The Folklore of Discworld

black horse arrived, demanding that it be shod – and the smith noted with horror that the rider himself had a hoof. The smith ran off in a panic and roused the parson, begging him for help. The parson answered that he must fulfil his boast, but should accept no payment, for that would be selling himself to the Devil. So the smith did shoe the Devil’s horse, most efficiently, but though the Devil repeatedly offered him good payment, he would take nothing. The Devil and his horse vanished in a flash of fire.
    To return to Death. In the course of the Middle Ages he became dissatisfied with the idea of himself as the crowned and sword-wielding Rider of the Pale Horse. He disliked the idea of kingship, even though it appealed to many artists and poets – to Milton, for example, who in Paradise Lost describes Death as a dark, faceless but menacing shadow:
    What seemed his head
    The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
    On one occasion on the Discworld, Death (who at the time had become more or less human and was calling himself Bill Door) encountered an entity which had taken on his role, and had adopted much the same wraith-like manifestation as Milton described. This filled him with fury:
    The new Death raised his cowl.
    There was no face there. There was not even a skull. Smoke curled formlessly between the robe and a golden crown.
    Bill Door raised himself on his elbows.
    A CROWN ? His voice shook with rage. I NEVER WORE A CROWN!
    You never wanted to rule . [ Reaper Man ]
    And so Death went looking for another image from our world. He decided he liked the look of Old Father Time, an old man carrying a scythe and an hourglass. This figure had evolved out of a god called Cronus in Ancient Greece and Saturn in Rome, who carried a sickle or a scythe because he was a god of agriculture, and an hourglass because he had also become the god of Time (this happened because ‘Cronus’ sounds almost exactly like chronos , meaning ‘time’ in Greek). Now, harvesting and death are two faces of the same thing, depending on the point of view. If you are the farmer reaping corn or grass, you’re looking ahead to the bread, the beer, the hay for thecattle, and you go home for a cheery Harvest Supper with plenty of drink and a hey-nonny-no, and maybe a barn dance. But if you are the plant being reaped, what you’re going through is death. Seeing the sense in this, Death copied the scythe and hourglass of Cronus, and adopted the title of the Grim Reaper. It was, after all, his job to separate the wheat-germ of the soul from the chaff of the mortal body.
    Both the Rider and the Reaper were thought of, at first, as having the normal body of a living man. However, the European Middle Ages had a rather morbid interest in physical decay, so for a while Death adopted the appearance of a rotting corpse, with split belly, peeling skin, and crawling worms, wearing (if anything) a shroud. Many medieval painters and sculptors showed him in this form. Then, little by little, he changed over to something more hygienic – just clean, gleaming bones. His new idea of himself as a Skeleton Reaper seeped into the minds of Italian artists during the fourteenth century. He can be seen in this guise, for example, on early packs of Tarot cards (he is Number 13 among the Greater Trumps, which accounts for a lot). Then, soon after 1400, painters in the Netherlands who had to do the illustrations for manuscripts of the Apocalypse got the message, and started drawing the Rider on the Pale Horse as a skeleton too. At first they kept the sword (after all, that’s what the Book said ), but by the end of the century woodcuts in German Bibles were giving him the scythe instead. And that, give or take a black cloak and hood, is how Death still usually chooses to be seen: a skeleton on a white horse, with a scythe and an hourglass. He allows himself one touch of luxury – the robe is fastened with a silver brooch engraved with an omega, which is the last letter of the Greek alphabet and so very definitely signals The End. Also, it’s a pretty shape.
    It was also towards the end of the European Middle Ages that Death learned how to dance. He is famed for it. Any dance, every dance – square dances, round dances, reels, the polka, the mazurka, the waltz, the tango, the Quirmish bull-dance (oh-lay!):
    A high-speed fusillade of hollow snapping noises suddenly kept time with the music.
    ‘Who’s playing the maracas?’
    Death grinned.
    ‘M ARACAS? I DON’T