The Folklore of Discworld

from the stone walls of their castle. But the job-description ‘hunter’ caught the eye of Jacob Grimm, a German expert on mythology in the early nineteenth century, and started up a whole new train of thought. It reminded him of the Wild Hunt – a horde of phantom riders who, according to European folklore, gallop across the night sky during midwinter storms. Their leader is sometimes said to be a lost soul who is doomed to hunt for ever, sometimes the Devil pursuing the souls of sinners, occasionally a god hunting forest elves. Maybe, said Grimm, Herne had once been a Wild Huntsman, not a common-or-garden gamekeeper’s ghost.
    This is Grimm’s theory, not Will Shakespeare’s. But people liked the idea, and so on the Earth Herne the Hunter, the stag-headed god of hunting, was born. He has enjoyed a brilliant career, thanks to those fascinating antlers. In the 1930s, people started wondering if he could be connected with various old Celtic gods who had horns or antlers on their heads, especially a Gaulish one to whom sailors raised an altar in Paris early in the first century AD , calling him Cernunnos, ‘Horned One’ (or possibly ‘Old Horny’). Others thought he might even have as his remote ancestor a prehistoric man painted on the wall of a French cave, wearing a skin and antlers. By now, there are many, many people ready to swear that Herne is an age-old god, the lord of wild nature. But there is the truth and, then again, there is The Truth, in the face of which truth can only shrug and grin.
    According to a popular 1980s British TV series, Robin Hoodused to meet a horned man in the forest, and this was none other than Herne. Well, maybe so – provided Robin had an efficient time machine to whisk him forward two or three centuries to Elizabethan times, or backwards to the first century AD to meet up with Cernunnos.
    And so, while Will Shakespeare lies giggling in his grave, the story goes drifting off across the dimensions, twisting itself into other shapes, and creating Herne the Hunted. Stories and folklore always tangle, and never more than on Discworld.
Hoki the Jokester
    Hoki is a localized nature-god, only to be found in the deep forests of the Ramtops. Sometimes he manifests himself as an oak-tree, sometimes as half a man and half a goat, and pretty well always as a bloody nuisance. He plays the flute, very badly.
    Hoki has a typically mix-and-don’t-match approach to the business of filching attributes and character traits from the gods of another universe. He admired and copied the shaggy goat-legs and the pipes of Pan, a cheerful, sexy little nature-god living in Arcadia in Ancient Greece. His name, however, he took from that of the Norse Loki, a trickster and trouble-maker, whose most infamous deed was a murder-by-proxy: he caused the death of the popular and handsome young Baldur by getting a blind god to throw a twig of mistletoe at him, supposedly as a joke. Hoki must have got to hear about this, since it is said that he was thrown out of Dunmanifestin for playing ‘the old exploding mistletoe trick’ on Blind Io.
    The oak-tree manifestation is something Hoki picked up more recently. In some countries of the Earth over the past fifty or sixty years there has been a revival of paganism, and sexy male nature-gods are once again in fashion, including a Green Man who manifests himself as a face sprouting leaves, peering through leaves, or entirely made up of leaves. Sometimes, they are oak leaves. Observing this, Hoki decided to go one better and be the whole tree.
The Lady
    Though everyone believes in her and longs to win her favour, nobody ever calls her by her true name, or tries to summon her, for this would make her vanish. Her eyes are pure green, from edge to edge, and green is her favourite colour. Her realm is that of the throw of the dice, of uncertainty and chance, especially the million-to-one chance. She thwarts the rigid rules of Fate.
    And on the Earth too, that’s exactly how things are. Except as regards the colour green. That information has not seeped through into our world, where many people regard green as unl— er, quite the opposite.
Nuggan
    Nuggan, the god of Borogravia (and also of paperclips, desk stationery sets, and unnecessary paperwork), is small and podgy, and has the sourest face one could wish never to see, with a fussy little moustache. He has revealed himself unto his faithful people via the holy Book of Nuggan , which – unlike other holy writs –