The Folklore of Discworld

ago, had sailed into the West. One of Bran’s friends jumped into the water and swam ashore, but as soon as he touched land he crumbled to dust. As for Bran, he put out to sea again, and has never been seen since.
    And it’s not only bards, seers and heroes – quite ordinary people get taken too. During a wedding dance on a Danish farm the bride went out for a breath of air, and walked as far as a little mound in one of the fields, a mound where elf-folk lived. It had opened up, and elves were dancing there too, and one of them came out and offered her some wine. She drank. She joined in the dancing, just one dance, and then remembered her husband and went home. But the village and the farm looked different; she couldn’t recognize anybody, and nobody recognized her. There was just one old woman who listened to her story and exclaimed, ‘Why, you must be the girl who disappeared a hundred years ago, at my grandfather’s brother’s wedding!’ At these words, the bride’s true age came upon her in an instant, and she fell dead.
    In tales such as this, told in the European countryside, elves were often lurking in quite normal, familiar places. Just a little mound in a field which you pass every day, nothing particularly eldritch about it, no marker stones to warn you off. It might of course be an ancient burial mound, like the one on the Chalk Downs which the Wee Free Men take as their home, but on the other hand it might be a simple natural hillock. But if you lie down and press your ear to the ground, you hear faint music … Then one day it is standing open, and thereThey are. They are the Hidden People, the Underground Folk, the Good People, the Good Neighbours. Maybe they’ve come to do you a favour, or to ask for one. There’s no need to be frightened, is there? Is there?
    Yet long after the ‘enlightened’ and well-educated generations had lost their faith and fear, after the wild elves had been safely reduced to Peaseblossoms, an occasional artist recaptured the older image. The crazed painter Richard Dadd did so in his sinister picture The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke , which he worked on from 1855 to 1864, while living in an asylum. So did the composer Rutland Boughton in the key aria of his opera The Immortal Hour (1914), based on a poem by Fiona Mcleod:
    How beautiful they are,
The lordly ones
Who dwell in the hills,
In the hollow hills.

Their limbs are more white
Than shafts of moonshine.
They are more fleet
Than the north wind.

They laugh and are glad
And are terrible.
When their lances shake and glitter
Every green reed quivers.

How beautiful they are,
How beautiful,
The lordly ones
In the hollow hills.
    Beautiful, yes. And terrible.

 
Chapter 4
THE NAC MAC
FEEGLE

     
    T HE W EE F REE M EN , also known as the Nac Mac Feegle (and, sometimes, as ‘the defendants’), are a fiercely independent species, organized into numerous interrelated clans. Outsiders sometimes call them gnomes. To humans, they are one of the most feared of the fairy races – indeed, they can put trolls to flight, and even Nanny Ogg’s cat Greebo retires under the furniture at the sight of them. They have shaggy red hair, and are covered all over with blue tattoos and blue paint, in patterns which indicate their clan. They wear kilts or leather loincloths, use feathers, bones or teeth as decorations, and carry swords almost as large as themselves – though they go in for kicking and head-butting too. They are about six inches tall.
    Originally, they were denizens of Fairyland, and served its Queen as her wild champion robbers who went raiding on her behalf into every world there is, but all that is over. Why so, is not certain. Some say they were thrown out of Fairyland for being drunk and disorderly, making rude gestures, and using language which would be considered offensive by anybody who could understand it. They themselves say they left in disgust because the Queen was a spiteful tyrant, and ordered them to steal from the poor as well as the rich, ‘But we said it’s no right to steal an ol’ lady’s only pig, or the food frae them as dinnae ha’ enough to eat.’ Whatever the truth of it, they are now out-and-out rebels against any authority whatsoever. Their war-cry is ‘Nac Mac Feegle! The Wee Free Men! Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna be fooled again!’
    They now live in the human territories of the Discworld, but it is hard to say just where they are at any one time. Not only