The Folklore of Discworld

night.
    There was even one type, the house-elves, whom humans welcomed. The English called them hobs, pixies or pucks, the Scots brownies, the Scandinavians nisses and tomtes. These would actually live in a farm and bring it luck; they would help with harvesting, tend the animals, even do housework, in exchange for an occasional bowl of milk or porridge – provided nobody spied on them or laughed at them. Russian country folk said there were several on each farm; the most important one lived behind the stove, others guarded the barn, the bath-house, the henhouse, and so on. On the Discworld, only the Wee Free Men have ever done such a favour for humans, and then only once, in the very special circumstances created by their bond with Tiffany Aching. Their reward was Special Sheep Liniment, which smells suspiciously like whisky.
    Another sign that people in Europe were forgetting the true nature of elves, and no longer took them seriously, is that they so often thought of them as small . The Little People, the Wee Folk. Some people said they were about the size of a rabbit; others, that of a six-year-old child. Some said they were really, really small – like the little farm-elf in Sweden who sweated and panted as he dragged a single ear of wheat into the barn, but went off in a huff when the farmer laughed at him; once he was gone, the farm went to rack and ruin. So he had his revenge. Even so, one can’t be seriously scared of something a few inches high (unless, of course, it is a Nac Mac Feegle).
    Why did the menace of elves dwindle in this way? How can they have been so reduced? Once again, it was Will Shakespeare’s plays which nudged the human imagination on to a new path. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he gave elves sweet but silly names: Peaseblossom and Cobweb, Mustardseed and Moth. They were, by his reckoning, just about big enough to kill a red-hipped bumble-bee on top of a thistle. True, he also wrote about Puck, who was bigger and more active and enjoyed playing practical jokes, but there is noreal malice or danger in Puck’s tricks. In Romeo and Juliet he described Mab, Queen of the Fairies, who controls people’s dreams, like the Fairy Queen whom Tiffany encounters in The Wee Free Men . But whereas that Queen is terrifying, Queen Mab is a delightful little thing as she drives her tiny, dainty chariot across the bodies of sleeping humans:
    Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
The traces, of the smallest spider’s web;
The collars, of the moonshine’s watery beams;
Her whip, of cricket’s bone; the lash, of film;
Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat …
    This new image of fairies and their world proved irresistible. From Shakespeare’s time right down to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it has gone on spreading in literature, painting, children’s books, films, television. So now there are plenty of pretty fairies and quaint little elves on Earth – they make a good story to entertain a child. And so some become Santa’s Little Helpers, and some bring money for a tooth, and there are fairies at the bottom of the garden (it’s not so very, very far away). There’s one who says she’ll die if children don’t clap their hands to prove they believe in her. And for very young children, just to get them properly addicted to tweeness, there are dumpy little baby-fairies in romper suits, with horns, living in a land where it’s all trees and flowers and sunshine. So nice. Such good fun.
    There is another way in which Earthly folk have tamed the notion of the elf, and this too involves children. Adults who have stopped believing in elves can make damn sure that their children are still scared of them, because that way they’ll stay away from dangerous places, and learn to obey the rules. They turn elves and fairies into Nursery Bogeys: ‘Don’t play in the woods after sunset, the hytersprites will get you’ – ‘Don’t stand at the edge of the pond, Jenny Greenteeth will drag you in and gobble you up’ – ‘Behaveyourself while I’m out, remember the tomte who lives under the stairs will be watching you’.
    Nanny Ogg understands this principle. Consider the copper in her washhouse:
    The water under the lid was inky black and, according to rumour, bottomless; the Ogg grandchildren were encouraged to believe that monsters from the dawn of time dwelt in its depths, since Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless