IT’S EASY, ALL TOO EASY, for people nowadays to get hold of the wrong end of the stick if you tell them there are ‘elves’ about. And if you say ‘fairies’, that just makes matters worse. People think of tall, shining figures dancing in rings in the moonlight to the loveliest music one could hope to hear; or tiny dainty creatures with butterfly wings, fluttering round flowers.
And in a way, some of this is true. For elves do generally choose to appear tall, beautiful and glamorous to humans. Their real appearance is thin, dull, and grey, with triangular faces and big slanty eyes (oddly, they occasionally let themselves be seen like this by the people of our world, who then label them ‘aliens’ and ‘extraterrestrials’, and get very excited). They do sing and dance, and sometimes they laugh a lot, though you would probably not like it if you knew what they are laughing about. And there are indeed little flying ones, though they have more in common with hornets than with butterflies. In truth, elves and fairies are a predatory, cruel, parasitic race, who will use other living beings, and hurt them, because this is fun. They break into a world through those strange places where the barrier between dimensions is just a bit too thin for safety. Places which are like a door, half open. Places where it’s wise to put a marker of some kind – a solitary tree, say, or some standing stones – to warn everybody to keep away.
And yet, foolish people will go there. In Lancre, for instance, a group of men in a wood, looking for somewhere private to rehearse a play:
‘Let’s go right,’ said Jason.
‘Nah, it’s all briars and thorns that way.’
‘All right, then, left then.’
‘It’s all winding,’ said Weaver.
‘What about the middle road?’ said Carter.
Jason peered ahead.
There was a middle track, hardly more than an animal path, which wound away under shady trees. Ferns grew thickly alongside it. There was a general green, rich, dark feel to it, suggestive of the word ‘bosky’.
His blacksmith’s senses stood up and screamed.
‘Not that way,’ he said.
‘Ah, come on,’ said Weaver. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Goes up to the Dancers, that path does,’ said Jason. [Lords and Ladies]
The blacksmith Jason Ogg knows that the Dancers – a ring of eight stumpy man-sized stones, one of which is The Piper – are to be avoided, though he doesn’t know why. Nor does his conscious mind know why he fears the ferny path; it is his instincts which (as we shall see) have picked up a warning from the lore of another world. These are signs of a gateway, a short cut between dimensions, a place where elves can enter.
One clue that elves have broken in, or are just about to, is that crop circles start appearing in cornfields; the growing wheat bends over sharply, breaks, and lies down in a circle. This strange phenomenon has been observed several times in Lancre, and also on the Earth in recent years.
Earlier generations on Earth got no such warnings, but then they didn’t need them. They knew for sure that there were elves and fairies lurking in pools and streams, in deep woods and inside mounds and rocks, and sweeping across the sky in the wild winter winds. And they knew that these beings were cold-hearted, revengeful, often cruel, however beautiful their faces and however enchanting their music. Any countryman in Ireland or the Scottish Highlands 150 or 200 years ago would have known of a dozen cases of someone who died, or lost his wits, or became paralysed, or simply was ‘never the same again’ after meeting them. Similarly in England, at an earlier period – in 1684, for instance, a writer named Richard Bovet reported that he knew someone (completely reliable, of course) who knew a man who had once seen fairies holding a market on Blackdown Hill in Somerset and foolishly tried to join them. He felt a sudden pain, and by the time he got home ‘lameness seized him all on one side’ and he remained so, though he survived for many years. We still call such a thing a ‘stroke’, even if we have forgotten who did the striking. And we still say of somebody who seems vague, dim-witted, or slightly crazed that he or she is ‘away with the fairies’.
In Eastern Europe, the fear of elves and fairies was still powerful in quite recent years. The American folklorist Gail Kligman, working in Romania in 1975, learned about wondrously beautiful but malevolent fairy maidens called iele, which literally means ‘They’ or ‘Themselves’, since it is dangerous to utter their true name. They live in woods and wild places. They travel by night, singing and dancing, but those who listen to their music or join their dance will regret it – at best, they will be deaf for life, and may well be crippled, or go mad. There is hardly any limit to the sickness and trouble which the iele can inflict on humans, even those who have never offended them. In Russia and other Slavonic lands, there are forest elves who trick travellers into leaving the path to wander helplessly among the trees until they starve to death, and water elves who catch and drown the unwary. Beautiful? Yes, usually. Nice? Never.
Wherever elves go they feed on the awe, the terror, the superstition they inspire. They take control of people’s minds. They enslave. When they invaded Lancre, as is told in Lords and Ladies, Granny Weatherwax warned King Verence II:
‘When they get into a world, everyone else is on the bottom. Slaves. Worse than slaves. Worse than animals, even. They take what they want, and they want everything. But worst of all, the worst bit is … they read your mind. They hear what you think, and in self-defence you think what they want. And it’s barred windows at night, and food out for the fairies, and turning around three times before you talks about ’em, and horseshoes over the door.’
Horseshoes are important, and so are the blacksmiths who make them, since almost the only protection humans have against fairies is the power of iron. It is known throughout the multiverse that all creatures of this species fear and detest iron, which causes them intense pain. Various more or less foolish theories have been proposed to account for this. On the Earth, it is often claimed that it shows ‘fairies’ are nothing more than a folk memory of some prehistoric human society which did not have iron weapons, and fled from others who did. But on the Discworld people know the real reason. Elves have a powerful sixth sense based on awareness of magnetic fields, and use it to know precisely where they are, and where and what all other living creatures are. So to them iron is:
… the terrible metal that drinks the force and deforms the flux universe like a heavy weight on a rubber sheet and blinds them and deafens them and leaves them rudderless and more alone than most humans could ever be. [Lords and Ladies]
The other picture people have of fairies, the picture of their beauty and charm, is partly created by the fairies themselves as they infiltrate the collective memory and imagination of humanity. Nanny Ogg knows this, yet even she finds it hard to keep a clear mind when thinking about elves:
People didn’t seem able to remember what it was like with the elves around. Life was certainly more interesting then, but usually because it was shorter. And it was more colourful, if you liked the colour of blood. It got so people didn’t even dare talk openly about the bastards.
You said: The Shining Ones. You said: The Fair Folk. And you spat, and touched iron. But generations later, you forgot about the spitting and the iron, and you forgot why you used those names for them, and you remembered only that they were beautiful.
Elves! The bastards … and yet … and yet … somehow, yes, they did things to memory.
We only remembers that the elves sang [thought Nanny Ogg]. We forgets what it was they were singing about.
How completely people forget depends very much on when, where and how they live. In the cities – in London, New York, or Ankh-Morpork – elves and fairies are nothing more than fantasy, just a bit of fun for the kids. But people who live on the land, especially in remote and wild parts of the country, those people know they are real. And they remember that though they might, just occasionally, bring good luck, they are far more likely to inflict diseases, kidnap people, and steal human babies, replacing them with their own sickly and mentally deficient ‘changelings’.
Changelings were a particularly sad obsession. A healthy young couple out in the country and in a world without modern medical understanding or any idea of the meaning of the term ‘limited gene pool’, give birth to a child who looks like a little old man, or is beautiful but very backward, or eats incessantly but nevertheless fails to thrive … and the only reason the family can find lies in folklore: ‘the fairies stole our beautiful child and left one of their own.’ A horrible thought, yet not quite so horrible for the parents as one religious alternative: ‘It’s our own fault the baby is like this, it’s a judgement on us for our sins.’
In a disturbing but fascinating paper published in the journal of the Folklore Society in 1988, Susan Shoon Eberley cites many accounts of the appearance and behaviour of changelings as they were described in nineteenth-century sources, and maps them against dozens of childhood disorders which produce children that look and act ‘like the fairies’. The Victorian medical establishment was coming to grips with the idea that these children were victims of disease; but the common people fell back on folk myth, which was reinforced with every case.
Folk myth also supplied a cruel remedy. You had to make life so miserable for the changeling that it would flee and the ‘real’ child would miraculously return. Custom handed down various ‘remedies’, including putting the child in a hot oven or leaving it out on the midden all night – child abuse at best, socially condoned infanticide at worst. The wonderful child did not return, but at least there was no longer the inconvenient changeling in the cradle, and everyone nodded and understood …
Nanny Ogg, a midwife, knew what she was doing when she took the king of the elves to task in Lords and Ladies. A society does not want elves in the driving seat.
Yet by the nineteenth century, in much of Europe, memories were fading, and people spoke of elves and fairies without such fear. Their world was under attack by education and street lights and medicine and technology; the telegraph could beat Puck when it came to putting a girdle round the earth.
And thus their decline continued. Though people still told stories about changelings and abductions, on the whole they believed (or half believed, or suspended disbelief) that the Hidden Folk could be good neighbours to humans, and were just mischievous, not truly dangerous. They could lead you astray even in woods which you knew quite well, so that you felt hopelessly lost and would maybe fall into a ditch, but that was just their fun (and in any case it was easier to blame the fairies than the cider). They would do you no harm, provided you were careful not to offend them. The rules were clear: don’t cut down their favourite trees, don’t damage the mounds where they live, don’t build a road across their paths, be careful where you throw dirty water, keep your house clean and your hearth swept in case a fairy comes there in the night.
There was even one type, the house-elves, whom humans welcomed. The English called them hobs, pixies or pucks, the Scots brownies, the Scandinavians nisses and tomtes. These would actually live in a farm and bring it luck; they would help with harvesting, tend the animals, even do housework, in exchange for an occasional bowl of milk or porridge – provided nobody spied on them or laughed at them. Russian country folk said there were several on each farm; the most important one lived behind the stove, others guarded the barn, the bath-house, the henhouse, and so on. On the Discworld, only the Wee Free Men have ever done such a favour for humans, and then only once, in the very special circumstances created by their bond with Tiffany Aching. Their reward was Special Sheep Liniment, which smells suspiciously like whisky.
Another sign that people in Europe were forgetting the true nature of elves, and no longer took them seriously, is that they so often thought of them as small. The Little People, the Wee Folk. Some people said they were about the size of a rabbit; others, that of a six-year-old child. Some said they were really, really small – like the little farm-elf in Sweden who sweated and panted as he dragged a single ear of wheat into the barn, but went off in a huff when the farmer laughed at him; once he was gone, the farm went to rack and ruin. So he had his revenge. Even so, one can’t be seriously scared of something a few inches high (unless, of course, it is a Nac Mac Feegle).
Why did the menace of elves dwindle in this way? How can they have been so reduced? Once again, it was Will Shakespeare’s plays which nudged the human imagination on to a new path. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he gave elves sweet but silly names: Peaseblossom and Cobweb, Mustardseed and Moth. They were, by his reckoning, just about big enough to kill a red-hipped bumble-bee on top of a thistle. True, he also wrote about Puck, who was bigger and more active and enjoyed playing practical jokes, but there is no real malice or danger in Puck’s tricks. In Romeo and Juliet he described Mab, Queen of the Fairies, who controls people’s dreams, like the Fairy Queen whom Tiffany encounters in The Wee Free Men. But whereas that Queen is terrifying, Queen Mab is a delightful little thing as she drives her tiny, dainty chariot across the bodies of sleeping humans:
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
The traces, of the smallest spider’s web;
The collars, of the moonshine’s watery beams;
Her whip, of cricket’s bone; the lash, of film;
Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat …
This new image of fairies and their world proved irresistible. From Shakespeare’s time right down to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it has gone on spreading in literature, painting, children’s books, films, television. So now there are plenty of pretty fairies and quaint little elves on Earth – they make a good story to entertain a child. And so some become Santa’s Little Helpers, and some bring money for a tooth, and there are fairies at the bottom of the garden (it’s not so very, very far away). There’s one who says she’ll die if children don’t clap their hands to prove they believe in her. And for very young children, just to get them properly addicted to tweeness, there are dumpy little baby-fairies in romper suits, with horns, living in a land where it’s all trees and flowers and sunshine. So nice. Such good fun.
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 crossroads 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.