The Folklore of Discworld

steadily upon him? Is he to lie in his bed, old and sick, meekly waiting for death – a straw death, as Vikings would mockingly call it? Of course, Fate might send him, even in old age, the chance of a last good fight; Beowulf had been a king for fifty years when he went to face the dragon. But if not … well, it is in the nature of heroes to rage against the dying of the light.
    In history, one of the great medieval warlords of Asia was the Mongolian Timur-I-Lenk, called Tamerlane by westerners, who was descended on his mother’s side from Genghis Khan. His empire was centred in Samarkand, and stretched from Turkey to the Gangesvalley and the borders of China; he died a natural death in 1405 at the age of seventy-two, while making plans to invade China itself. According to legend, as told by the Elizabethan playwright Marlowe (who called him Tamburlaine), on his deathbed he declared war on the gods for striking him down:
    What daring god torments my body thus,
    And seeks to conquer mighty Tamburlaine?
    Shall sickness prove me now to be a man,
    That have been termed the terror of the world?
    Techelles and the rest, come, take your swords,
    And threaten him whose hand afflicts my soul.
    Come, let us march against the powers of heaven,
    And set black banners in the firmament,
    To signify the slaughter of the gods.
    He may not have been the only one who refused to go quietly. Odysseus may have done the same, though less fiercely. In Homer’s Odyssey we hear how this resourceful hero, whose cleverness led to the Greek victory in the Trojan War, eventually got home to his island kingdom of Ithaca after ten years of struggling against monsters, enchantments, and shipwrecks. And there Homer leaves him, happily reunited with his wife Penelope, to grow old in peace. But did he?
    A thousand years later Dante (who, like all Italians, called him Ulysses) thought his story ended differently. The bonds of family and homeland could not overcome his passion to learn more about the world. So he set sail with a small band of his faithful comrades, all grown old, urging them on towards the lands beyond the sun; men were not made to live like brutes, he said, but to pursue knowledge and excellence. They sailed through the straits of Gibraltar and out into the deep ocean, past the equator, and far southwards, till they saw a towering mountain – which, though they did not know it, was the Mount of Purgatory crowned with the Earthly Paradise. But therecame a whirlwind from this unknown land, and spun their ship three times round, and sank it. And thus ended the life of Ulysses.
    In Victorian times, Tennyson took up the theme. In his poem ‘Ulysses’ the aged hero looks back on a life spent ‘always roaming with a hungry heart’, and resolves never to pause, never to make an end, but still
    To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
    Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
    He gathers his former comrades, urging them to defy the years and the approach of death, and join him on a last voyage into the unknown:
    For my purpose holds
    To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
    Of all the western stars, until I die.
    It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
    It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
    And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
    Though much is taken, much abides; and though
    We are not now that strength which in old days
    Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are:
    One equal temper of heroic hearts,
    Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
    Cohen and the Silver Horde would have understood.

 
Chapter 13
LORE, LEGENDS
and TRUTH

     
T HE F OUNDATION L EGENDS
    A NY SELF-RESPECTING CITY has to have a legend about its own foundation. Ankh-Morpork, as is right and proper for the oldest and greatest city on the Disc, has two.
    The first is the official one. According to this, there were once two orphaned brothers, mere babies, who had been left on the shores of the Ankh to die. There they were found by a she-hippopotamus, who suckled them. When they grew up, they decided to build themselves a home, and so founded what must at the time have been a very small city indeed. In memory of this, the shield on the coat of arms of Ankh-Morpork has as its supporters deux Hippopotâmes Royales Bâillant, un enchainé, un couronné au cou. Which, stripped of its aristocratic herald-speak, means two royal hippos yawning, one wearing a chain and the other with a crown round