The Folklore of Discworld

coming home and just saying you were shipwrecked for two years and ate winkles, is it? You have to put in a lot of daft stuff about men who go around on one big foot and the Land of Giant Plum Puddings and nursery rubbish like that.’ [ The Last Continent ]
    Magic as actually practised by wizards generally consists of transformation spells, the skilled hurling of fireballs, the creation of illusions, and the occasional summoning of demons or, in extreme cases, of Death himself. These things are done as rarely as possible. But the theory underpinning these few simple acts is immense, and subdivided into innumerable branches – divination, theurgy, runes ancient and modern, cabbalistic rites, gramarye, knowledge of amulets and talismans, magianism, thaumatology, astrology, morbid spellbinding, sortilege, invisible writing – and so on and so forth. Not necromancy, however; this is frowned upon, and has been replaced by a far more acceptable Department of Post-Mortem Communications. The very heart and soul of Unseen University is its Library. With over 90,000 volumes of grimoires and magical texts, it is by far the largest concentration of magical scholarship anywhere in the multiverse, and so dangerous that most of the books have to be chained up.
    Folklore? Oral tradition? Old wives’ tales? Tchah! It is an insult to the grand intellectual achievements of wizardry to think their work has anything in common with the foolish ways of the peasantry.
    No doubt the famous and learned occultists of medieval and Renaissance Europe – such men as Albertus Magnus in the thirteenthcentury, or Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, and Dr John Dee in the sixteenth – would have been just as dismissive. They wrote books which straddled the ill-defined boundaries between magic, science and philosophy – massive, expensive tomes in Latin, the international language of the wise. Albertus, for instance, wrote a treatise on the practical procedures of alchemy, and was also reputed to be the author of a much simpler Book of Secrets which described the magical properties of stones, herbs, and beasts. For example:
    If thou wilt know whether thy wife be chaste or no . Take the stone which is called Magnet, in Englishe the Loadstone. It is of a sadde blew colour, and it is found in the sea of Inde, and sometime in part of Almaine. Lay this stone under the head of a wife. And if she be chaste, she will embrace her husband. If she be not chaste, she will fall forth of her bed …
    If thou wilt Overcome thine Enemies . Take the stone which is called Draconites, from the dragon’s head. And if the stone bee drawne out from him alive it is good against all poisons, and he that beareth it on his left arme shall overcome all his enemies …
    The Marygold . The vertue of this herbe is marvellous for if it be gathered, the Sunne being in the Signe Leo in August, and wrapped in the leafe of a Lawrell, or May tree, and a wolf’s tooth added thereto, no man shall be able to speake one word against the bearer thereof, but only words of peace. If anything bee stolen, and the bearer of the things before named shall lay them under his head in the night, he shall see the theefe in a vision.
    And so on. It must remain one of the mysteries of trans-dimensional correspondence whether this Albertus Magnus of medieval Europe has any connection with Alberto Malich, the exceptionally powerful wizard who founded Unseen University some two thousand years ago, and disappeared while performing the Rite of AshkEntebackwards. He had intended to achieve immortality, and so he did, in a way. He now exists (one can’t quite say ‘lives’) as cook, valet and gardener in the House of Death, which suits him nicely.
    On Earth, grimoires were often attributed to prestigious figures from legendary times, such as King Solomon the Wise and Hermes Trismegistus. As time went on, the practice of magic slid down the social scale; by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cheap, simple books of spells and conjurations were selling in thousands to village cunning men and wise women, and to ordinary households. In Germany, there was The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses ; in France, Le grand Albert and Le petit Albert , Le dragon rouge , La poule noire , and the splendidly named Abracadabra monumentissima diabolica . Intellectual wizardry was being drawn into the vast melting-pot of folk tradition.
    This has not happened in Ankh-Morpork, nor is it likely to, so long as the Librarian