The Folklore of Discworld

tooth fairies. Everybody knows what they do – when a child loses a tooth, he or she must slip it under the pillow, and a tooth fairy will come in the night to take it away, leaving at least half an Ankh-Morpork dollar as payment. Despite the name, they do not belong to the same species as elves, or even gnomes. They are human-sized, rather plain and dumpy, and none too bright.
    Fairies aren’t necessarily little twinkly creatures. It’s purely a job description, and the commonest ones aren’t even visible. A fairy is simply any creature currently employed under supernatural laws to take things away or, as in the case of the Verruca Gnome, to bring things. [ Hogfather ]
    Tooth fairies are to be found chiefly in towns (there are at least half a dozen in Ankh-Morpork alone), and then only in moderately well-off homes. This is probably due to socio-economic factors, since it is generally supposed that the coins the fairy brings have been recycled (by bogeymen) after being lost in the very same house. You won’t find many coins under the furniture of a cottage in Lancre, where the basic unit of currency is the chicken. Nor, come to that, in the poor quarters of Ankh-Morpork, in a place like Cockbill Street. Pennies were precious in Cockbill Street; if you had any spare onesyou put them by to get you a decent funeral; you didn’t lose them under the settee, because you didn’t have one. The Tooth Fairy rarely visits Cockbill Street.
    Actually, it is wrong to speak of The Tooth Fairy, as if there was only one of her. The mistake originated in America somewhere around 1960, and has mysteriously leapt across the dimensions in an attempt to gain a footing in the Discworld. Fortunately, in Ankh-Morpork Violet Bottler and her fellow workers are united in loyalty to one another and to their weekly wage, insisting that they are all, each and every one of them, tooth fair ies .
    In Britain, it is certain that fairies (in the plural) have been collecting children’s shed milk teeth from under pillows for about a hundred years, leaving money in exchange. What happened earlier is a mystery. Victorian folklore books do not mention tooth fairies, but this is probably because the collectors spent their time hunting for excitingly unusual customs and beliefs; it did not occur to them that the everyday stuff in their own homes was interesting too.
    Nowadays, owing to pervasive American influence, British children believe in one single Tooth Fairy. She is immensely popular. Even dentists talk about her, and keep a stock of dinky little envelopes with her picture on, so that when children have a tooth professionally extracted, they can take it home and pop it under the pillow just the same.
    So, how long have tooth fairies been around? There is one small scrap of evidence that in seventeenth-century England elves and fairies were already busy collecting pretty little items in the human world and carting them off to fairyland to decorate their dwellings – which answers the question, ‘What exactly do the fairies do with the teeth?’ This evidence comes in the poem ‘Oberon’s Palace’ by Robert Herrick, number 444 in his book Hesperides (1648). The poem describes a charming little cave or grotto where Oberon the Fairy King goes to make love to Queen Mab. They are very small fairies, possibly the same species as are often mistaken for waspson the Disc. The cave walls are decorated with bits of peacock feathers, fish scales, blue snake skins, dewdrops etc. The floor is a mosaic of plum-tree gum, dice, brown toadstones, human fingernails, warts, and the teeth of squirrels and children ‘lately shed’. These bits and pieces, says Herrick, are ‘brought hither by the Elves’. They are not following quite the same procedure as a modern tooth fairy, since they don’t leave money, but they’re well on the way.
    There is another way of dealing with shed teeth, and this too goes back to the seventeenth century. Children would just rub the tooth with salt and throw it in the fire. This was still done in some homes in the 1950s, especially in the north of England, sometimes with a verse:
    Fire, fire, burn a bone,
    God send me a tooth again,
    A straight one, a strong one,
    A white shiny bright one.
    In many parts of Europe, especially Germany and Russia, it wasn’t fairies that took the teeth, but mice or rats. And what they gave in exchange was not a coin, but lovely new teeth to grow in place of the old – teeth as strong, sharp