Sourcery

1

A pun on the English boy’s name ‘Colin’, with a nod to the expression “to coin a phrase”.

2

This subject comes up every now and again on alt.fan.pratchett, so it is time for an annotation to settle this matter for once and for all: playing (chess) games with Death is a very old concept. It goes back much further than either Ingmar Bergman’s famous 1957 movie The Seventh Seal, or Chris de Burgh’s less famous 1975 song ‘Spanish Train’ (which describes a poker game between God and the Devil).

3

A reference to C. S. Lewis’s classic fantasy story The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, in which the heroes are magically transported to the Land of Narnia through the back of an old wardrobe, which was made from a tree that grew from the seeds of a magical apple taken from that Land long before.

4

Probably a reference to a famous scene from the ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ segment in Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia. The “sourcerer” being in fact the Apprentice, Mickey, dreaming of commanding the wind to blow, the waves to wave, the stars to fall, and so on.

Some people were also reminded of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

5

Play on the word ‘pissed’, common British/Australian (but apparently not American) slang for ‘drunk’.

6

Paraphrases Humphrey Bogart’s famous line from Casablanca: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

7

The reference is to traditional British pub names like King’s Head, Queen’s Head or Nag’s Head, all occurring quite frequently, where the appropriate head (a nag being a horse) is displayed on a sign outside, often on a pole before the building.

8

In Norse mythology, the “Twilight of the Gods” refers to Ragnarok, the final conflict at the end of times between the gods and their enemies (amongst which are the Ice Giants).

9

“Annus mirabilis” translates to “year of wonder”. “Anus mirabilis” does not.

Brewer mentions that the year of wonder in question is actually known to be 1666, “memorable for the great fire of London and the successes of our arms over the Dutch.”

10

Napoleon, to his troops just before the Battle of the Pyramids: “From the summit of these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you”.

11

A sideways pun (via ‘veterinary’) on the name of the famous de Medici family, who were the enlightened rulers of Renaissance Florence.

During one of those interminable “which actor should play which Discworld character if there was a movie?” discussions, Terry gave some insight in how he himself visualises the Patrician:

“I can’t remember the guy’s name, but I’ve always pictured the Patrician as looking like the father in Beetlejuice — the man also played the Emperor of Austria in Amadeus. And maybe slightly like the head bad guy in Die Hard.”

The actors Terry is thinking of are Jeffrey Jones and Alan Rickman, respectively.

12

In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the Stewards of Gondor also sat on a chair on the steps below the real throne, awaiting the return of the king. The prophecy in that case also included a magic sword, although Tolkien neglects to make any mention of a strawberry-shaped birthmark.

Other occurrences of the legend can be found in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time epic fantasy series, in Raymond E. Feist’s Prince of the Blood, and in David Eddings’ Belgariad quintet.

This is undoubtedly one of those cases where everybody is drawing on a much older idea. Legends about kings, swords and birthmarks are of course legion, although I must admit that so far I haven’t been able to actually find an occurrence of the ‘chair below the real throne’ concept outside of contemporary fiction.

13

A reference to Ernst Stavro Blofeld, leader of SPECTRE and arch enemy of James Bond

14

The word ‘Sator’ refers to a famous magic square (magic square, get it?) dating back to the times of the spread of Christianity in Europe. ‘Sator’ means sower or farmer. The complete square is:

S A T O R

A R E P O

T E N E T

O P E R A

R O T A S

This square is palindromic in all directions. The sentence you get reads: Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas, which means, more or less: “The sower [i.e. God] in his field controls the workings of his tools [i.e. us]”. Some correspondents questioned the correctness of this translation, so if anyone has a good reference to something else I’d love to hear it.

The magic Sator square also has the property that it can be ‘unfolded’ into two “A PATER NOSTER O” strings that form a cross with the ‘N’ as a pivot element (sorry, proper graphics will have to wait until a future edition of the APF). The ‘A’ and the ‘O’ stand for alpha and omega.

15

Punning on ‘souk’, meaning a Middle Eastern marketplace; and the verb ‘soak’, meaning to charge (and get) exorbitant prices.

16

From Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan:

17

‘Sherbet’ is a cooling Oriental fruit drink (also a frozen dessert) as well as a fizzy sweet powder children eat as a sweet, and which comes in a cardboard tube with a liquorice ‘straw’ at the top. To get to the sherbet you bite off the end of the liquorice and suck through it.

18

Coleridge’s Kubla Khan:

19

Ok, lessee: Creosote parodies the proverbially rich Croesus (king of Lidya — which lies in what is now Turkey — in the 6th century BC), ‘Serif’ is a typographical term which also puns on ‘caliph’, and ‘Al Khali’ is pronounced ‘alkali’ (just covering all the bases here, as my original source put it), but probably refers to the Rub’ al Khali desert in Arabia.

Creosote itself is actually the name for an oily liquid mixture of organic chemicals, resulting as a by-product from the industrial burning of coal or wood.

20

The English word “assassins” was originally used to denote a group of fanatical Ismailis (a Shi’ite Muslim sect) who, between 1094 and 1273, worked for the creation of a new Fatimid caliphate, murdering prominent individuals. They murdered prominent individuals; hence, “assassin” in English came to mean a politically motivated murderer.

The name derives from the Arabic “hashashin” — Marco Polo and other European chroniclers claimed that the Assassins used hashish to stimulate their fearless acts. For example, Brewer writes:

“Assassins. A band of Carmathians, collected by Hassa, subah of Nishapour, called the Old Man of the Mountains, because he made Mount Lebanon his stronghold. This band was the terror of the world for two centuries, when it was put down by Sultan Bibaris. The assassins indulged in haschisch (bang), an intoxicating drink, and from this liquor received their name.”

For more information, see also the Hawkwind song ‘Hassan I Sabbah’ on their album Quark, Strangeness and Charm.

21

Creosote’s poetry is mostly based on Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaïyat of Omar Khayyam. The poem parodied on this page goes:

22

Kubla Khan:

23

Because John the Baptist ate those, according to Matthew 3:4 (also Mark 1:6): “And the same John had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.”

In order to avoid confusion it should perhaps be pointed out that the locusts in question are the seeds of honey locust trees, also known as carob and (from this story, of course) St John’s Bread.

24

Kubla Khan:

25

This, and Creosote’s further compliments to Conina (“your hair is like a flock of goats that graze upon the side of Mount Gebra”, “your breasts are like the jewelled melons in the fabled gardens of dawn”, etc.) are all very similar to the compliments in the Biblical ‘Song of Solomon’:

I did an electronic search across the entire King James bible for “jewelled melons”, but those appear to be an invention of Creosote’s. Fine by me — I was already slightly shocked to find out that “thy hair is as a flock of goats” was a genuine Biblical compliment and not something Terry had made up.

26

The Rubaïyat:

27

A falling apple supposedly helped Newton discover the Law of Gravity, a boiling kettle helped Watt revolutionise the steam engine, and Archimedes, according to legend, discovered the principles of fluid displacement while taking a bath.

28

No connection to the original Croesus here, but rather to the Alhambra, the palace of the Emirs of Granada in 15th century Spain. As Terry says:

“Incidentally, the Seriph’s palace, the Rhoxie, is indeed a ‘resonance’ with the Alhambra — a famous Moorish palace which became a synonym for an impressive building, and later became a common cinema name as in Odeon and, yes, Roxy.”

29

“Nijel the Destroyer” may be a suitably heroic-looking name, but ‘Nijel’ is of course pronounced as ‘Nigel’, a name that is traditionally associated with wimpy rather than with heroic males.

I am told that among school-age Australians, Nigel is in fact slang for someone with no friends.

30

Someone, somewhere, hasn’t heard of the “How many does it take to change a light-bulb?”-jokes this is a reference to. This annotation is for him/her.

31

Captain Marvel, an American comic book character was able to transform himself into his superhero alter-ego by saying the magic word ‘Shazam’.

32

Reference to Charles Darwin’s landmark 1871 book The Descent of Man.

33

This is the first, but not the last time in the book that Creosote asks Conina for a story. This refers to 1001 Nights, and the stories Scheherezade had to tell every night to her Caliph, Harun al-Rashid.

34

‘Wandering Monsters’ is a phrase that comes from the world of fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons And Dragons, and it more or less means just what you think it means. Nijel is of course exactly the type of stereotypical nerd who would, in our world, actually play D&D.

35

The magic lamp and magic ring, which summon a demon when rubbed, appear in the legend of Aladdin. On p. 208/187 Creosote tells the story of how “one day this wicked old pedlar came round offering new lamps for old [...]”. This is also part of the original Aladdin fairy tale.

36

I always thought that the impossibility of trying not to think of something specific was a general concept, but a correspondent informs me that the writer Tolstoy actually founded a club as a boy, which you could be admitted to if you managed a test. The test was to sit in a corner, and not think of a white bear.

37

Another Tom Swifty, as per the annotation for p. 26/26 of The Light Fantastic:

[p. 26/26] “I WAS AT A PARTY, he added, a shade reproachfully.”

When someone on the net wondered if this scene had been influenced by Monty Python (who also do a Death-at-a-party sketch), Terry replied:

“No. I’m fairly honest about this stuff. I didn’t even see the film until long after the book was done. Once again, I’d say it’s an easy parallel — what with the Masque of the Red Death and stuff like that, the joke is just lying there waiting for anyone to pick it up.”

The Masque of the Red Death is a well-known story by Edgar Allan Poe, in which the nobility, in a decadent and senseless attempt to escape from the plague that’s ravishing the land, lock themselves up a castle and hold a big party. At which a costumed personification of Death, of course, eventually turns up and claims everyone anyway.

It is perhaps also worth pointing out that the quoted sentence looks very much like a classic Tom Swiftie (if you can accept Death as a shade). Tom Swifties (after the famous series of boys’ novels which popularised them) are sentences of the form “xxx, said he zzz-ly”, where the zzz refers back to the xxx. Examples:

38

Ovin is modifying Einstein’s explanation of gravity for a magical setting: rubber sheets distorted by balls are one popular way of visualising Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The sheet represents the space-time-continuum, and the balls are bits of mass (like suns and planets). The balls press down and deform the space around them. When things try to move along the rubber sheet, not only are they attracted into the dimples in the sheet (gravity), but things like light which try to travel in a straight line find little kinks in their path around an object.

39

‘Sheep’ was almost right. The exact song the horsemen are trying to sing goes:

and is a favourite of the highly drunk

40

In all editions of this novel I am aware of (UK Corgi paperback, UK Gollancz hardcover, US Signet paperback) this line is printed in a plain font. It seems logical, however, that the line is said by Pestilence and should therefore have been in italics. It is now.

41

Rincewind, nerving himself up to distract the Things in the Dungeon Dimensions so that Coin can escape, is anticipating Granny Weatherwax in this little speech. The theme is clearly important to Terry from the humanist angle, but its roots are in the occult — actively holding in mind who and what you are is a traditional exercise in a number of mystical teachings. Note that this statement is the result of the inspiration particle which hit Rincewind on p. 165/149.

42

This is a rather subtle reference to the scene with the bone and tapir skull in the ‘Dawn of Man’ portion of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.