The Folklore of Discworld

reign, but a short one. (We have more to say about this in the section on the Hogfather.)
    To return to the early kings of Ankh. Theirs was a Golden Age, from which little remains – some well-built ancient sewers, a few ruined walls, a worm-eaten throne, and, if legend can be believed, a very special Sword. Nobody has set eyes on it for centuries, and many think it must be lost.
    And yet, there are always rumours. Although they are so proud of being modern and living in an Age of Reason, the citizens of Ankh-Morpork have surprisingly romantic imaginations. Their minds are littered with mangled myths and fragmented fairy tales. Deep down, they feel sure that one day a long-lost heir will turn up, brandishing the Sword and displaying a birthmark, to claim the throne. He will right all wrongs, and the Golden Age will return.
    Since the rules of fairytale narrative are known to every child in the multiverse (even in worlds where the books of Grimm and Andersen are not to be found), the people of Ankh-Morpork naturally assume that the heir will have begun life as a humble swine-herd, and/or revived a princess who has been asleep for a hundred years, and/or proved how royal he is by sleeping on a huge pile of mattresses and a few very small peas. His hands will have sensational, but highly specialized, healing powers, though there appears to be some uncertainty about what exactly it is that he cures.Some citizens think a true king can cure baldness by his touch, while the aristocratic Lord Rust mentions dandruff, and scrofula, a disease of the throat glands. On Earth, it was definitely scrofula, which was therefore known as ‘king’s evil’. Several kings of England, from the time of Edward the Confessor to the end of the Stuart dynasty, made a point of ceremonially touching sufferers; so did the kings of France.
    Best of all, if the heir to a kingdom encounters a dragon he will most certainly slay it. As Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler says to the sceptical Vimes:
    ‘You’ve got no romance in your soul, Captain. When a stranger comes into the city under the thrall of the dragon and challenges it with a glittery sword, weeell, there’s only one outcome, ain’t there? It’s probably destiny.’ [ Guards! Guards! ]
    In the same way, people know just how things will go if a dragon appears. It will fly around, flaming and ravening; it will want a pile of gold to sleep on; it will expect people to give it virgins to eat, chained to rocks; it will speak, quite likely in riddles; but , it will have one vulnerable spot, which a good archer can hit as it flies overhead. That’s what always happened in the old stories, and so that’s what will happen again.
    These expectations are moulded by all the dragon-lore which has been drifting from one universe to another from the dawn of time. There is no mythology in any world which doesn’t have dragons in it, together with gods or heroes to kill them. The tales known in Ankh-Morpork are just as famous on Earth. There, it was the Ancient Greek hero Perseus who was the first to rescue a virgin who had been left chained to a rock for a dragon to eat; her name was Andromeda. Later, St George did the same, though he, being a Saint, didn’t marry the girl. Several great warriors of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian legend – Beowulf, for instance, and the two Volsung heroes, Sigmund and Sigurd (whom Germans call Siegfried) – slew dragons which lay on hoards of treasure. One of these, the onenamed Fafnir which Sigurd killed, did indeed speak, and could ask and answer riddles.
    As for the one vulnerable spot, this is sometimes on the belly, as it was with Fafnir, and with Smaug in the tale of Bilbo the hobbit. More often, it is when a dragon opens his mouth that he becomes vulnerable to a well-aimed spear or arrow going down his gullet and into his vitals; this technique was pioneered by the Babylonian god Marduk, who destroyed the primeval dragoness Tiamat by hurling deadly winds down her throat. And then there is the sad case of the Yorkshire Dragon of Wantley, whom More of More Hall kicked in the arsehole with a spiked boot:
    ‘Murder, murder!’ the dragon cried,
    ‘Alack, alack for grief!
    Had you but missed that place, you could
    Have done me no mischief!’
    Then his head he shaked, trembled and quaked,
    And down he laid and cried;
    First on one knee then on back tumbled he,
    So groaned, kicked, shat, and died. 12
S OME M ORE L EGENDS
    Many town-dwellers have, lurking in the