LANCRE LANDMARKS

The Dancers

WHEN PEOPLE HAVE LIVED in the same place for generations, they know every inch of the countryside as if it were their own backyard, which it often is. They like things to have reasons, a name, a history, an explanation. Particularly an explanation. Everything inexplicable demands an explanation. Narrativium takes over, the land becomes filled with stories, and the result is a fine crop of folklore. On the Discworld the process is most obvious in Lancre and on the Chalk, though much the same thing would be found in every country if anyone went to look.

Of course, there are always people who wouldn’t take a folk tale seriously even if it jumped up and bit them (which, given the power of narrativium, it might quite well do). Consider the case of Eric Wheelbrace, that most resolute and rational of ramblers, now alas missing and presumed dead. Among interesting features noted in his essay ‘Lancre: Gateway to the Ramtops’ (included in A Tourist Guide to Lancre), he briefly mentions the Dancers, a group of standing stones on a small area of moorland about midway between Lancre River and the Ramtops:

There are eight of them, in a circle wide enough to throw a stone across. They are reddish, about man height, and barely thicker than a man as well. Local legend has it that they are a gateway into the kingdom of the elves but the truth is likely to be much more prosaic. They are typical of a style of silicon chronograph constructed in the dawn of time by our ignorant forebears. Basically, they are an underused resource, and I for one intend to organize a Lancre Music and Dance Festival next year, based round the stones, which are in a perfect location for that sort of activity. It is my belief that the stories are put about by the locals in order to keep people away, but we will not be deterred. [A Tourist Guide to Lancre]

Oh deary, deary me. Eight of them, a magic number. And called The Dancers, too, with a Piper and a Drummer among them. This looks very much like a warning that something eldritch happened there in the olden days, and maybe could happen again. The witches have done their best to make sure everyone avoids the place. Even the more stupid locals have some notion of the dangers:

‘I remember an old story about this place,’ said Baker. ‘Some man went to sleep up here once, when he was out hunting.’

‘So what? I can do that,’ said Carter. ‘I go to sleep every night, reg’lar.’

‘Ah, but this man, when he woke up and went home, his wife was carrying on with someone else and all his children had grown up and didn’t know who he was.’ [Lords and Ladies]

These weird tricks of time always happen when someone is taken out of their own world into Elfland, as we noted in an earlier chapter. But in what sense are the stones themselves Dancers? Since the locals didn’t tell Wheelbrace, or if they did he wasn’t listening, we must look to the Earth for the explanation, thanks to some of those remarkable parallels and echoes between one universe and another.

Stone circles are powerful or, at least, become cloaked in powerful stories. In various parts of England – Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Derbyshire – there are circles of stones known as the Nine Ladies or Nine Maidens or Merry Maidens. There may or may not actually be nine of them (it’s a magical number, like eight is on the Disc), but their story is everywhere the same: there were once some girls who loved dancing so much that they would go off to the hills to dance together whenever they could, even on Sundays when they should have been in church. So one Sunday they were smitten by the Wrath of God, which turned them to stone. No more dancing for them – except maybe for the ones near Okehampton in Devon, where (some people say) they are allowed to take a few steps every day at noon. Sometimes one stone in the circle, or close beside it, is named the Piper or Fiddler; it is said he was playing the music for the girls to dance to, and was smitten too.

Back in Lancre, Eric Wheelbrace insisted that there was a right of way across the Dancers, and that he would organize his Festival there. Dismissing local objections as mere superstition, and declaring that a determined rambler will laugh with scorn at threats, he set off to cross the circle one Midsummer Eve. His boots were found frozen solid, in a hedge a mile away. He has presumably now discovered that the Dancers are indeed, as legend claims, ‘a gateway into the kingdom of the elves’, and he may even understand that such gates are meant to be kept shut. That’s why the stones chosen for the job are reddish and magnetic; they contain a good deal of iron, a tried and trusted elf-repellent.

The Standing Stone

On the crest of a moor in the Ramtops, there is a solitary bluish Standing Stone (well, sometimes there is). It is a painfully shy megalith, so although there is only one of it, nobody has ever been able to count it. If it sees anyone approaching with a calculating look, it shuffles off to hide among the gorse bushes or flops into a peat bog. There are rumours that other huge standing stones on the moor are mobile too, but are too keen on their privacy to let themselves be seen when on the move.

The folklore of Earth is, as so often, remarkably close to the facts of the Disc. It is almost commonplace on Earth to be told that at midnight, or at dawn, a particular standing stone will spin round on its base, or dance, or walk down to the river to drink. But if someone tells you about this, do listen carefully – it could be folklore, or it could be a leg-pull. If what he said was, ‘That stone turns round whenever it hears the church clock strike midnight’, he’s speaking a very literal kind of truth, and what you have to ask yourself is, ‘How often does a stone hear a clock?’ Never, actually. That’s the leg-pull. On the other hand, if what he said was, ‘That stone turns round when the church clock strikes midnight’, he’s folk, and that’s lore.

As for counting, Earthly megaliths absolutely hate being counted, and will do anything to prevent it. Stonehenge used to be very good at this – a rumour got around that anyone who reckoned up its stones and got the number right would be sure to die. And those who did try got wildly different results. Yet Daniel Defoe, writing in the 1720s, said he had seen them counted four times, and each time the total was 72; the only problem, he thought, was that many were fallen and half buried, so one could not easily tell whether one was seeing two parts of one stone, or two separate stones. In 1740 the antiquary William Stukeley published his count, making it 140 and exclaiming triumphantly, ‘Behold the solution of the mighty problem, the magical spell is broke which has so long perplexed the vulgar.’ Modern archaeologists disagree with them both; having tidied the place up and mapped it, they have settled on 96.

In several places where there are ‘countless stones’, people have had the same bright idea: take a basket of loaves, count them, and put one on top of each stone till you have gone all round the ring, then see how many loaves are left, do a simple sum, and, bingo, that’s it. This did work with The Hurlers in Cornwall, but not at Stonehenge, nor yet at Little Kit’s Coty in Kent. There, some say, a baker who tried this trick ended up with more loaves than he started out with; others say he completed his calculations but dropped dead before he could announce the result.

Some people might suggest that all you need to do is chalk a number on each stone as you go, but somehow that just doesn’t do the trick, lore-wise. It lacks style. Besides, there’s sure to be Something that comes creeping up behind you to rub the figures out.

The Long Man

In a valley a few miles from Lancre’s solitary Standing Stone is an even more significant landmark, the Long Man. This name could mislead someone from our world, since here the Long Man is a giant human figure carved into the chalk of a hillside at Wilmington, on the Sussex Downs. Lancre has no chalk, and hence no hill-figures, but it does have plenty of burial mounds (‘barrows’), housing the dead of long-gone generations, and sometimes housing the Wee Free Men as well. Some have partly collapsed, exposing their huge stones to the sky, and attracting folklore of their own. There’s one that’s supposed to be the workplace of an invisible blacksmith; people put a sixpence on the stone and leave a horse there overnight to be shod, just as people of this world used to do at Wayland’s Smithy on the Berkshire Downs. There, this magic worked (or so they say); in Lancre, both coin and horse would be gone by morning, people there having more of a sense of humour.

What Lancre calls ‘the Long Man’ is a group of burial mounds close together, two round ones at the foot of a long one. Nanny Ogg says that the first time she saw them from the air she laughed so much she nearly fell off her broomstick. She has also given a pithy description of a much-loved Lancre custom, the Scouring of the Long Man.

This takes place about every twenty years in early May, when the men and the married women go up to the Long Man and cut away all the bracken and seedlings which have grown up since the last Scouring. Says Nanny: ‘Unmarried girls ain’t allowed to join in, but it’s amazin’ what a good view you can get from up a tree and if you ain’t got brothers you can get an education there which will prevent surprises later in life. When it’s decently dark there’s a pig roast and then people wander off and make their own entertainment.’ [A Tourist Guide to Lancre]

If the memories of Nanny Ogg’s great-grandmother can be trusted, things had been a good deal wilder in the old days, when the menfolk used to go up to the Long Man for strange rites which no woman ever saw (unless, being an Ogg, she hid in the bushes):

‘She said they just used to build sweat lodges and smell like a blacksmith’s armpit and drink scumble and dance around the fire with horns on and piss in the trees any old how. She said it was a bit cissy, to be honest. But I always reckon a man’s got to be a man, even if it is cissy.’ [Lords and Ladies]

In Lancre Town, as Eric Wheelbrace notes, one can buy ‘vulgar and inappropriate souvenirs which allegedly depict the Long Man and some of the legends attached to it’. Well, well.

There is nothing on the Earth which fully matches the three-dimensional majesty of Lancre’s Long Man, where, as Nanny Ogg puts it, the landscape itself is boasting, ‘I’ve got a great big tonker.’ The poor old Long Man of Wilmington, in fact, has no tonker at all. In Dorset, however, there is the Cerne Abbas Giant, which is the outline of a huge man with an erect penis, carved into the chalk. It requires to be scoured every seven years, to keep it clear of grass and weeds. There is a strong local tradition that couples who want a child but have failed to conceive should visit the Giant and make love at the appropriate spot. We are not certain if an appointment is required.

The Scouring of Lancre’s Long Man, though, would seem to have more in common with the periodical Scouring of the White Horse, a magnificent and very ancient figure carved into a hillside near Uffington in Berkshire (see the section on the Chalk). On irregular occasions the Horse was cleaned up, and this became the occasion for a fair and games such as chasing cheeses down a hill, climbing the greasy pole, cudgelling, wrestling and, as the ale and the sun both went down, brawling, drunkenness and, after dark, ‘making your own entertainment’.

But there is more to Lancre’s Long Man – much, much more. At the foot of the long mound three large irregular stones form a low cave. One wall has a drawing scratched on it, showing an owl-eyed man wearing an animal skin and horns, who appears to be dancing. A shaman, performing a magical hunting ritual? A god, half human and half beast? A shaman, dressed as this god? Whoever and whatever he is, he has an identical twin brother on Earth, painted several thousand years ago on the wall of the Trois Frères cave in the south of France.

Force the stones apart, and the opening reveals steps leading down into the vast underground network of the Lancre Caves. This too is an entrance to an elf world – but this is the other elf world, the one the Queen’s elves don’t talk about, the one which is an integral part of Lancre, not a malevolent, parasitic universe. A spiral path goes further and further down under the Long Man, till one comes to a hot, dark, steamy tent of skins, a shaman’s sweat-lodge. There, sprawled half asleep beside a bowl of red-hot stones, lies the huge figure of the Antlered One, the only god for whom Nanny Ogg has a soft spot. He is the Lord of the Elves, the Queen’s estranged husband; at Nanny’s request, he forces the Queen to give up her attack on Lancre, as described in Lords and Ladies.

Will Shakespeare, whose finely tuned mind often unconsciously picked up the particles of information which drift from one universe to another, echoed the strained relations between the Elf Queen and her husband when he described the quarrel of Titania and Oberon in his play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet he had no inkling of the true nature and appearance of the Antlered Elf Lord. In fact, it is less than a hundred years since this image began to coalesce in the imaginations of English witches and pagans. It has been built up out of bits and pieces of various myths, some far older than others – the figure in the Trois Frères cave, the Greek Pan, the Celtic antlered god Cernunnos, the medieval idea that the Devil has bull’s horns and goat’s feet. Plus the fact that horns are a natural, universal symbol of a male animal’s strength and sexuality. Put all this together, and you get what modern witches call The Horned God – the incarnation of maleness, the personification of the ever-renewed vital force of Nature. Some now say he is the oldest god man has created. And on the Discworld, he is real.

Sleeping Warriors

There are other things too in the labyrinthine Lancre Caves, for these are one of those areas where the normal rules of time and space do not apply. When Nanny Ogg goes there with the dwarf Casanunda, they pass a certain cavern:

There were hundreds of dust-covered slabs ranged around the cavern in a spiral; at the centre of the spiral was a huge bell, suspended on a rope that disappeared into the darkness of the ceiling. Just under the hanging bell was one pile of silver coins and one pile of gold coins.

‘Don’t touch the money,’ said Nanny. ‘’Ere, watch this, my dad told me about this, it’s a good trick.’

She reached out and tapped the bell very gently, causing a faint ting.

Dust cascaded off the nearest slab. What Casanunda had thought was just a carving sat up, in a creaky way. It was an armed warrior … He focused deepset eyes on Nanny Ogg.

‘What bloody tyme d’you call thys, then?’

‘Not time yet,’ said Nanny.

‘What did you goe and bang the bell for? I don’t know, I haven’t had a wynke of sleep for two hundred years, some sodde alwayes bangs the bell. Go awaye.’

The warrior lay back.

‘It’s some old king and his warriors,’ whispered Nanny as they hurried away. ‘Some kind of magical sleep, I’m told. Some old wizard did it. They’re supposed to wake up for some final battle when a wolf eats the sun.’ [Lords and Ladies]

The legend of the Sleeping Warriors recurs so often that its narrativium drive must be unusually powerful. On the Discworld it has been found in at least three other places, far from Lancre.

First, in a huge burial mound on the Counterweight Continent there are seven thousand terracotta warriors, each seven foot tall, who form an invincible Red Army when aroused. Their Earthly counterparts were discovered by archaeologists some years ago, drawn up in military array in pits all round an Emperor’s grave in China; wisely, nobody has yet attempted to arouse them. It is as yet unclear whether the golems who have come to Ankh-Morpork, as is told in Making Money, and who were last seen digging themselves into trenches round the city, will be taking on a similar role. Secondly, inside a hill at Holy Wood, there is a gigantic knight in golden armour lying on a dusty slab in front of a silver screen, and beside him is the gong to wake him. And thirdly, in the limestone caverns under Koom Valley, there is the Kings’ Cave, where Dwarf King and Troll King, encased in stalactites, sit eternally at their game of Thud, as they were when death overtook them:

There was the dwarf king, slumped forward across the board, glazed by the eternal drip, his beard now rock and at one with the stone, but the diamond king had remained upright in death, his skin gone cloudy, and you could still see the game in front of him. It was his move; a healthy little stalactite hung from his outstretched hand. [Thud!]

Many European traditions tell of an ancient king who lies asleep inside a mountain. Some say he will awake in the hour of his country’s greatest need, and return to save his people; others, that when he wakes it means the End of the World is near. In France, he is Charlemagne; in Britain, King Arthur; in Denmark, Holger Danske; in Germany, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (‘Red Beard’). Barbarossa is in Mount Kyffhausen:

He sits on a bench at a round stone table, resting his head on his hand, sleeping, nodding his head and blinking his eyes. His beard has grown long – according to some, right through the stone table. But according to others, the beard grows around the table, and when it has encircled it three times it will be the time of his awakening. It has now grown around twice.

A shepherd was once led into the mountain by a dwarf. The emperor rose and asked him, ‘Are the ravens still flying round the mountain?’ When the shepherd assured him that they were, he cried, ‘Now I am going to have to sleep for another hundred years.’ [German Legends of the Brothers Grimm (1816), no. 23; transl. Donald Ward, 1981]

In Britain, the sleeper is King Arthur. Many people claim to know the very place where he and his knights are lying in some cavern under a hill, with their horses and hounds beside them – inside Alderley Edge in Cheshire, inside Cadbury Hill in Somerset, under Sewingshields Crag in Northumberland, under Richmond Castle in Yorkshire, in the Eildon Hills near Edinburgh. If you can find your way in and reach the place where Arthur sleeps, you may see a pile of gold; you are allowed to take some once, but don’t ever go back to get more. There will certainly be significant objects – maybe a bell, maybe a sheathed sword, a garter, or a horn. There are just two problems: first, you have to know whether you must or must not touch them in order to wake the king (assuming that is what you want to do); and then, you have to keep your nerve. So far, things have never worked out properly. At Richmond Castle, one man who found his way down to the sleepers’ vault saw a sword and a hunting horn. He drew the sword half out of its scabbard, and the sleepers began to stir, but this terrified him so much that he thrust the blade back. An angry voice called out:

Thompson, Potter Thompson,

If you’d drawn the sword or blown the horn,

You’d ha’ been the luckiest man

That ever yet was born.

The man who got into the vault at Sewingshields did a bit better. He saw a sword, a garter, and a bugle. He drew the sword right out of the scabbard, and Arthur and the knights opened their eyes. Then he cut the garter, and this too was the right thing to do, and they slowly sat up. But then he stopped. The spell took hold again, and the king and his warriors sank back on their couches, but not before Arthur had cursed the man:

O woe betide that evil day

On which this witless wight was born

Who drew the sword, the garter cut,

But never blew the bugle horn!

The Gnarly Ground

Gnarly ground is hard to see, let alone describe. There’s a patch of it on the highest part of the moorlands, beyond the forest and among the mountains. If you look at it in one way, it’s just a pathless stretch of heather and furze, less than a mile across (even if the furze is horribly matted and thorny), and at one point there’s a little stream which has cut a groove among the rocks, scarcely more than a foot deep. You could easily jump it. Yet somebody has laid a broad stone slab across it, as a bridge. Now look at the scene the other way … You see an endless, nasty-looking, desolate expanse; a long, narrow, dizzying bridge spanning a ravine; a raging torrent far below. They say a deer will sometimes run on to gnarly ground if hard-pressed in the hunt, but it has to be pretty desperate.

‘What is gnarly ground?’ said Agnes.

‘There’s a lot of magic in these mountains, right?’ said Nanny. ‘And everyone knows mountains get made when lumps of land bang together, right? Well, when the magic gets trapped you … sort of … get a bit of land where the space is … sort of … scrunched up, right? It’d be quite big if it could, but it’s like a bit of gnarly wood in an ol’ tree. Or a used hanky … all folded up small but still big in a different way.’ [Carpe Jugulum]

In Carpe Jugulum, Granny Weatherwax sets out alone to cross the gnarly ground, and the younger witches go after her. Their socks, knitted from Lancre’s toughest, most wiry wool, protect them from the savage spikes of furze. But then comes the gorge, an abyss so deep one can barely see the river below, and a high, slender bridge that shifts and creaks underfoot. And then a cavern, some tunnels, a flash of fire.

It is a strange, perilous journey, but not unparalleled. Time and again, in myths and folk tales from all parts of the multiverse, those who take the road to the Otherworld must pass a water barrier by way of a Bridge Perilous. A Scottish ballad describes one leading from Purgatory to Paradise:

The brigge was as heigh as a tower,

And as scharpe as a rasour,

And naru it was also;

And the water that ther ran under

Brennd of lightning and of thunder,

That thought him mikle wo.

The closest match for Granny’s journey is the strange medieval funeral chant known as ‘The Lyke-Wake Dirge’, which Yorkshire women sang, as late as the sixteenth century, as they kept watch over a corpse. The tale it tells was already old; it had begun (in so far as such things can be said ever to begin) four hundred years before, as a vision which came to a German monk called Gottskalk in December 1189, as he lay sick of a fever. He saw the souls of the dead gathering on the edge of a great wild heath covered with thorns and furze. There was a tree nearby, its branches loaded with pairs of shoes, but the newly dead soul must cross the thorny ground barefoot – unless, while alive, he or she had given socks and shoes as alms to the poor. And so the Yorkshire women sang:

If ever thou gavest hosen or shoon,

Every night and all,

Sit thee down and put them on,

And Christ receive thy soul.

If hosen and shoon thou never gave none,

Every night and all,

The whinnies shall prick thee to the bare bone,

And Christ receive thy soul.

Having passed over Whinny Moor, the soul comes to The Bridge of Dread, which is ‘no broader than a thread’, and finally to Purgatory Fire. Those who once gave food and drink to the needy will not shrink from its flames; those who never did will be burned to the bare bone. The song stops at this point, but since in Christian belief Purgatory is never a final state, simply the last stage on a sinner’s journey to God in Heaven, we can assume a happy ending.

As for Granny Weatherwax, the message she sends the world is, I ATE’NT DEAD YET.

BELIEFS OF LANCRE

The people of Lancre are, on the whole, remarkably free from irrational beliefs. Things which in another universe would be considered superstitions are plain commonsensical everyday facts in Lancre. People there don’t believe that a horseshoe over the door keeps you safe from elves, they know it, and if you ask them why it works they can explain just why (the magnetic effect of iron disrupts the sixth sense so vital to an elf’s well-being). Beekeepers are careful to tell their bees everything important that concerns the family and household – births, marriages, deaths, a new set of curtains, and suchlike. But that’s not superstition, just the practical observation that if you don’t tell them, they will fly indoors to find out for themselves.

Or take the matter of controlling horses. On the Earth, there were farriers and farm workers who had learned the secret magic of the ‘Horseman’s Word’. They could make any horse follow them, or utterly refuse to move on, by whispering it into its ear. To become a Horse Whisperer or Toadman wasn’t easy. In Scotland, you had to be initiated into a secret society and swear blood-curdling oaths. In East Anglia, you had to kill a toad, leave it on an ant-hill for a month till the bones were picked clean, then on the next night of the full moon put the bones in a stream (ignoring the eldritch sounds which would break out just behind you). One single bone would float upstream. Take it home, rub it with oils, grind it to powder. That powder holds the power.

In Lancre, the blacksmith and farrier Jason Ogg has no need of all that palaver, but he does have a more immediately practical approach. He can calm the wildest stallion by whispering a definitely non-magical Word in its ear – he simply points out what all those pliers and hammers could be used for, ‘if you don’t stand still right now, you bugger’.

Royal Phantoms

Curiously, the royal family of Lancre have one strong superstition, though it only affects them once they are dead. They believe that they are bound to the stones of their ancient castle (especially if they happen to have been murdered on the premises), and must haunt it indefinitely. When this happened to King Verence I, he found he disliked most of his fellow-ghosts:

Champot was all right, if a bit tiresome. But Verence had backed away at the first sight of the Twins, toddling hand in hand along the midnight corridors, their tiny ghosts a memorial to a deed darker even than the usual run of regicidal unpleasantness.

And then there was the Troglodyte Wanderer, a rather faded monkeyman in a furry loincloth who apparently happened to haunt the castle merely because it had been built on his burial mound. For no obvious reason a chariot with a screaming woman in it occasionally rumbled through the laundry room. [Wyrd Sisters]

Being not entirely stupid, King Verence found a way of escape. He persuaded Nanny Ogg to help him, pleading, ‘Pray carry a stone out of the palace so’s I can haunt it, good mother, it’s so bloody boring in here.’ So he left the castle, clinging to a bit of rock that Nanny broke off the battlements and put in her apron pocket, and took up residence in her cottage. Unfortunately all the other ghosts came along too, but she got used to them in the end.

Magpies

Creatures which in other parts of the multiverse are a topic for wild rumour and proliferating legend are regarded in Lancre simply as rare and interesting species. To see the occasional phoenix or unicorn is sometimes a surprise, always a pleasure, but never an omen, either for good or ill. (Details of these and other remarkable fauna are to be found in the chapter on ‘Beasties’.) But there is one exception – magpies are definitely bodeful.

The magpies which come down into Lancre from Uberwald are the spies and messengers of a powerful vampire, Count de Magpyr. But even apart from that, magpies are unpopular there for their thieving ways and for being omens.

Something chattered at them from a nearby branch …

‘Good morning, Mister Magpie,’ said Agnes automatically.

‘Bugger off, you bastard,’ said Nanny, and reached down for a stick to throw. The bird swooped off to the other side of the clearing.

‘That’s bad luck,’ said Agnes.

‘It will be if I get a chance to aim,’ said Nanny. ‘Can’t stand those maggoty-pies.’

‘ “One for sorrow”,’ said Agnes, watching the bird hop along a branch.

‘I always take the view there’s prob’ly going to be another one along in a minute,’ said Nanny, dropping the stick.

‘ “Two for joy”?’ said Agnes.

‘It’s “two for mirth”.’

‘Same thing, I suppose.’

‘Dunno about that,’ said Nanny. ‘I was joyful when our Jason was born, but I can’t say I was laughin’ at the time.’

Two more magpies landed on the cottage’s antique thatch.

‘That’s “three for a girl—”,’ said Agnes nervously.

‘ “Three for a funeral” is what I learned,’ said Nanny. ‘But there’s lots of magpie rhymes.’ …

‘ “Seven for a secret never to be told”,’ said Agnes.

‘ “Seven’s a devil, his own sel’ ”,’ said Nanny darkly. ‘You’ve got your rhyme, I’ve got mine.’ [Carpe Jugulum]

*

Things are much the same on the Earth, where magpies (also known as pies, pyats, mags, or maggoty-pies) are sinister and unpopular birds. They are shameless thieves, snatching anything bright and glittery and carrying it off to decorate their extremely untidy and badly built nests – behaviour which earned one of them a vital but non-singing role in Rossini’s opera The Thieving Magpie. It is said they will even fly down into Hell if there is a bag of gold to be found there. They love gossiping, chattering, and causing trouble; they are evil birds who know far more than they ought, always peering about and prying into other people’s business. They have always enjoyed disasters. Even in the days of Noah’s flood, the magpie refused to enter the Ark, preferring to perch on the roof and jabber with glee at the sight of the drowning world.

Magpies are so malicious that Spanish peasants say each one has seven bristles from the Devil’s beard among its feathers, and seven bladders of bitter gall in its body. They are the Devil’s spies and messengers. In Russia, too, they are considered the Devil’s forces; there are said to be forty of them perched on fir trees to guard a bog where he sits enthroned on a white rock.

Throughout England and Scotland for the past two hundred years and more, there have been rhymes to warn you what to expect if you see magpies flying across your path. However, as Nanny Ogg would certainly point out, they are not very reliable, since they are not the ones the magpies know themselves. There are many versions, all agreeing that a single magpie brings bad luck, but two bring good. With three and four, there is more choice:

One for sorrow,

Two for joy,

Three for a girl,

And four for a boy.

Or:

One for sorrow,

Two for mirth,

Three for a wedding,

Four for a birth.

Or on the other hand, in the oldest known version (from Lincolnshire in 1780) it is:

Three for a wedding,

And four for a death.

After which things become more complicated. You can have:

Five for silver, six for gold,

Seven for a secret never to be told.

Or:

Five for rich, six for poor,

Seven for a witch, I can tell you no more.

Or:

Five for England, six for France,

Seven for a fiddler, eight for a dance.

Or:

Five for heaven, six for hell,

Seven, you’ll see the devil himsel’.

To be on the safe side when a magpie crosses your path, and to turn aside the bad luck, you can draw a cross on the ground, or lay two straws or sticks crosswise; or bow to the bird, saying ‘Good day, Mr Magpie!’, or blow a kiss towards it; or recite this charm:

I crossed the magpie, and the magpie crossed me;

Devil take the magpie, and God save me!

CUSTOMS OF LANCRE

For some years now, the Ankh-Morpork Folk Dance and Song Society has been compiling an archive of old folk customs and fertility rituals from the countryside around. One summer a lady folklorist arrived on Nanny Ogg’s doorstep, demanding information. ‘Well,’ said Nanny, ‘there’s only one fertility ritual that I knows of and that’s the one that comes nat’rally.’ But the lady said, ‘No, there’s got to be loads of folk stuff hanging on because I am writing a book, and I will give you this handsome silver dollar, my good woman.’

So Nanny Ogg gave her what she reckoned was one dollar’s worth, but no more. This included the Scouring of the Long Man, as described above, and two or three others, which will be found in A Tourist Guide to Lancre:

The Seven-Year Flitch. This is an old custom datin’ back to one Miscegenation Carter who left some money in his will to set it up to provide a flitch of bacon for the deservin’ poor. It is held every five years. It is open to any man who has been married for more than seven years to appear before the Flitch Court, which consists of six old married couples, an’ swear that in that time he has never had a cross word with his wife or regretted bein’ married. If he does, he is beaten near senseless with the flitch for lying, but brought round with strong drink and the rest of the day is a fair. So far no man has ever convinced the Court an’ the flitch is the original one, which is as hard as oak now.

The Lancre Oozer. The Oozer, attended by people dressed up as his Squeasers, dances from house to house in every village on Old Hogswatch Eve until people gives them money to go somewhere else. It is said that any maiden kissed by the Oozer is sure to be pregnant before the year is out but this is an odds-on bet in these parts anyway.

The Slice Mummers’ Play. This is performed on the first Saturday after Marling Day, when the characters of Old Hogfather, Death, Merry Hood and the White Knight perform an age-old ritual tellin’ of the death and resurrection of really bad acting. This is the high spot of the Slice Fair and Revels. There is not a lot to do in Slice. Well, not that isn’t mostly banned everywhere else.

The similarities to Earthly customs here are truly astonishing. Anyone who knows anything about English traditions will recognize the name of the Dorset Ooser, a large, heavy wooden head with bull’s horns, goggle eyes, and movable snapping jaws. Folklorists found out about it in 1891, at which time it was kept by a family in Crewkerne, but could get no information on how it was used. It has since disappeared, or perhaps it took a dislike to the folklorists and ran away. Its Discworld counterpart behaves very much like the May Day Obby Oss at Padstow in Cornwall, which dances from house to house through the narrow streets, led by a Teaser, and accompanied by singers and a massed band of accordions and drums. This goes on all day. If the Oss catches a woman, she will be married and/or pregnant within a year.

Mumming Plays can be seen in many towns and villages of England, Lowland Scotland, and parts of Ireland around Christmas time (or Easter, in Lancashire). They always involve a lot of shouting of bad verse, two or three fights, a death, and a resurrection brought about by a quack doctor. And then someone takes up a collection from the spectators. Folklorists used to think this was some sort of extremely ancient fertility ritual, but eventually got around to noticing the collection, and the odd fact that performances used to take place outside rich men’s houses, and nowadays at a pub.

As for the Seven-Year Flitch, this recalls something which has been going on, off and on, for at least six hundred years at Great Dunmow in Essex. Originally, any man who, having been married for more than a year, could convince the monks at Little Dunmow Priory that he had never once had words with his wife or wished he was single again, would be given a flitch of bacon and carried in procession. Successful claims were few and far between. When the monastery was closed down at the Reformation, successive Lords of the Manor took responsibility for keeping the custom going, and did so till 1751, when they dropped it. Fortunately, in 1854 the bestselling novelist Harrison Ainsworth wrote an enthusiastic description, The Flitch of Bacon, or the Custom of Dunmow (it can still be found). This inspired a revival, which has flourished ever since. Nowadays there is a mock trial, with the wives giving evidence, and the whole thing is treated as a joke.

Soul Caking

If the lady folklorist from Ankh-Morpork had produced another dollar, she could have learned about the excitements of the Soul Cake Days, which are celebrated in the Ramtops and on the Sto Plains on the first Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday after first half-moon in the month of Sektober. Readers attempting to work out this date should bear in mind that on the Discworld it is extremely dangerous to utter the magic number ‘eight’, or any of its derivatives, in any language.

According to the Discworld Almanak, the Soul Cake Days are ‘celebrated by Dwarfs and Men with great fires, much noise, and mysterious customs, too many to catalogue, and some too moist to recommend’. It is known that Morris Dancing is involved; also that dwarfs play at Bobbing for Toffee-Rats on a Stick, and human children go Trickle-Treating. Lady folklorists in Ankh-Morpork assume that this is just a local pronunciation of ‘Treacle-Treating’, meaning that the kids who dress up and go from house to house are hoping to be given treacle gob-stoppers as their treat. Male folklorists hold the opinion (never mentioned in print, or in the hearing of their female colleagues) that the name arose because people who refuse to hand out any treats later find a rather nasty trickle on their doorstep.

Lancre children are also given eggs with funny faces on them (Nanny Ogg is a dab hand at painting them). There must be some connection with the Soul Cake Tuesday Duck, a magical creature which lays chocolate eggs for children in Ankh-Morpork, as will be described in a later chapter. And this in turn links up with the fact that the duck-hunting season begins that Tuesday. The good people of Ubergigl (in Uberwald) mark the date by ‘The Running of the Ducks’, when maddened untamed ducks run, more or less, through the streets, pursued by young men who vie with one another to snatch the coveted rosette from the beak of the biggest drake. Perhaps their minds have been affected by some floating awareness of the Running of the Bulls, which is done every July at a fiesta at Pamplona in Spain.

All of which is well and good, but does not even begin to explain what souls, and cakes, have to do with it. Here, by remarkable coincidence, English traditions can again cast light on the problem. In the Middle Ages 2 November, All Souls’ Day, was the day when Christians prayed particularly for the souls of the dead, to speed them on their way from Purgatory to Heaven (as is still done in Catholic countries); on this and the preceding days, it was customary for those who could afford it to give away little cakes to the poor, asking them too to pray for the donor’s dead family and friends. Long after the religious purpose had been forgotten, people made fancy cakes at this time of year, and called them ‘soul cakes’; in the nineteenth century in the rural parts of Cheshire and Shropshire, the poorer people went from farm to farm asking for money, food or drink, with the song:

Soul, soul, for a souling cake,

I pray you, good missis, for a souling cake,

Apple or pear, a plum or a cherry,

Anything good to make us merry.

Up with your kettles and down with your pans,

Give us an answer and we’ll be gone.

They said they were ‘Going Soul Caking’, but secretly they hoped there’d be some beer to go with the cakes, or, better still, some money. By the end of that century the custom had died out among adults; children, however, were still keeping it up in the 1950s. Though sometimes they forgot about the cakes:

Soul, soul, for an apple or two,

If you’ve got no apples, pears will do;

If you’ve got no pears, ha’pennies will do;

If you’ve got no ha’pennies, God bless you.

Morris Dancing, Light and Dark

There are some things Nanny Ogg took good care not to mention to the lady folklorist from the city – the things she calls the ‘real stuff’, things like the Dark Morris. The lady would be bound to get them all wrong anyway.

Now, even ordinary Morris dancing, what we may for convenience call the Light Morris, is a curious thing, both on Earth and on the Disc. A typical dance involves six men in two lines of three, facing each other; they are all dressed alike, usually in white, with coloured baldrics and decorated hats, and possibly with ribbons and rosettes too; they clash sticks in time to the music, miraculously avoiding one another’s fingers by a hair’s breadth, or wave large handkerchiefs, or clap; they have bells strapped to their ankles and knees. There will be one or two reserve dancers in the team, to replace anyone who retires exhausted or injured; a musician playing an accordion, or a fiddle, or in earlier centuries a pipe and tabor; a Fool; and someone to go round taking the collection.

On one level it’s a public display of skill, strength, stamina and sheer bloody-mindedness, which some people in Lancre think of as entertainment and others as a form of martial art (especially when sticks and buckets are involved). There is a definite competitive edge to it. You can have events like the Fifteen Mountains All-Comers’ Championships, which the Lancre Morris Men have won no fewer than six times. It gives the teams a chance to dress up and swagger around, to be someone special.

In Elizabethan England, the strict Puritans thought the swaggering was much too much fun, both for the dancers and the crowd. In 1583 Philip Stubbes complained furiously in his Anatomie of Abuses that at village festivals there would be Morris Men dressed in ‘green, yellow, or some other light wanton colour’:

And as though that were not gaudy enough, I should say, they bedeck themselves with scarfs, ribbons and laces, hanged all over with gold rings, precious stones and other jewels; this done, they tie about either leg twenty or forty bells, with rich handkerchiefs in their hands, and sometimes laid across their shoulders and necks, borrowed for the most part from their pretty Mopsies or loving Betties, for bussing them in the dark … Then march this heathen company towards the church and churchyard, their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs fluttering above their heads like mad men, their hobby horses skirmishing among the throng.

On a second level – at any rate in England, where it has flourished (off and on) for at least six hundred years – Morris dancing used to be an excellent way for working men in country districts to get free beer and food and some extra cash. They would appear at seasonal festivals such as May Day and Whitsun, and also at whichever date the local fair was held; in winter they would go round performing outside the houses of the wealthy. This was a great asset when times were hard, as they so often were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nowadays, Morris teams usually perform outside pubs and in town centres; they still take up a collection, but simply to cover their expenses or for a charity.

Some English teams used to go out on tour for several weeks, and even visit towns. At a fair in London in 1823, for example, there was:

a group of young rustics attired in garments decorated with numerous bows of ribbon. They had small jingling bells fastened to their knees and ankles. Some waved white handkerchiefs and others wands … keeping time by striking their wands against one another.

It was so pleasant, wrote another London eyewitness in 1830,

to observe the monotony of some long dull street of dingy houses broken by the simple music of the pipe and tabor, and the ringing of the bells on the legs of the morris-dancers … There seems a patch of old-time merriment in the active motions of the ruddy and sunburnt countrymen.

Just how old was the merriment? When and why did it come to be such an essential part of the rose-tinted picture of the happy, simple, country life of Old England? A theory popular in the eighteenth century was that the name ‘Morris’ was a corruption of the Spanish word morisco, ‘Moorish’, and that it was a fashion introduced from Spain in the fourteenth century. This would imply that at first it was danced by the upper classes, not among country folk, and that they called it ‘Moorish’ not just for being foreign, but because it was so wild and energetic, in contrast to the stately dances of the Court. It is a plausible suggestion, but apart from the name itself there is no actual evidence for it.

Then, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a dramatic new theory emerged and became instantly popular and widely accepted. The origins of the Morris, it was claimed, lay in the fertility rituals of prehistoric Europe; the noisy bells, the waving hankies, and aggressive sticks were meant to drive away evil spirits; the high leaps into the air were meant to make the crops grow tall. On this level, the third and for many people the most important one, Morris dancing is an immensely ancient magical rite for the promotion of life. There is no evidence for this either, but as the English scholar Keith Chandler recently wrote, ‘viewing a dance which is supposedly several thousand years old appears to satisfy some indefinable need in the human psyche’.

Whether or not this theory holds good on Earth, it is well known to be the truth of the matter on the Disc. There, Morris dancing is done to bring good luck and drive bad things away; there’s nothing like the jangle of little iron bells for getting rid of elves. What’s more, it’s all about the cycles of growth and decay, summer and winter, life and death. It involves the Light Morris, yes, but the Dark Morris too.

This is why there’s one village in the Ramtops, the one where they really do know what they are doing, where the Morris Men dance twice, and twice only, in every year (we shall have more to say on this in the next chapter). The first time is at dawn on the first day of spring, and everyone is welcome to watch. But the second time is in autumn, and it’s private.

On a certain day when the nights are drawing in, the dancers leave work early and take, from attics and cupboards, the other costume, the black one, and the other bells. And they go by separate ways to a valley among the leafless trees. They don’t speak. There is no music. It’s very hard to imagine what kind there could be.

The bells don’t ring. They’re made of octiron, a magic metal. But they’re not, precisely, silent bells. Silence is merely the absence of noise. They make the opposite of noise, a sort of heavily textured silence.

And in the cold afternoon, as the light drains from the sky, among the frosty leaves and in the damp air, they dance the other Morris. Because of the balance of things.

You’ve got to dance both, they say. Otherwise you can’t dance either. [Reaper Man]

This is the Dark Morris Nanny Ogg was keeping quiet about. If it is danced elsewhere in the multiverse – and it surely is – people there are keeping quiet about it too. (Well. Not that quiet. Terry is occasionally informed of a sighting, and once saw it danced in Chicago.)