The Folklore of Discworld

appearance to match whatever horrors they find lurking in their child-victim’s subconscious. But one can say how to get rid of them – at any rate, on the Discworld. They are terrified of blankets, especially those with blue fluffy bunnies on. Even a small square of blanket fabric drives them off. Which stands to reason, for if you can protect yourself from a bogeyman by hiding your head under the blanket, how much more effective it will be to drop a blanket on his head!
    Most of the Frighteners exist on Earth too. A poem by A. A. Milne tells how Pavement Bears lurked in the streets of London in the 1930s; sensible children watched their feet as they walked, taking care to tread only on the square paving stones, never on the cracks between them.
    The Earthly Scissor Man, a monstrous tailor, was first described in nineteenth-century Germany by Heinrich Hoffman in Struwwelpeter , a book of verses known in English as Shock-Headed Peter . There, he is a tailor, a ‘great, long, red-legged Scissor Man’.
    One day Mama said, ‘Conrad dear,
    I must go out and leave you here.
    But mind now, Conrad, what I say,
    Don’t suck your thumb while I’m away.
    The great tall tailor always comes
    To little boys that suck their thumbs;
    And ere they dream what he’s about,
    He takes his great sharp scissors out,
    And cuts their thumbs clean off, and then,
    You know, they never grow again.’
    On the Discworld, he looks different:
    When Susan turned to go up the stairs the Scissor Man was there.
    It wasn’t man-shaped. It was something like an ostrich, and something like a lizard on its hind legs, but almost entirely like something made out of blades. Every time it moved a thousand blades went snip, snip.
    Its long silver neck curved and a head made of shears stared down at her.
    ‘You’re not looking for me,’ she said. ‘You’re not my nightmare.’ [ Hogfather ]
    Then there’s the Sandman. He sweeps right across the world at the speed of dark, just as dusk falls, and gets inside every house where there are children. It’s up to him to make sure that they go up the wooden hill to Bed fordshire the very minute they’re told, and get straight into bed and go straight off to sleep, no fooling about. If the mother is kind-hearted and modern in her views, she will say he does this by sprinkling magic sand which makes them so sleepy that they can’t keep their eyes open. Those who are less soppy know that the bag of sand he carries is small, but heavy, and he doesn’t bother to take any out before he swings it against the child’s skull.
    These days, on our world, he has been ‘dwindled’; mums all have the same idea of a nice Sandman. But go back a couple of hundred years, to a time when people really knew how to keep children in a constant wholesome state of terror, and listen to what a nanny says in a story by another German author, E. T. A. Hoffman:
    ‘Oh, the Sandman is a wicked man, who comes to little children when they won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so they jump out of their heads all bloody; and he puts them in a bag and takes them to the half-moon as food for his little ones; and they sit there in the nest and have hooked beaks like owls, to pick at the eyes of naughty little boys and girls.’
    The magic of childhood is not what it was.
    Thankfully, not all Anthropomorphic and Theriomorphic Personifications are so sinister. Jack Frost, an elderly man who draws ferns and paisley patterns on window panes at night, has no dealings with children at all. The Soul Cake Duck lays chocolate eggs for them, in gardens, on the Tuesday of the Soul Cake Days in the month of Sektober; she hides them well (but not too well), so that the kiddies can have fun hunting for them. In spite of her name, she does not lay cakes. Her equivalent on Earth is the German and Swiss Easter Hare, who has been laying eggs for children to find since the sixteenth century. Nowadays he is known in Britain and America under the name of the Easter Bunny – a terrible come-down. At first the Hare only laid real eggs, often brightly painted; more recently he has been producing chocolate ones. German and Swiss children enjoy building little nests of moss and flowers and hay, ready for the Hare to use. Just how a hare – and a male hare at that – can lay chocolate eggs will be no mystery to anyone who has noticed certain little brown oval objects in the corner of the rabbit hutch.
    Then there are the ever-welcome