The Folklore of Discworld

strength of the Discworld moon, he was suffering from chronic tides.
    The sea-troll was not native to the Discworld. He came from a different disc, quite a small one (mostly blue), where the seafolk livedin thriving civilized communities on its three oceans. Unfortunately, he had been blown over the edge in a great storm, fell through outer space (which froze him solid), and eventually landed on the Disc. Curiously, the name of his own world is Bathys, which on Earth is Greek for ‘ocean depths’, and the troll’s personal name is Tethis, remarkably close to that of the Ancient Greek sea-nymph Thetis.
    Interestingly, the Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen, who painted a large number of what we now call fantasy paintings, did several based on trolls, including, in 1887, a fearsome sea-troll. Alas, it is not transparent.

 
Chapter 6
OTHER SIGNIFICANT
RACES

     
V AMPIRES
    T HE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT are an increasing presence in Ankh-Morpork these days, thanks to the efforts of the Uberwald League of Temperance. Sensible vampires have realized that a diet of black pudding and blood sausage and a stake in a growing economy is much to be preferred to just a stake. However, it was not always thus: the vampire – or at least the image of the vampire – has evolved quite markedly over the centuries.
    Do vampires suck blood? Silly question, nowadays. If there’s one thing everybody knows about vampires, it’s that they suck your blood, leaving you with two neat puncture marks at the base of your neck. Of course, what everyone knows is wrong, and nearly everyone knows it. At least, we think so; the trouble with what everyone knows is that you can never be sure that everyone knows it. But surely everyone knows that vampires, like werewolves, have stepped out of folklore and into popular culture. The movies, of course, were the major influence; in the 1950s and 60s a generation grew up (thanks to Hammer Films) knowing that female vampires always wore underwired nightgowns, and male ones a high-collared black cloak with a red satin lining. 6
    But it was not always so. In the folklore of the Balkans, Greece, and Central Europe a vampire, also known as a nosferatu , a vrykolakas , or a nachzehrer , was simply an Undead revenant – a corpse that gets out of its grave and wanders about. Some sucked blood, others didn’t. Instead, they might breathe on you and give you plague, cholera or consumption; or sit on your chest and give you nightmares; or strangle you; or beat you black and blue; or simply get into your house and smash the furniture. Subtle and elegant they were not. Their close relative, the draug of medieval Iceland, would break every bone of your body, and of your cattle too.
    Early European vampires were not aristocrats, but village folk. They did not look like noble gentlemen in black cloaks, or luscious women in low-cut ball gowns. They looked like what they were, corpses. To be precise, corpses that have been buried long enough to begin decaying, but not long enough to turn into nice clean skeletons. When terrified locals dug into the grave of a suspected vampire to destroy him, they would find a body bloated with gases, and therefore plumper and bigger than when alive; the skin taut; the blood no longer congealed, but runny, and often oozing from the mouth or nose; the face puffy and red, or in some cases dusky. If they jabbed a stake or spade into it, nasty reddish liquids gushed out. They might even hear a sort of grunt or squawk as the blow forced the gases out through the windpipe. Who could doubt that this was an Undead?
    Such a corpse must then be destroyed by burning. If this is too difficult (dead bodies take a lot of burning), at least it can be mutilated or pinned down in some way, so that it will never walk again. Which is where staking comes in, or beheading, or tearing the heart out.
    Vampires as the Earth knows them now are rather different. They were created by English writers in the Romantic and Victorian periods, and perfected by that most powerful myth-making medium, the cinema. The first was Lord Ruthven in John Polidori’s story ‘The Vampyre’ (1819), an evil blood-sucking deathless aristocrat. Then in 1872 came Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s story about the beautifulyoung Carmilla, who (like Salacia in Thud! ) assumed she could evade discovery by making anagrams of her name – Millarca, Mircalla. She was gentler than Lord Ruthven, but she too brought death; she was eventually found