The Folklore of Discworld

until one day Oedipus came along, and replied, ‘That animal is Man. As a feeble baby, he crawls on all fours; as an adult, he walks upright; as an old man, he uses a stick.’ The Sphinx was so furious that she beat her brains out against the rock.
    Prince Teppic’s Sphinx, like the Egyptian one, guarded a border – in this case, a fold in the space-time continuum which was a border between dimensions. Like the Greek one, it relied upon The Riddle to provide it with entertainment and with innumerable meals. Now Teppic, despite being a fully qualified Assassin, was not a man of violence, and had a proper concern for wildlife, even in its more alarming forms. He tried polite conversation (‘We’ve got any amount of statues to you at home’), but the Sphinx, though flattered, could not be sidetracked for long, and challenged him with its Riddle. Teppic admitted defeat, so the gloating Sphinx itself gave him the explanation.
    Now, Teppic had been born into a culture profoundly distrustful of metaphors, symbolism, allegories, and figures of speech of every sort. The people of Djelibeybi took all religious, poetic, and metaphysical statements as literal physical truths; to them, a metaphor was a lie. Furthermore, Teppic had recently visited Ephebe, where hehad heard the philosopher Xeno expounding his famous logical proof that if you shoot an arrow at a tortoise you cannot possibly hit it.
    So Teppic launched an attack, not on the Sphinx, but on its metaphor. Combining the deadly literalism of Djelibeybi with the debating skills and logic of Ephebe, he demanded clarifications. Did all this actually happen in one day, to one individual? Well, no, the Sphinx admitted, it is a figure of speech, but what’s wrong with that? ‘An element of dramatic analogy is present in all riddles,’ it claimed. ‘Yes, but ,’ said Teppic, ‘is there internal consistency within the metaphor?’ Step by step, the hapless Sphinx was forced to concede that in an analogy where the human lifespan of seventy years is represented by twenty-four hours, the crawling stage only lasts for about twenty minutes, and can’t be called ‘morning’, as it comes just after midnight. There are other problems too. Since some old folk need no sticks while others use two, would it not be more accurate to say that after supper-time ‘it continues to walk on two legs or with any prosthetic aids of its choice’?
    When everything had been settled to their mutual satisfaction, the Sphinx repeated its challenge. But of course Prince Teppic already knew the answer. The Sphinx itself had told him, earlier on. He now gave it, and the Sphinx had to let him go free. He got away just in time as an angry bellow erupted behind him, when the Sphinx finally worked out what had happened.
    Should the creature ever reappear on the Discworld or in our own universe, people will now know how to deal with it.
T HE P HOENIX
    Everyone agrees that the phoenix, also known as the firebird, is extremely beautiful, and that it is the rarest bird that has ever existed, or could ever exist, anywhere in the multiverse. It’s said, both on theDiscworld and on Earth, that you only get one phoenix at a time, that it lives to be five hundred years old, and that when it feels its death approaching it builds a nest, in which it lays a single egg. Then it bursts into flame and burns itself up, so that the warmth will hatch out the new bird from the ashes. This way of life, and death, makes it extremely useful as an allegory or metaphor. It also makes some people think that it is only a mythical creature.
    However, there are people in Lancre who, having observed nature closely, think the commonly accepted story cannot be accurate. Both Hodgesaargh the falconer and Granny Weatherwax have found the occasional phoenix feather, a small flickering flame-like thing which nothing can quench. Granny keeps hers in a little glass bottle. One day the other witches are examining it:
    ‘I saw her pick that thing up years ago,’ said Magrat. ‘It was around this time of year, too. We were walking back through the woods and there was a shooting star and this sort of light fell off it and we went to look and there it was. It looked like a flame but she was able to pick it up.’
    ‘Sounds like a firebird feather,’ said Nanny. ‘There used to be old stories about them. They pass through here. But if you touch their feathers you’d better be damn sure of yourself, because the old stories say