The Folklore of Discworld

everywhere, and age-old traditions spring up overnight like mushrooms.
    This is beginning to happen in Ankh-Morpork. There is a team of folk dancers who have revived the Morris – probably more than one, since Morris dancing is essentially a competitive pastime, sometimes quite dangerously so. Nobby Nobbs is known to be a participant. There are also enthusiastic and delightfully melodious wassailers, who put in weeks of practice before setting out to spread seasonal cheer through the streets of Ankh-Morpork at Hogswatch.
    The custom was referred to by Anaglypta Huggs, organizer of the best and most select group of the city’s singers, as an occasion for fellowship and good cheer …
    The singers were halfway down Park Lane now, and halfway through ‘The Red Rosy Hen greets the Dawn of the Day’ in marvellous harmony. Their collecting tins were already full of donations for the poor of the city, or at least those sections of the poor who in Mrs Huggs’ opinion were suitably picturesque and not too smelly and could be relied upon to say thank you …
    In fact the hen is not the bird traditionally associated with heralding a new sunrise, but Mrs Huggs, while collecting many old folk songs for posterity, had taken care to rewrite them where necessary to avoid, as she put it, ‘offending those of a refined disposition with unwarranted coarseness’. Much to her surprise, people often couldn’t spot the unwarranted coarseness until it had been pointed out to them.
    Sometimes a chicken is nothing but a bird. [ Hogfather ]
    Thanks to the humorous workings of narrative necessity, these well-bred singers, so beautifully free from anything that could distress either the musical ear or the moral susceptibilities of their audience, find themselves face to face with what may well be the last vestige of pure, raw wassailing in the city, the makers of the Rough Music of Time – Foul Ole Ron and the Canting Crew of deranged beggars, singing and swearing at the tops of their voices, and banging saucepans together. The beggars are not well versed in folkloric theory, but they do know this is the sort of thing one does at midwinter, and have good reason to believe that if you make enough din people will give you money to stop.
    Those who have looked into the history of folklore of western Europe over the last couple of hundred years will notice some quite astonishing similarities to this situation. There too, some genteel Victorian collectors, while professing their deep love of tradition,took for granted that it must be stripped of all coarseness and daintily repackaged. There too, some customs slipped down the social scale till they were little more than a way for the poorest of the working class (or even beggars) to extract a little beer-money from their betters at festive seasons. And there too, these same customs might be rediscovered, imitated, revived and updated by later and more sophisticated generations.
    As soon as people begin to notice a custom (as opposed to just doing it), they start wondering where, when and why it began. They weave wonderful theories. But this is futile, since folklore is almost always unaccountable:
    Very few people do know how Tradition is supposed to go. There’s a certain mysterious ridiculousness about it by its very nature – once there was a reason why you had to carry a posy of primroses on Soul Cake Tuesday, but now you did it because that’s what was Done. [ Jingo ]
    The ceremony still carries on, of course. If you left off traditions because you didn’t know why they started you’d be no better than a foreigner. [ Hogfather ]
    In both worlds, old customs discarded by adults are often kept going for a few generations by children. According to the Bursar, when he was a boy there was a custom on Soul Cake Tuesday that children would roll boiled eggs down the Tump, a large steep hill on the outskirts of the city. Naturally, nobody can say what the point of it is, apart from the fairly obvious fact that it is fun, and that the eggs are nice to eat, even if they are a bit cracked and muddy. As Nanny Ogg would say, with surprising Biblical insight, ‘We all have to eat a peck of dirt before we die.’
    Since children in Lancre and other rural areas also get given eggs on this date, as we mentioned earlier, there is every reason to think the custom is genuinely folksy – possibly even mythic, if the SoulCake Duck is involved. If so, it would have begun as something serious, to be done