The Folklore of Discworld

mercy of Allah be upon you, for this is no island but a gigantic whale floating on the bosom of the sea, on whose back the sands have settled and trees have grown since the world was young! When you lit the fire it felt the heat and stirred. Make haste, I say; for soon the whale will plunge into the sea and you will all be lost!’ [transl. N. J. Dawood]
    According to the poet Milton, the enormous creature is none other than Leviathan, mentioned in the Bible –
    … that sea-beast
    Leviathan, which God of all his works
    Created hugest that swim the Ocean stream.
    Him, haply slumbering on the Norway foam,
    The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff,
    Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,
    With fixèd anchor in his scaly rind
    Moors by his side under the lee, while night
    Invests the sea, and wishèd morn delays.
    Atlantic, Indian Ocean, seas off Norway … the monster (or the story) certainly does get around.
    In Cambridge University Library and in the British Library there are manuscripts of a Latin Bestiary (that is, a Book of Beasts) dating from the early twelfth century. It includes a section about the sea-monster which gets mistaken for an island, beginning thus:
    There is an ocean monster which is called an aspido delone in Greek. On the other hand, it is called an aspido testudo in Latin. It is also called a Whale … This animal lifts its back out of the open sea above the watery waves … [transl. T. H. White]
    Testudo is Latin for ‘tortoise’. Delone makes no sense, and must be a mistake for chelone , which is indeed a Greek word, meaning ‘turtle’. Why on earth should English monks a thousand years ago get the traditional whale mixed up with tortoises and turtles? Some echo from the Discworld, maybe? As for aspido , this must refer to a snake of some sort, so it would seem that the Sea Serpent has somehow got into the mix. It makes a good yarn even better.
K INGS AND H EROES
    A certain legendary glow surrounds the (rather vague) memory of the Kings of Ankh, a dynasty which came to an end some 2,000 years ago. They are said to have been thoroughly wise, just, charismatic, and so on, plus being of course extremely powerful. As for the later Kings of Ankh-Morpork, they are remembered in many a merry anecdote, for recurrent lunacy, sadistic cruelty, and general bloody-mindedness. (These anecdotes, being factually accurate, do not count as folklore.) If a ruler made himself too disagreeable to the rest of the aristocracy, the Guild of Assassins would eventually be contacted, and he would be discreetly inhumed. Curiously, this tactful and civilized procedure is seen by some as the survival of something extremely archaic:
    There was a tradition once, far back in the past, called the King of the Bean. A special dish was served to all the men of the clan on a certain day of the year. It contained one small hard-baked bean, and whoever got the bean was, possibly after some dental attention, hailed as King. It was quite an inexpensive system and it worked well, possibly because the clever little bald men who actually ran things and paid some attention to possible candidates were experts at palming a bean into the right bowl.
    And while the crops ripened and the tribe thrived and the land was fertile, the King thrived too. But when, in the fullness of time, crops failed and the ice came back and animals were inexplicably barren, the clever little bald men sharpened their long knives, which were mostly used for cutting mistletoe.
    And on the due night, one of them went into his cave and carefully baked one small bean.
    Of course, that was before people were civilized. These days, no one has to eat beans. [ Night Watch ]
    That, at any rate, is a theory of kingship put forward by speculative folklorists in Ankh-Morpork, and enthusiastically adopted by peoplewho feel tradition must always be bloodthirsty, or about sex, or (preferably) both. Naturally, when dealing with such a remote period one can’t expect to find documentary evidence to back up one’s hypothesis (cave-dwelling clans don’t keep diaries or committee minutes). But Quoth the Raven, who is a member of an occult species with links to the gods and therefore knows what he’s talking about, does mention a midwinter custom, thousands of years ago, which sounds rather similar. It involved some poor bugger finding a special bean in his food at the Hogswatch feast. It made him king, but also meant he’d be killed off a few days later. A merry