The Folklore of Discworld

Igors, ‘he’s got his grandfather’s hands’ is likely to be literally true.
    There is a tradition among Igors that the ancestor who first learned surgery was working for a mad doctor at the time. A morerecent member of the clan, who diversified into extremely delicate clock-making, produced references from a series of employers whose hold on sanity appears to have been shaky – Mad Doctor Scoop, Crazed Baron Haha (crushed by a burning windmill), Thcreaming Doctor Bertherk (died of blood poisoning caused by a dirty pitchfork), and Demented Doctor Wimble, who discovered how to make the perfect clock while working on a scheme to extract sunshine from oranges. This particular Igor has a passion for electricity and thunderstorms, as described in Thief of Time .
    There are few echoes of the Igors on Earth. And those that there are are only to be found in modern cinema and comic strips, not in age-old folklore. However, they do support the idea that an Igor once worked for a Doctor Frankenstein (who was definitely crazy) on a job which involved a great deal of stitching body parts together and exposing them to lightning. The Doctor wouldn’t have got far without his help.
    Despite the people they work for, Igors are generally well-intentioned, nay, spiritual beings. Most religions teach that the body is just an outer garment, to be shed in due time, and Igors think, in a provident way, that items with some wear left in them should not be wasted.
Z OMBIES
    It is not strictly accurate to include the Discworld zombies in this chapter, since (unlike werewolves, golems or Igors) they do not constitute a separate race or species. On the contrary, a zombie is simply a human being who obstinately remains sort-of-alive when he has in fact died. He ought to lie a-mouldering in his grave, instead of wandering around looking vaguely grey, with fingers dropping off occasionally. No one knows why some people are natural zombies; it may simply be stubborn bloody-mindedness, an inborn refusal tokowtow to any authority, even that of Death. What Death thinks of this situation has not been recorded.
    On the Disc, it would seem that zombies keep the personalities they had when alive, more or less intact, with the result that the four we know best are strikingly different. One is Mr Slant, the eminent lawyer who can count most of the upper-class families in Ankh-Morpork among his clients. He is dry-as-dust, in a very literal sense, and though he would never (of course) do anything illegal, it is not wise to cross him. He knows family secrets going back for an uncomfortable number of generations. At the opposite end of the city’s social and political spectrum is Reg Shoe. In life he saw himself as a romantic revolutionary; in death he devotes most of his energies to protesting at society’s unjust prejudice and discrimination towards the Undead. Then there is the old wizard Windle Poons, who finds his time as a zombie considerably more exciting than his actual life had been, as we learn in Reaper Man ; in his case, however, it is merely a temporary state – the default setting for someone who happens to die when Death is not around to do whatever it is he does with his scythe. And in distant Genua there is Baron Saturday, a zombie who may be something more than just that. His name and his appearance suggest that he has an Earthly counterpart in the sinister Baron Samedi in Haiti – a being who is not himself a zombie or ghost, but a spirit Lord of the Dead. He is seen at crossroads and in cemeteries, and can be recognized by his black tuxedo, white top hat, dark glasses, and skull-like face. He is greatly feared.
    Earth’s zombies, who are only to be found in the traditional beliefs of Haiti, are very, very different, despite the identical name, and despite the fact that they too are Undead humans. Their condition is due to the spells of some voodoo sorcerer who has called them from their graves – and who, some say, was responsible for putting them down there in the first place, having sent them into a death-like trance by a secret poison, concocted from the liver of a very rare fish (it appears, from a conversation recorded in Reaper Man , that the wizards of Unseen University have heard rumoursabout this). When Haitian zombies emerge, their minds and souls have gone; they have become mere robots, incapable of speech, who must serve the sorcerer as his slaves. However, there is one way to rescue a zombie: give him salted food,