The Folklore of Discworld

and well shaped as their own. So children would shove the tooth as far as they could down a mousehole, with some suitable rhyme:
    Mousey, mousey, mousey,
    Here’s my tooth of bone,
    Mousey, bring a new tooth,
    A tooth as hard as stone.
    Tooth Mice didn’t care whether a home was rich or poor, and they were one hundred per cent reliable. No child who put a tooth in a mousehole ever failed to find a new one growing through its gums.
    Unfortunately, the same magic law of like-to-like meant that if people were careless about shed teeth, the unlucky child could end up with something very ugly indeed. According to the folklorist Charlotte Latham, writing in 1878 about superstitions she had noted in Sussex ten years earlier:
    A servant girl said children’s cast teeth must never be thrown away, because if an animal found and gnawed them, the new tooth would grow just like that animal’s. ‘Look at old Master Simmons,’ she said, ‘with that gurt big pig’s tooth in his upper jaw. He allus says ’twas his mam’s fault, she having dropped one of his baby teeth in the hog’s trough, accidental like.’
    Poor Master Simmons! If he had lived on the Disc, people would have told him how lucky he was to look just like the Hogfather, whose teeth are remarkably tusk-like.
    But there is an older, darker reason why shed teeth must either be entirely destroyed by fire, or be hidden somewhere where nobody can ever lay hands on them. It has to do with power, and control, and magic – a magic so old and so simple it’s hardly magic at all. In our world, this is explained by Sir James Frazer in his famous work The Golden Bough :
    The most familiar example of Contagious Magic is the magical sympathy which is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of his person, such as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets possession of human hair or nails may work his will, at any distance, upon the person from whom they were cut. This superstition is worldwide.
    Exactly the same principle works on the Discworld, as the assassin Teatime knows only too well, especially as regards teeth. So does Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, who remarks, with reference to his own toenails,
    ‘You can’t be too careful. Get hold of something like someone’s nail clippings and you’ve got ’em under your control. That’s real old magic. Dawn of time stuff.’ [ Hogfather ]
H OGSWATCH
    In the bleak midwinter, frosty winds make moan. People, on the other hand, make as much loud and cheerful noise as they can:
    People have always had the urge to sing and clang things at the dark stub of the year, when all sorts of psychic nastiness has taken advantage of the long grey days and the deep shadows to lurk and breed. Lately people in Ankh-Morpork’s better districts had taken to singing harmoniously, which rather lost the effect. Those who really understood just clanged something and shouted. [ Hogfather ]
    They also gather to eat and drink and dance, to light bonfires, and to give one another presents. This happens in many parts of the multiverse, provided the climate is suitable. Obviously, you’ve got to have a midwinter before you can have a midwinter festival, so there’s no point looking for one in hot regions like Djelibeybi or the Rimward hinterland of Klatch, but wherever there’s a cold dark season you can find something pretty much like Hogswatchnight. It’s a way of telling the Sun what you expect of him – ‘Rise and shine, Sun, start to grow strong again, drive back the Ice Giants, bring us the warmth of Spring.’ The Sun needs a little encouragement, whatever astronomers may say.
    The Disc is a lucky world in that the sensible arrangement of its sun, its disc, and its supporting elephants has ensured that the dates of its solstices can be easily observed without any need for complicated maths – unlike Earth, where the hours of sunrise and sunset stay apparently the same for three or four days around midsummerand midwinter, giving rise to muddled arguments over whether Midsummer Day is 21 June or 24 June, and why the Romans chose 25 December rather than the 21st as the Feast of the Unconquered Sun. It is also lucky for the inhabitants of Lancre, Ankh-Morpork and the Sto Plains that some sensible ruler in ancient times decided that the night of the winter solstice, Hogswatchnight, would also count as New Year’s Eve. Would that all calendars were as simple and rational! As a result, it is both the time of the darkest