The Folklore of Discworld

things he is supposed to have said to them.
    Om’s views on these matters are known because he spent three years or so in the world in the form of a tortoise. This was an embarrassing accident. He had meant to manifest himself briefly in some suitably impressive avatar – most likely, a bull – but what he got was a tortoise. Not a vast mountain-bearing tortoise such as the Hindu god Vishnu once chose, but a mere common-or-garden tortoise. And he found he was quite unable to get back to his own shape. This humiliating failure of god-power was due to the fact that hardly any Omnians had real, true, deep-down belief in Om. Possibly, only one. The rest thought they believed in him, but what they really believed in was the terrifying authority of the Omnian Church and its Quisition. As the philosopher Abraxas wrote:
    Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed. [ Small Gods ]
    To make matters worse, Om-as-tortoise found his physical life in danger. Far too many people he met knew that ‘there’s good eating on one of those’. He was also being hunted by an eagle who had found out that if you carry off a tortoise in your talons and drop it on a rock from a great height, the result is a shattered shell and a rather fiddly meal. If, on the other hand, you drop it on somebody’s head, then you are recreating the Earth legend which claims that the Ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus was killed when a flying eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a rock.
    That eagles in some places have learned to drop tortoises in order to crack them open has been attested to by various sources, and our suspension of disbelief in a bird’s ability to target humans in the course of breaking its lunch was occasioned by a Daily Telegraph obituary of Brigadier John Mackenzie. In the Second World War he worked with partisans in the mountains of Greece, and ‘… on one occasion a brigade rifle meeting on a mountain was disrupted whena flock of vultures carrying various small tortoises in their talons decided to drop them on the mountainside to crack their shells. Two soldiers sustained fractured skulls from the tortoises and there were other injuries; the meeting was abandoned.’
    Om has been affected by his spell as a humble tortoise. The Omnian Church has now disbanded its Quisition. Divine smitings have become noticeably rare. Om’s devotees grudgingly allow foreigners to worship their own deities without being massacred, and his missionaries simply afflict the infidel with hymns and excruciatingly boring tracts. Clearly, this is all made up and the story has nothing to do with any ‘Earthly’ deity.
Valkyries
    Valkyries form a group of very specialized goddesses honoured by Barbarian Heroes; their name means ‘Choosers of the Slain’. They are found both on the Discworld and in the Nordic and Germanic myths of Earth, where they serve Odin the God of War (also known as Wotan or Woden). They became even better known through a nineteenth-century opera by the German composer Wagner. They are tall, powerfully built women, wearing chain mail and horned helmets, and riding magnificent airborne horses. Since Wagner’s time, a good singing voice is also a requirement for the job, for they ride to a rousing chorus of ‘Hi-jo-to! Ho! Hi-jo-to! Ho!’
    The task of a Valkyrie is to hover over battlefields where her chosen Hero is fighting, bringing him good luck for as long as the God of War decrees. Then, when the fated time comes for the Hero to be killed, she swoops down and carries his soul to Odin’s Valhalla, ‘Hall of the Slain’ – or to its Discworld equivalent, the Halls of Blind Io – where he will enjoy a blissful afterlife of quaffing mead and feasting on roast boar. The Valkyries will be on hand to make sure the drinking horns are kept filled. And there is other fun to be had too, as the medieval Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson explained in his account of heathen Nordic mythology, The Edda , in the 1220s:
    ‘What sport is there for the Chosen Warriors when they aren’t drinking?’ asked Gangleri the Wanderer.
    The High One said: ‘Every day, when they have dressed they put on their armour and go out into the open country and have a battle, and they kill one another, every one of them. That is their sport. And when the time for the evening meal comes round, they ride back