The Folklore of Discworld

kill a wren at Hogswatch and walk around from house to house singing about it? With a whack-fol-oh-diddle-dildo. Very folkloric, very myffic.’
    ‘A wren ? Why?’
    ‘I dunno. Maybe someone said, hey, how’d you like to hunt this evil bustard of an eagle with his big sharp beak and great ripping talons, sort of thing, or how about instead you hunt this wren, which is basically about the size of a pea and goes “twit”? Go on, you choose.’
    But killing a bird or beast, however sacred, is not half as impressive as killing a human, especially an important one, especially a king. The Raven says that once, long ago, that’s what used to happen, up to a point – the king was not a real king, presumably because real kings don’t take kindly to being killed off after just one year on the throne, and have bodyguards to see no one tries it.
    ‘Then they start this business where some poor bugger finds a special bean in his tucker, oho, everyone says, you’re king , mate, and he thinks “This is a bit of all right” only next thing he’s legging it over the snow with a dozen other buggers chasinghim with holy sickles so’s the earth’ll come to life again and all this snow’ll go away.’
    This is a very remarkable piece of information, which probably explains what happened when Sir James Frazer, that most famous of Victorian speculative folklorists, turned his attention to a cheerful, innocent little Christmas custom, and came up with a splendidly melodramatic theory. In England and France, from Tudor times onwards, people used to round off the Twelve Days of Christmas with a lavish party on Twelfth Night. There was a big, rich cake. In that cake was a bean. Whoever got the slice with the bean in it would be ‘King of the Bean’ for the rest of the day, and would preside at the celebrations. It was simply a bit of fun – no violence, no sinister implications. But Frazer decided that it was really the survival of a bloodthirsty primitive ritual, long, long ago, in which the King of the Bean had been put to death when the revels were over. He had no shred of evidence, just a powerful hunch that mock kings must somehow also be sacred sacrificial victims. In the light of what we now know to be the case on the Discworld, it seems certain that Frazer’s mind had been invaded by some drifting inspiration from that distant universe. 15
    Way back in the early centuries of the Disc’s existence, the Hogfather had been a sacred victim, hunted and slaughtered in animal or human form so that the sun would rise and the snows melt. He had been the boar, the wren, the Bean King. But times change, and old gods must find new jobs. Nowadays, the Hogfather is the Midwinter Visitor, the Gift-Bringer, and Hogswatch is meant to be, on the whole, just for kids. Toys, stockings on the end of the bed, crackers and puddings, holly and cards, jolly little figures of elves and fairies. But he still lives in a Castle of Bone, far away in the icyregions near the Hub. People still make offerings to him, of a sort – the glass of sherry and the pork pie left on the mantelpiece, the carrots for the boars that pull his sledge. His colours are red and white, even if nobody now thinks about blood on the snow. And he is, still, just a little scary, even when he is handing out toys in a sparkly grotto in Crumley’s Emporium:
    H APPY H OGSWATCH AND B E G OOD . I WILL K NOW IF YOU’RE GOOD OR BAD, YOU KNOW. H O . H O . H O .
    ‘Well, you brought some magic into that little life,’ said Albert.
    I T’S THE EXPRESSION ON THEIR LITTLE FACES I LIKE , said the Hogfather.
    ‘You mean sort of fear and awe and not knowing whether to laugh or cry or wet their pants?’
    Y ES . N OW THAT IS WHAT I CALL BELIEF .
    The Hogfather’s duties include moral judgement. Has the child been good or bad, naughty or nice? A good little boy gets, say, a model Klatchian war chariot with real spinning sword blades. A bad little boy traditionally gets nothing but a bag of smelly old bones, though modern and enlightened parents are beginning to back off from this practice, on the grounds that (a) it causes a nasty complex, and (b) you really do not want to be woken up by all this weeping and wailing at six in the morning.
    On Earth, supernatural midwinter visitors have been around in Europe for centuries. They are a very mixed lot – saints and angels and even the Child Jesus on the one hand, hags and goblins and mock-terrible monsters on the other – and they