The Folklore of Discworld

(illustrated by Gray Jolliffe)
    Non-Discworld novels for younger readers
    THE CARPET PEOPLE
    TRUCKERS
    DIGGERS
    WINGS
    ONLY YOU CAN SAVE MANKIND
    JOHNNY AND THE DEAD
    JOHNNY AND THE BOMB
    NATION

Introduction
by Terry Pratchett
    A number of things conspired to cause this book to be written.
    There was the time when I was in a car with several other grownup, literate people and we passed a sign to the village of Great Dunmow, in Essex. I said aloud, ‘Oh, yes. Home of the Dunmow Flitch.’ They had not heard of it, yet for centuries a married man could go to that village on a Whit Monday and claim the prize of a flitch (or side) of bacon if he could swear that he and his wife had not quarrelled, even once, during the past year. And that he had never wished he was a bachelor again. Back in the late fifties and early sixties the Flitch ceremony used to be televised, for heaven’s sake.
    Not long after this I did a book-signing on the south coast, when I took the opportunity to ask practically every person in the queue to say the magpie rhyme (I was doing research for Carpe Jugulum ). Every single one of them recited, with greater or lesser accuracy, the version of the rhyme that used to herald the beginning of the 1960s and 70s children’s TV programme Magpie – ‘One for sorrow, two for joy’. It wasn’t a bad rhyme, but like some cuckoo in the nest it was forcing out all the other versions that had existed around the country (some of which will appear in a later chapter). Then a distinguished-looking lady was in front of me with a book, and I asked her, with some inexpressible hope in my heart, how many versions of the magpie rhyme she knew. After a moment’s thought, she said ‘about nineteen’.
    And that was how I met Jacqueline Simpson, who has been my friend and occasional consultant on matters of folklore, and once got me along to talk to the British Folklore Society, where I probably upset a few people by saying that I think of folklore in much the same way a carpenter thinks about trees.
    Some of the things in this book may well be familiar, and you will say ‘but everybody knows this’. But the Discworld series, which on many occasions borrows from folklore and mythology, twisting and tangling it on the way, must be the most annotated series of modern books in existence. And one thing I have learned is this: not many people know the things which everyone knows.
    But there are some things we shouldn’t forget, and mostly they add up to where we came from and how we got here and the stories we told ourselves on the way. But folklore isn’t only about the past. It grows, flowers and seeds every day, because of our innate desire to control our world by means of satisfying narratives.
    I used to live a short distance away from a standing stone which, at full moon and/or Midsummer’s Eve, would dance around its field at night, incidentally leaving unguarded a pot of gold which, in theory, was available to anyone who dared to seize it and could run faster than a stone. I went to see it by daylight early on, but for some reason I never found the time to make the short nocturnal journey and check on its dancing abilities. I now realize this was out of fear: I feared that, like so many stones I have met, it would fail to dance. There was a small part of me that wanted the world to be a place where, despite planning officers and EU directives and policemen, a stone might dance. And somewhere there, I think, is the instinct for folklore. There should be a place where a stone dances.
    For those who feel the same way we have included a short reading list, in theory for those readers who would like to know more, but also because people who love books always want to recommend them to other people at the least excuse.

Introduction
by Jacqueline Simpson
    Ah yes, I remember it well, that book-signing on the south coast! A misty, moisty November evening in 1997, a long queue inching its way towards a very impressive black hat, the eager voice demanding, ‘Tell me everything you know about magpies!’
    A little ahead of me in the queue, one woman had been explaining to all and sundry as we waited that it was for her nephew, not herself, that she wanted a signed copy of Jingo . She herself never, ever read novels of any kind, let alone fantasy fiction. ‘I only want facts. What’s the point of reading about things that aren’t real? As for a world flying through space on a turtle …’ Her voice died out in a