The Folklore of Discworld

These are signs of a gateway, a short cut between dimensions, a place where elves can enter.
    One clue that elves have broken in, or are just about to, is that crop circles start appearing in cornfields; the growing wheat bends over sharply, breaks, and lies down in a circle. This strange phenomenon has been observed several times in Lancre, and also on the Earth in recent years.
    Earlier generations on Earth got no such warnings, but then they didn’t need them. They knew for sure that there were elves and fairies lurking in pools and streams, in deep woods and inside mounds and rocks, and sweeping across the sky in the wild winter winds. And they knew that these beings were cold-hearted, revengeful, often cruel, however beautiful their faces and however enchanting theirmusic. Any countryman in Ireland or the Scottish Highlands 150 or 200 years ago would have known of a dozen cases of someone who died, or lost his wits, or became paralysed, or simply was ‘never the same again’ after meeting them. Similarly in England, at an earlier period – in 1684, for instance, a writer named Richard Bovet reported that he knew someone (completely reliable, of course) who knew a man who had once seen fairies holding a market on Blackdown Hill in Somerset and foolishly tried to join them. He felt a sudden pain, and by the time he got home ‘lameness seized him all on one side’ and he remained so, though he survived for many years. We still call such a thing a ‘stroke’, even if we have forgotten who did the striking. And we still say of somebody who seems vague, dim-witted, or slightly crazed that he or she is ‘away with the fairies’.
    In Eastern Europe, the fear of elves and fairies was still powerful in quite recent years. The American folklorist Gail Kligman, working in Romania in 1975, learned about wondrously beautiful but malevolent fairy maidens called iele , which literally means ‘They’ or ‘Themselves’, since it is dangerous to utter their true name. They live in woods and wild places. They travel by night, singing and dancing, but those who listen to their music or join their dance will regret it – at best, they will be deaf for life, and may well be crippled, or go mad. There is hardly any limit to the sickness and trouble which the iele can inflict on humans, even those who have never offended them. In Russia and other Slavonic lands, there are forest elves who trick travellers into leaving the path to wander helplessly among the trees until they starve to death, and water elves who catch and drown the unwary. Beautiful? Yes, usually. Nice? Never.
    Wherever elves go they feed on the awe, the terror, the superstition they inspire. They take control of people’s minds. They enslave. When they invaded Lancre, as is told in Lords and Ladies , Granny Weatherwax warned King Verence II:
    ‘When they get into a world, everyone else is on the bottom. Slaves. Worse than slaves. Worse than animals, even. They take what they want, and they want everything. But worst of all, the worst bit is … they read your mind. They hear what you think, and in self-defence you think what they want. And it’s barred windows at night, and food out for the fairies, and turning around three times before you talks about ’em, and horseshoes over the door.’
    Horseshoes are important, and so are the blacksmiths who make them, since almost the only protection humans have against fairies is the power of iron. It is known throughout the multiverse that all creatures of this species fear and detest iron, which causes them intense pain. Various more or less foolish theories have been proposed to account for this. On the Earth, it is often claimed that it shows ‘fairies’ are nothing more than a folk memory of some prehistoric human society which did not have iron weapons, and fled from others who did. But on the Discworld people know the real reason. Elves have a powerful sixth sense based on awareness of magnetic fields, and use it to know precisely where they are, and where and what all other living creatures are. So to them iron is:
    … the terrible metal that drinks the force and deforms the flux universe like a heavy weight on a rubber sheet and blinds them and deafens them and leaves them rudderless and more alone than most humans could ever be. [ Lords and Ladies ]
    The other picture people have of fairies, the picture of their beauty and charm, is partly created by the fairies themselves as they infiltrate the