The Folklore of Discworld

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    The grags, or deep-downers, go beyond even the strictest letter of the Laws. They have dug themselves new dwellings under the cellars of existing houses, where they live as much as possible underground; if they do have to come up to the surface, they wear heavy black leather robes and hoods with a mere slit for the eyes, and are carried about in curtained sedan chairs, so as never to commit the crime of seeing daylight. The strictest among them form enclosed communities, and never come out. They send a junior novice, called ‘the daylight face’, to do any errands above ground and to speak with visitors in an antechamber. They claim that everything that happens underground should be governed by kruk , ‘mining law’, not by the laws of Ankh-Morpork. This is something Commander Vimes vigorously rejects; city law, he argues, applies just as much below the city as in the city.
    It should not be too difficult to find parallels to all this in other universes, including ours. One thinks of fundamentalist movementsin various religions, of cultic communities, of the rules of enclosed orders of monks and nuns. Humans and dwarfs think the same way. Regrettably, here there is no Commander Vimes around to put a stop to the endless revival of Koom Valley …
    4 Any assembly of dwarfs for a common purpose is technically a ‘mine’, even if it is a boat or a farm.
    5 For a given value of ‘non-religious’. Study of the text suggests that Tak, in the dwarfs’ understanding, is both the creator of, and immanent in, the fundamental laws of the universe. There is no act of worship, any more than gravity is worshipped, although it may be argued that living a ‘right life’ is such a thing. Even then the dwarf laws seem open to slow change by long argument. Dwarfs are artisans, after all; tools that don’t work are recast.

 
     

     
Chapter 3
THE ELVES

     
    I T ’ S EASY, ALL TOO EASY , for people nowadays to get hold of the wrong end of the stick if you tell them there are ‘elves’ about. And if you say ‘fairies’, that just makes matters worse. People think of tall, shining figures dancing in rings in the moonlight to the loveliest music one could hope to hear; or tiny dainty creatures with butterfly wings, fluttering round flowers.
    And in a way, some of this is true. For elves do generally choose to appear tall, beautiful and glamorous to humans. Their real appearance is thin, dull, and grey, with triangular faces and big slanty eyes (oddly, they occasionally let themselves be seen like this by the people of our world, who then label them ‘aliens’ and ‘extraterrestrials’, and get very excited). They do sing and dance, and sometimes they laugh a lot, though you would probably not like it if you knew what they are laughing about. And there are indeed little flying ones, though they have more in common with hornets than with butterflies. In truth, elves and fairies are a predatory, cruel, parasitic race, who will use other living beings, and hurt them, because this is fun. They break into a world through those strange places where the barrier between dimensions is just a bit too thin for safety. Places which are like a door, half open. Places where it’s wise to put a marker of some kind – a solitary tree, say, or some standing stones – to warn everybody to keep away.
    And yet, foolish people will go there. In Lancre, for instance, a group of men in a wood, looking for somewhere private to rehearse a play:
    ‘Let’s go right,’ said Jason.
    ‘Nah, it’s all briars and thorns that way.’
    ‘All right, then, left then.’
    ‘It’s all winding,’ said Weaver.
    ‘What about the middle road?’ said Carter.
    Jason peered ahead.
    There was a middle track, hardly more than an animal path, which wound away under shady trees. Ferns grew thickly alongside it. There was a general green, rich, dark feel to it, suggestive of the word ‘bosky’.
    His blacksmith’s senses stood up and screamed.
    ‘Not that way,’ he said.
    ‘Ah, come on ,’ said Weaver. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
    ‘Goes up to the Dancers, that path does,’ said Jason. [ Lords and Ladies ]
    The blacksmith Jason Ogg knows that the Dancers – a ring of eight stumpy man-sized stones, one of which is The Piper – are to be avoided, though he doesn’t know why. Nor does his conscious mind know why he fears the ferny path; it is his instincts which (as we shall see) have picked up a warning from the lore of another world.