a situation just like this,’ said Magrat. ‘This girl had her fiancé stolen by the Queen of the Elves and she didn’t hang around whining, she jolly well got on her horse and went and rescued him. Well, I’m going to do that too.’ [Lords and Ladies]

  The song Magrat remembers is known in Scotland as the ballad of Tam Lin. To save him, his lover Janet must pull him off the fairy horse and hold on as he turns into a snake, a deer, and a red-hot iron, before returning to human form. She has the courage, and Tam is free and unharmed.

  Others were not so lucky. Some never escaped, others fell victim to the distortion of time in Fairyland. An Irish hero, Bran the son of Febal, heard an elf-woman singing and followed her to her magical island in the western seas. He remained there for a year (so he thought), but then he and his companions grew homesick. She told them they were allowed to sail close to the coast of Ireland and speak with anyone standing on dry land, but must not step ashore themselves. And so they anchored in a harbour, and shouted to the men on the beach. Nobody recognized them, though someone remembered that there were old stories about a man called Bran who once, long ago, had sailed into the West. One of Bran’s friends jumped into the water and swam ashore, but as soon as he touched land he crumbled to dust. As for Bran, he put out to sea again, and has never been seen since.

  And it’s not only bards, seers and heroes – quite ordinary people get taken too. During a wedding dance on a Danish farm the bride went out for a breath of air, and walked as far as a little mound in one of the fields, a mound where elf-folk lived. It had opened up, and elves were dancing there too, and one of them came out and offered her some wine. She drank. She joined in the dancing, just one dance, and then remembered her husband and went home. But the village and the farm looked different; she couldn’t recognize anybody, and nobody recognized her. There was just one old woman who listened to her story and exclaimed, ‘Why, you must be the girl who disappeared a hundred years ago, at my grandfather’s brother’s wedding!’ At these words, the bride’s true age came upon her in an instant, and she fell dead.

  In tales such as this, told in the European countryside, elves were often lurking in quite normal, familiar places. Just a little mound in a field which you pass every day, nothing particularly eldritch about it, no marker stones to warn you off. It might of course be an ancient burial mound, like the one on the Chalk Downs which the Wee Free Men take as their home, but on the other hand it might be a simple natural hillock. But if you lie down and press your ear to the ground, you hear faint music … Then one day it is standing open, and there They are. They are the Hidden People, the Underground Folk, the Good People, the Good Neighbours. Maybe they’ve come to do you a favour, or to ask for one. There’s no need to be frightened, is there? Is there?

  Yet long after the ‘enlightened’ and well-educated generations had lost their faith and fear, after the wild elves had been safely reduced to Peaseblossoms, an occasional artist recaptured the older image. The crazed painter Richard Dadd did so in his sinister picture The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, which he worked on from 1855 to 1864, while living in an asylum. So did the composer Rutland Boughton in the key aria of his opera The Immortal Hour (1914), based on a poem by Fiona Mcleod:

  How beautiful they are,

  The lordly ones

  Who dwell in the hills,

  In the hollow hills.

  Their limbs are more white

  Than shafts of moonshine.

  They are more fleet

  Than the north wind.

  They laugh and are glad

  And are terrible.

  When their lances shake and glitter

  Every green reed quivers.

  How beautiful they are,

  How beautiful,

  The lordly ones

  In the hollow hills.

  Beautiful, yes. And terrible.

  Chapter 4

  THE NAC MAC

  FEEGLE

  THE WEE FREE MEN, also known as the Nac Mac Feegle (and, sometimes, as ‘the defendants’), are a fiercely independent species, organized into numerous interrelated clans. Outsiders sometimes call them gnomes. To humans, they are one of the most feared of the fairy races – indeed, they can put trolls to flight, and even Nanny Ogg’s cat Greebo retires under the furniture at the sight of them. They have shaggy red hair, and are covered all over with blue tattoos and blue paint, in patterns which indicate their clan. They wear kilts or leather loincloths, use feathers, bones or teeth as decorations, and carry swords almost as large as themselves – though they go in for kicking and head-butting too. They are about six inches tall.

  Originally, they were denizens of Fairyland, and served its Queen as her wild champion robbers who went raiding on her behalf into every world there is, but all that is over. Why so, is not certain. Some say they were thrown out of Fairyland for being drunk and disorderly, making rude gestures, and using language which would be considered offensive by anybody who could understand it. They themselves say they left in disgust because the Queen was a spiteful tyrant, and ordered them to steal from the poor as well as the rich, ‘But we said it’s no right to steal an ol’ lady’s only pig, or the food frae them as dinnae ha’ enough to eat.’ Whatever the truth of it, they are now out-and-out rebels against any authority whatsoever. Their war-cry is ‘Nac Mac Feegle! The Wee Free Men! Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna be fooled again!’

  They now live in the human territories of the Discworld, but it is hard to say just where they are at any one time. Not only do they stay well hidden, but they often shift from one area to another at high speed, rather like a swarm of locusts, while indulging in their favourite occupations: drinking, stealing, and fighting anything that gets in their way. They get such pleasure from this that they think they’re dead, and gone to heaven, where there’s lovely sunshine (not like the perpetual half-light of Fairyland), good hunting, and plenty of monsters to fight:

  An amazing world like this couldn’t be open to just anybody, they say. It must be some kind of a heaven or Valhalla, where brave warriors go when they are dead. So, they reason, they have already been alive somewhere else, and then died and were allowed to come [to the Discworld] because they have been so good. [A Hatful of Sky]

  They don’t mourn much for those that actually get killed while fighting on the Disc:

  ‘Oh, they’ve gone back to the land o’ the livin’. It’s nae as good as this one, but they’ll bide fine and come back before too long. No sense in grievin’.’ [The Wee Free Men]

  They do not limit themselves to the Discworld, for, as one of their leaders, Rob Anybody, proudly declares, ‘We’ve been robbin’ an’ runnin’ aroound on all kinds o’ worrlds for a lang time.’ Their running around within a particular world is done normally, with feet (though very, very fast); but their transit from one universe to another is done by magic. They are unwilling to discuss the process, which they call ‘the crawstep’. Those who have seen them actually doing it say they simply thrust out one leg straight ahead of them, wiggle the foot, and are gone.

  For many centuries, one of their favourite places was an area of the Earth called Scotland. They were already there in the time of the Ancient Romans, who spoke of them as picti, ‘painted men’; Julius Caesar himself records that the tribes of Northern Britain had ‘designs carved into their faces by iron’, a clear reference to tattooing. Needless to say, they refused to submit to the Empire, conducting such a persistent guerrilla war that the Romans gave up hope of conquering Scotland, and the Wee Free Men remained both wee and free.

 
Later generations of Scottish humans were well aware of their presence, and called them Pehts, Pechs, Pechts or Picts. They themselves like the last version best, and have adopted it for their own use, in the form ‘pictsies’. (Be careful, however, never to confuse them with the ‘pixies’ of Devon and Cornwall, since pixies are an altogether inferior race, whom the Feegles despise as ‘wee southron shites’, whatever that means.) Several Scotsmen have described the Pechs, who were somewhat taller than the Discworld clans, but in other respects pretty similar. They were ‘unco wee bodies, but terrible strang’, wrote a certain James Knox in 1831, and lived in underground chambers and burial mounds. Indeed, for generations the Scots took it for granted that any odd stone structures found underground were ‘Picts’ houses’. Robert Chambers, in his Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1870), wrote: ‘Short wee men they were, wi’ red hair, and long arms, and feet sae braid that when it rained they could turn them up owre their heads, and then they served for umbrellas. The Pechs were great builders; they built a’ the auld castles in the kintry.’

  This refers to the brochs, a type of ancient round tower, which Scotsmen called ‘Picts’ castles’. Why they built them is a mystery, since they never lived in them; perhaps they had struck some bargain with the local human ruler, broch-building in exchange for hunting rights, or the like. It was said they could raise a broch in a single night, quarrying the stones, forming a long chain from the quarry to the chosen site, flinging the stones from hand to hand, and then piling them into massive walls. This is much the same technique as that of the Feegles when fighting people bigger than themselves; they work in groups, running up one another’s backs to form a pyramid, till the top one is high enough to punch the enemy, or, preferably, to head-butt him. Once he is down, it is all over bar the kicking.

  Feegles can easily lift things far heavier than themselves; to steal a sheep or cow, for instance, needs only four of them, as Nanny Ogg explains: