Lords and Ladies

1

One of the best songs from The Sound of Music is called ‘My Favourite Things’ (it’s the song Maria sings for the Von Trapp children when they are all frightened of the thunderstorm). The opening verse goes:

The Von Trapp children would probably have murdered Magrat if she had been their governess.

2

This is another Christopher Marlowe quote, from The Jew of Malta (act IV, scene i):

Barnadine: “Thou hast committed — ”

Barabas: “Fornication? But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead.”

3

A reference to (Kentucky) bluegrass country.

4

An explanation of the Crop Circle phenomenon might be in order here.

Crop Circles are circular patches of flattened crops which have appeared in fields of cereals in the South and West of England over the last few years. There is no firm evidence pointing to their cause: this has been taken by certain parties as a prima facie proof that they are of course caused by either alien spacecraft or by some supernatural intelligence, possibly in an attempt to communicate.

In recent years, circle systems have become increasingly elaborate, most notably in the case of a circle in the shape of the Mandelbrot Set, and another system which is shown on the cover of the recent Led Zeppelin compilation album, which seems to indicate that whoever’s up there they probably have long hair and say Wow! and Yeah! a lot. A number of staged circle-forging challenges in the summer of ’92 have demonstrated both how easy it is to produce an impressive circle by mundane, not to say frivolous methods, and also the surprisingly poor ability of ‘cereologists’ to distinguish what they describe as a “genuine” circle from one “merely made by hoaxers”.

Anyone with a burning desire to believe in paranormal explanations is invited to post to the newsgroup sci.skeptic an article asserting essentially “I believe that crop circles are produced by UFO’s/Sun Spots/The Conservative Government/The Easter Bunny” and see how far they get…

5

Over on alt.fan.pratchett it was postulated that this sounded a bit too much like a quote not to be a quote (annotation-hunters can get downright paranoid at times), but it took us a while to figure out where it originated, although in retrospect we could have used Occam’s razor and looked it up in Shakespeare immediately. In King Henry IV, part 2, act 1, scene 2, Falstaff says: “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.”

6

The original quote is (as usual) by William Shakespeare, from Twelfth Night (act 2, scene 5), where Malvolio reads in a letter (which he thinks was written to him by his mistress):

The dictator most associated with the phrase ‘Arch-Generalissimo-Father-of-His-Countryship’ is probably Franco.

7

The patent crop rotator is an agricultural tool that might not figure very prominently in your day-to-day conversation (possibly since no such machine exists: crop rotation means growing different things in a field in successive years) but British comedy writers are apparently fascinated by it. Several people wrote to tell me that the cult TV comedy series The Young Ones also used the patent crop rotator in their episode Bambi.

When Neil (the hippy) is testing Rick (the nerd) on medieval history, the following dialogue ensues (edited somewhat for clarity):

8

Boggi’s = Gucci’s.

9

Think CPU’s and MHz.

10

In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale we find the character Autolycus (“a Rogue”), saying in act 4, scene 2:

11

Lord Lankin is a character in a traditional folk ballad:

12

Herne the Hunter is a spectral hunter of medieval legend, said to originally have been a keeper in Windsor Forest. Herne appears in many stories, varying from Shakespeare (who else) to the fairly recent ITV television series “Robin of Sherwood” (starring Jason “son of” Connery).

When alt.fan.pratchett readers mistakenly assumed that the reference originated from this series, Terry cautioned: “Be careful when reference spotting… Herne the Hunter certainly did turn up in the Robin of Sherwood series and on an album by “Let’s breathe romantically to music” group Clannad, but any passing pagan will tell you he goes back a lot, lot further than that.”

Here is some relevant information condensed from the book The Western Way by John and Caitlin Matthews:

“Herne the Hunter / Cernunnos is God of green and growing things; huntsman, spirit of earth, birth and masculinity. Often pictured seated cross-legged with antlers on his brow, he is […] tutelary deity of many modern witch covens.”

13

The names of the would-be junior witches.

Two of the names resonate with the names used in Good Omens: Agnes Nitt is similar to Agnes Nutter, and Amanita DeVice (Amanita is also the name of a gender of deadly poisonous mushrooms) is similar to Anathema Device. There’s also a Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; the name means ‘damned’ or ‘lost’.

In fact, all these names are based on the names of the so-called Lancashire Witches. The deeds of this group on and around Pendle Hill were the subject of probably England’s most famous 17th century witchhunt and trials. The story is described in some fictional detail in a little-known book called, surprise, The Lancashire Witches, written at the end of the nineteenth century in Manchester by William Harrison Ainsworth.

Interestingly enough, Ainsworth also wrote a book called Windsor Castle in which Herne the Hunter appears as a major character.

14

‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’: a fairly well-known phrase used, amongst others, by Tolkien in a poem, by Theodore Roosevelt as the title for a book on hunting, and by pop-group A-ha as an album title. It originally is the title of an old Scandinavian fairy tale, which can be found in a book by Kay Nielsen, titled East of the Sun and West of the Moon — Old Tales from the North. Terry has confirmed that this book was his source for the phrase.

‘Behind the North Wind’: from the title of a book by George McDonald: At the Back of the North Wind, the term itself being a translation of Hyperborea.

‘At the Back Of Beyond’: an idiom, perhaps originating from Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary: “Whirled them to the back o’ beyont”.

‘There and Back Again’: The sub-title of Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

‘Beyond the Fields We Know’: from Lord Dunsany’s novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter, where “the fields we know” refers to our world, as opposed to Elfland, which lies ‘beyond’. The phrase was also used as the title of a collection of Dunsany’s stories.

15

An Ouija board is a well-known means of communicating with the dead. It’s a board with letters and symbols on it, and the spirits supposedly move a glass over it and spell out messages. The name ‘Ouija’ derives from ‘oui’ and ‘ja’, two words meaning ‘yes’, one of the symbols on the board.

16

The origins of the ‘rag rugge’ are more fully explained in Equal Rites.

17

Well, for one thing kings can cure dandruff by permanently removing people’s heads from their shoulders, but I think that what Terry is probably referring to here is the folk-superstition that says that a King’s touch can cure scrofula (also known as the King’s Evil), which is a tubercular infection of the lymphatic glands.

A similar type of legend occurs in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but Shakespeare also has a lot to say on the subject in Macbeth, act 4, scene 3.

18

In fact, many real life Morris teams put on so-called ‘Mummers Plays’: traditional plays with a common theme of death and resurrection. These ritual plays are performed on certain key days of the year, such as Midwinter’s Day (Magrat’s wedding is on Midsummer’s Eve!), Easter, or All Souls Day (Halloween), at which time the Soul Cake play is performed. I am also told that a Soul Cake, traditionally served at All Souls, is similar to a Madeira Sponge (or ‘yellow cake’ as the Americans call it).

19

Jason Ogg is thinking of Artesian Wells, a kind of well that gets its name from the French town of Artois, where they were first drilled in the 12th century.

20

There are Morris dances that use sticks, but according to my sources there aren’t any that use buckets. Jason’s reluctance to do this dance has its parallels in real world Morris dancing: at least in one area (upstate New York), a dance called the Webley Twizzle has a reputation for being hazardous to one’s health, which is perhaps why it’s hardly ever danced. It has even been claimed that someone broke his leg doing it, although no one seems to know any details. Of course, the reluctance of the Lancre Morris Men to perform the ‘Stick and Bucket’ may also have to do with the fact that the name of the dance very probably indicates another ‘mettyfor’ along the lines of maypoles and broomsticks.

When you mention ‘Discworld’ and ‘dance’ in the same breath, you can only be talking about one thing: Morris Dancing, a subject that most non-Brits will be almost completely in the dark about. Brewer has this to say on the subject:

Morris Dance: brought to England in the reign of Edward III, when John of Gaunt returned from Spain. In the dance, bells were jingled, and staves or swords clashed. It was a military dance of the Moors or Moriscos, in which five men and a boy engaged; the boy wore a ‘morione’ or head-piece, and was called Mad Morion.

Which is interesting, but doesn’t really explain anything in a 20th century context. Luckily, a newsgroup like alt.fan.pratchett attracts contemporary Morris Dancers like flies, and for the rest of this section I will give the floor to Rich Holmes:

“In a number of books (including Strata, Guards! Guards! Reaper Man, and Lords and Ladies) Pratchett refers to morris dancing. These allusions may be lost on the typical American reader. Picture, then, six men in white shirts and trousers, decorated with ribbons, wearing bells on their legs, in a two-by-three formation — the men, not the bells. To a tune played on fiddle or squeezebox, they dance up and down, back and forth, gesturing with big white handkerchiefs in their hands — or, maybe, clashing yard-long willow sticks with one another. That’s morris dancing, or at least the species of morris dancing that was done in the late 19th century in the Cotswolds region of England.

It’s also done today, throughout the English-speaking world (though in America it’s not exactly an everyday sight), these days by women’s teams and mixed teams as well as by men. There are several hundred morris teams in England as well as 170 or so in the US and Canada and God knows how many in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and other odd places.

As for where it came from, and when, and what it all means, no one really knows. Some of its roots seem to go back to the European continent sometime in or before the 15th century. Similar, possibly related dances were and are found in Europe and even as far away as India. For a while in the late 19th and early 20th centuries they were commonly claimed by folklorists to be a remnant of a pre-Christian fertility rite performed by a male priesthood; there’s really no hard evidence to support such a theory, though.

Terry Pratchett tells us he’s “never waved a hankie in anger” nor knows any morris dancers personally, but that he finds the morris dance kind of fascinating.

21

Because the play-within-a-play performed by the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (act 1, scene 2) also features a lion in a starring role, of course.

The Morris Men’s discussions on plays and lions reminded one of my sources of the play written by Moominpapa in Moominsummer Madness by Tove Jansson. When asked about it, Terry said that although he has read the Moomin books, the lion dialogue is not connected with them.

22

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by that mediocre hack-writer William S., is an example of a real play that has a donkey in it. Or to be absolutely precise, a character magically cursed with a donkey’s head.

23

The taxonomic name for orangutans is ‘Pongo pygmaeus’. And of course Pongo is a popular dog name as well, doubling the insult.

24

Terry writes: “Can it be that this is forgotten? Yossarian — the ‘hero’ of Catch-22 — was the bomber pilot who flew to the target twisting and jinking in an effort to avoid the flak — as opposed to the Ivy League types who just flew nice and straight…”

A minor correction: Yossarian was not the pilot, but rather the bombardier, who kept screaming instructions to the pilot over the intercom, to turn hard right, dive, etc.

25

This immediately recalls the famous science fiction short story A Sound of Thunder, by Ray Bradbury, which has as its basic premise that the universe cares very much indeed if someone steps on a butterfly.

26

Hodgesaargh is based on Dave Hodges, a UK fan who runs a project called The REAL Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This is a computer database containing a couple of thousand entries (the project began in 1987) in the style of Douglas Adams’s Hitch Hiker’s Guide. Dave takes his Guide along with him to SF conventions and events, where he auctions off printed versions of the Guide in order to raise money for charity. This is why the Guide is not readily available, e.g. on the Internet.

One of the entries in the Guide concerns a computer virus called “Terry”, which, it says, “autographs all the files on the disk as well as any nearby manuals”.

In real life Dave Hodges works for a firm that keeps birds away from airports and other places. To this purpose he sometimes uses a falcon called, yes, Lady Jane, who bites all the time, which gave Terry the idea for the character Hodgesaargh.

Note that there exist at least two other “let’s write a Hitch Hikers Guide” projects on the Internet that I know of. One of these is the Project Galactic Guide, which can be reached on the Web through the URL:

27

The complex issues of class distinction in falconry apparently existed in medieval times just as Terry describes them here. In The Once and Future King, T. H. White quotes a paragraph by Abbess Juliana Berners: “An emperor was allowed an eagle, a king could have a jerfalcon, and after that there was the peregrine for an earl, the merlin for a lady, the goshawk for a yeoman, the sparrow hawk for a priest, and the musket for a holy-water clerk.”

28

This has echoes of another traditional ballad, this time ‘Tam Lin’:

As with some of the other folk song extracts Terry is closer to the recorded (in this case Fairport Convention) version than to the very early text in (say) the Oxford Book of Ballads.

29

There are several stone circles in England similar to the Dancers. Usually, legend has it that a group of dancers, revellers, ball players, etc. got turned to stone by the devil’s trickery, for not keeping the Sabbath, or for having too much fun, or some other awful transgression. The Merry Maidens stone circle, with two nearby standing stones known as the Pipers, is one such site in Cornwall; the Stanton Drew stone circles near Bristol, the petrified remains of a wedding party that got out of control, also include a stone circle said to be dancers with a nearby set of stones representing the fiddlers.

30

The technical name for vitamin C is ascorbic acid.

31

Granny refers to the traditional explanation for hanging horseshoes over the door, which is that they bring luck, but only if placed with the open side up — otherwise the luck would just run out the bottom.

32

It is impossible to list all the ways in which the sections about the Lancre Morris Men and the play they are performing parodies the play-within-a-play that occurs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The only way to get full enjoyment here is to just go out and read Shakespeare. While you’re at it, pay particular attention to the names and occupations of both Terry’s and William’s ‘Rude Mechanicals’.

33

Baker’s next three lines are “Bum!”, “Drawers!” and “Belly!”. These come from a song by Flanders and Swann, which is called ‘P**! P*! B****! B**! D******!’. The first verse goes:

34

It is relevant that Thatcher is making this remark to Carpenter the poacher, because it is a line from the chorus of an English folk song called ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’:

35

The three paths leading from the cross-roads in the woods are variously described as being “all thorns and briars”, “all winding”, and the last (which the Lancre Morris Men decide to take) as “Ferns grew thickly alongside it”.

This echoes the poem and folk song ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, about a man who followes the Queen of Elves to Elfland:

36

Inconsistency time! On p. 154/135 of Witches Abroad, Granny responds to Nanny Ogg’s intention of taking a bath with the words “My word, doesn’t autumn roll around quickly”.

In subsequent discussions on the net it was postulated that Nanny’s bath habits could well be explained by taking into account the fact that the Discworld has eight seasons (see first footnote in The Colour of Magic on p. 11/11), which might result in e.g. two autumns a year. And of course, on our world April is indeed a month in Autumn — in the southern hemisphere (don’t ask me if that also holds for a Discworld, though).

Personally, I tend to agree with Terry, who has once said: “There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; occasionally, however, there are alternate pasts”.

37

Burke’s Peerage is a book that lists the hereditary titled nobility of the British Realm (the Peers of the Realm, hence the title of the book). It contains biographical facts such as when they were born, what title(s) they hold, who they’re married to, children, relationships to other peers, etc. For example, under ‘Westminster, Duke of’ it will give details of when the title was created, who has held it and who holds it now.

Also, ‘twerp’ and ‘berk’ (also spelt as ‘burk’) are both terms of abuse, with ‘twerp’ being relatively innocent, but with ‘berk’ coming from the Cockney rhyming slang for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’.

38

Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote a well-known poem called The Lady of Shalott (see also e.g. Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d). A shallot (double l, single t), however, is a small greenish/purple (octarine?) onion.

39

It is in fact a Lithuanian tradition (one of many) to roll boiled eggs downhill on Easter Sunday in a game similar to lawn bowls. The idea is to either (1) break the other person’s egg, thereby eliminating them from the competition (although this can be risky, since your own egg may also break) or (2) to get your egg to just hit someone else’s, in which case you win their egg. Similar traditions undoubtedly exist in many other European countries (in fact, I’m told it is also done in some English villages), though not in the Netherlands, where we’d be having extreme difficulties finding a spot high enough for an egg to be rolled down from in the first place.

40

This sentence used to have me completely stumped, until I discovered (with the help of the ever helpful alt.fan.pratchett correspondents) that this refers to a well-known British fairy tale of Scandinavian origin called ‘The Three Billygoats Gruff’.

That tale tells the story of three billygoat brothers who try to cross a bridge guarded by, you guessed it, a mean troll who wants to eat them. Luckily, the troll wasn’t very smart, so the first two goats were able to outwit him by passing him one at a time, each saying “Don’t eat me, just wait for my brother who’s much bigger and fatter than I am”. The third goat, Big Billygoat Gruff, was big, all right. Big enough to take on the troll and butt him off the bridge and right over the mountains far from the green meadow (loud cheers from listening audience). So the troll was both tricked and trounced.

41

Creosote = Croesus.

42

Hort mond = haut monde = high society.

43

This is Schrödinger’s cat.

44

More people than I can count have written, in the light of Terry’s fondness for They Might Be Giants, pointing out their song ‘I Lost My Lucky Ball and Chain’:

45

Many people recognised this joke, and mentioned a variety of different sources. Terry replied: “It’s very, very old. I first heard it from another journalist about 25 years ago, and he said he heard it on the (wartime) radio when he was a kid. I’ve also been told it is a music-hall line.”

46

Refers back to certain events described more fully in Sourcery.

47

Jane’s is a well known series of books/catalogues for military equipment of all sorts and types. There is a Jane’s for aeroplanes, for boats, etc.

48

This is a reference to the well-known ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ quantum theory thought-experiment in which a cat in a box is probabilistically killed, leaving it in a superposition of being alive and being dead until the box is opened and the wavefunction collapses.

49

A Claymore mine is an ingenious and therefore extremely nasty device. It is a small metal box, slightly curved. On the convex side is written “THIS SIDE TOWARDS THE ENEMY” which explains why literacy is a survival trait even with US marines. The box is filled with explosive and 600 steel balls. It has a tripod and a trigger mechanism, which can be operated either by a tripwire or, when the operator doesn’t want to miss the fun, manually. When triggered, the device explodes and showers the half of the world which could have read the letters with the steel balls. Killing radius 100 ft., serious maiming radius a good deal more. Used to great effect in Vietnam by both sides.

50

This is a brilliant bit of logical extrapolation on Terry’s part. Since iron is anathema to elves, they obviously can’t have haemoglobin-based red blood. Copper-based (green) blood is used by some Earth animals, notably crayfish, so it’s an obvious alternative. Of course, it was Star Trek that really made pointy-eared, green-blooded characters famous…

51

A reference to the folk song ‘Tam Lin’, in which Fair Janet successfully wrests her Tam Lin from the Queen of Fairies, despite various alarming transformations inflicted on him.

52

Catchphrase used by Arnold Schwarzenegger in (almost) all his movies.

53

The six lines given make up three different poems. From The Fairies, by Irish poet William Allingham (1850):

From a traditional Cornish prayer:

And finally from a traditional school girls’ skipping rhyme:

54

This section demonstrates that Terry is not a Morris dancer himself; the terminology isn’t quite authentic enough. But “beetle crushers” is an actual Morris step, and “bean setting” is the name of a dance and, by extension, a name for a move used in that dance.

55

Women who wished to conceive would spend the night on the um, appropriate bit of the Cerne Abbas Giant site in Dorset.

56

If you haven’t read Reaper Man yet, you may not realise that the reason why Mr Ixolite slips notes under the door is that he is the only banshee in the world with a speech impediment.

57

The Discworld’s Long Man is a set of three burial mounds. In Britain there is a famous monument called the Long Man of Wilmington, in East Sussex. It’s not a mound, but a chalk-cut figure on a hillside; the turf was scraped away to expose the chalk underneath, outlining a standing giant 70 meters tall. There are several such figures in England, but only two human figures, this and the Cerne Abbas Giant.

Chalk-cut figures have to be recut periodically, which provides opportunities to bowdlerize them. This is probably why the Long Man of Wilmington is sexless; it was recut in the 1870s, when, presumably, public displays of great big tonkers were rather frowned upon. However, the other chalk-cut giant in Britain, the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset, is a nude, 55-meter-tall giant wielding a club, who has a tonker about 12 meters long, and proudly upraised. Nearby is a small earth enclosure where maypole dancing, etc. was once held.

58

I am told this description applies to the cave painting known as The Sorceror (aka The Magician, aka The Shaman) in the Trois Freres cave in Arieges, France.

59

Ogham is the name of an existing runic script found in the British Isles (mostly in Ireland) and dating back at least to the 5th century.

60

The best-known song in Walt Disney’s 1937 full length animation movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is sung by the seven dwarfs and starts:

61

Another one of Terry’s famous Mixed Legends along the lines of the princess and the pea fairy tale in Mort.

The wolf bit is straight from Norse mythology. The wolf Fenris, one of Loki’s monster children, will one day break free from his chains and eat the sun. This is one of the signs that the Götterdämmerung or Ragnarok has begun, and at this point the frost giants [Who presumably have still not returned the Gods’ lawnmower] will cross the Rainbow Bridge and fight the final battle with the gods of Asgard and the heroes who have died and gone to Valhalla. See the last part of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle for details.

The sleeping king is one of the oldest and deepest folk-myths of western culture, some versions of the popular legend even have King Arthur and his warriors sleeping on the island of Anglesea. For more information, see e.g. the section about the Fisher King in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual To Romance and all the stuff that this leads into, such as Elliot’s The Wasteland and David Lodge’s Small World.

62

Much later, in Interesting Times, we learn that Cohen the Barbarian’s first name is, in fact, Genghiz.

With respect to the original pun on Genghiz Kahn, Terry says:

“As a matter of interest, I’m told there’s a kosher Mongolian restaurant in LA called Genghiz Cohen’s. It’s a fairly obvious pun, if your mind is wired that way.”

63

The ancient warrior queen Ynci is modelled on Boadicea (who led a British rebellion against the Romans). Boadicea’s husband was the ruler of a tribe called the Iceni, which is almost Ynci backwards.

64

From J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan:

[…] [Tinkerbell the Fairy] was saying that she thought she could get well again if children believed in fairies. […] “If you believe,” [Peter Pan] shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.”

65

One of the truly frequently asked questions on alt.fan.pratchett is “Where does this phrase come from?” (Foul Ole Ron also uses it, in Soul Music.)

The answer concerns Terry’s experiments with computer-generated texts:

“It was a program called Babble, or something similar. I put in all kinds of stuff, including the menu of the Dragon House Chinese take-away because it was lying on my desk. The program attempted to make ‘coherent’ phrases (!) out of it all.”

One of the other things Terry must have fed it were the lyrics to the song ‘Particle Man’ by They Might Be Giants:

66

In our world there is a magazine Guns And Ammo; this appears to be the Discworld equivalent.

67

Shawn’s speech is a parody of the ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speech in Shakespeare’s King Henry V, act 4, scene 3: