Once More With Footnotes

body".
     
                  Only on Discworld, perhaps, would a group of slightly-drunken toga-clad philosophers actually try to race a tortoise against a hare. When one novice philosopher proposed to his seniors that, logically, an arrow could not actually catch up with and hit a running man (because of course by the time it got to where he i s now he would have moved further on, and so on) they told him to start running and picked up their bows. He was in fact proved right, although the hypothesis was amended to add that the arrows would not hit the running man only if the archers had been in the pub since lunchtime.
     
                  The roots of all this started to burrow into the soil when I was given a copy of The Wind in the Willows, at the age of ten. Up until then it had never occurred to me that reading could be anything other than a chore, but I read that book in a day, and I wanted a lot more. In a week or two, I went from a child who barely read anything to a child who would read anything, and was trying to read everything.
     
                  There wasn't a lot of fantasy in my local library. This was in the late '50 s, you understand, and I don't think we had a very good '50s in this country. A nasty, drab, furtive decade, it seems to me in retrospect. This is because only one major country is allowed a decent decade at any time. America got the '50s — all those juke b o xes, rock 'n' roll, and Cadillacs with fins — and over here we had to fill up the ten years after 1949 with a sort of re-heated '40s. In fact we weren't even allowed any '60s until 1964, when we were allowed to keep them until they were exported to the West Coast of the USA in 1968. To be honest, they only happened to about 250 people in London, in any case. The rest of us read about them, and picked up the pieces.
     
                  I read my way through what the local library did have like a chainsaw. So fast was I reading, in fact, that I read my way into the mythology and folklore section without realising it. George Ewart Evans, Margaret Murray Lady Gregory, J. G. Frazer ... I was travelling too fast to stop, and I piled into the folklore shelves like an out-of-control j u ggernaut.
     
                  I suspect that for many of us a major chapter opened in our lives when we discovered the pleasures of reading. Of course, there are minor problems. I wasn't the only person I know who ended up with a rather bigger vocabulary of understanding th an of speech. For years I thought that a certain humanoid monster was an "ogree"; I mentioned this to a distinguished friend of mine who admitted that, for years, another word for "ghost" was mentally pronounced by him as "perhantom".
     
                  Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable was a major discovery. I still have the second-hand copy I bought in a local bookshop for 10/6d; I may have been the only twelve-year-old to read through it, end to end, for the dark pleasure of realising that the world is a fascinatin g and complicated place. Even now, when I have been able to afford one of life's true pleasures — bookshelves high enough to require a library stool — and have been asked to write the preface to the Brewer's Millennium Edition, it is still the first and last r esort in matters of a mythical nature.
     
                  So for years my regular reading of folklore went hand in hand with a taste for science fiction and fantasy and, I have to say, outlived them. I was very fortunate. Perhaps one of the librarians had a particular inte rest in folklore. There seemed to be a lot. The Opies, of course, and a whole lot of those rather trite, tourist-orientated folklore books, but The White Goddess was there, too, and I particularly remember being impressed by Dermot Mac Manus' The Middle Ki ngdom, which headed straight for my sub-conscious and stayed there.
     
                  There was no pattern to this. I just chose the books that looked interesting. I tended towards folklore rather than mythology, because gods seemed rather dull and stupid, and in any case mythology just seemed to be the folklore of the winners.
     
                  What was going on, I now realise, was the stealthy laying down of the coal measures I was subsequently to mine as a professional author. I can't remember where I first heard of the Dunmow Flitch, or the King of the Bean, or the