The Folklore of Discworld

they burn in the presence of evil—’
    ‘Firebird? You mean a phoenix?’ said Agnes.
    ‘Haven’t seen one go over for years,’ said Nanny. ‘Sometimes you’d see two or three at a time when I was a girl, just lights flying high up in the sky.’
    ‘No, no, the phoenix … there’s only one of it, that’s the whole point,’ said Agnes.
    ‘One of anything’s no bloody use,’ said Nanny. [ Carpe Jugulum ]
    On the Discworld, the firebird is said to have its main home in the hot deserts of Klatch, even though its seasonal migrations take itover Lancre. So, the best place to look for its equivalent on Earth would be in the hot deserts of Ancient Egypt. And there, sure enough, it is – not yet called the phoenix, but the Benu Bird. The name probably means ‘rise-and-shine’. According to one Egyptian myth it is the oldest of all creatures; its cry was the first sound ever heard, when it perched, glowing, on the first mound of earth to rise up out of the primeval sea – or, others said, on the first sacred obelisk, the Benben stone at Heliopolis. It was usually described as a heron, or as a huge golden hawk with a heron’s beak.
    Many generations later, in the fifth century BC, the Greek writer Herodotus visited Heliopolis, where he was told about a marvellous red-gold bird which would come to the temple of the sun there once every five hundred years. He called it ‘phoenix’, meaning that its brilliant colouring was as fine as the richest Phoenician purple dye. This bird, he was told, would arrive carrying an egg which it had formed from the ashes of its parent mixed with myrrh; the next phoenix would be born from this egg.
    Later writers changed the bird’s homeland from Egypt to Arabia, and gave a different explanation of its death and rebirth. An aged phoenix, they said, would build itself a nest full of spices, and settling there would sing a last sad song. Then it would burst into flame and burn itself to ashes. But from the ashes a new young bird would arise.
    Thanks to this story, the phoenix is famous in poetry and folklore as a symbol of indestructible life. As Will Shakespeare put it:
    Thus when
    The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
    Her ashes new-create another heir,
    As much to be admired as she herself.
    The witches of Lancre would not entirely agree. ‘Bird of wonder’, yes; ‘maiden’, no. For, as Granny Weatherwax pointed out, ‘One of anything ain’t going to last for very long, is it?’
T HE S ALAMANDER
    Salamanders are a species of lizard, pinkish in colour, sluggish in behaviour, and in no way dangerous. The only interesting thing about them is that they do not eat in the normal sense of the word; instead, they subsist entirely on the nourishing quality of octarine, the eighth colour in the Discworld’s sunlight, which they absorb through their skins. Since the wavelengths corresponding to the other colours have no food value for them, they store this surplus light in a special sac and discharge it when the sac is full, or when they are alarmed, causing a vivid flash. A cage of salamanders is a very useful piece of equipment for anyone who wants to keep a pictorial record of events (such as Twoflower the tourist, or Otto Chriek the journalistic iconographer), for the flash enables the imp in the picture-box to function even in the dark.
    On Earth the name was applied, in the days of the Ancient Greeks, to what must be a related species – a lizard that lives in the midst of fire, remaining unharmed because its body is so intensely cold that it extinguishes the flames around it. Centuries later, the alchemist Paracelsus taught that each of the four elements (earth, air, fire and water) had its own elemental spirit, and that of fire was a salamander. These dramatic creatures are now regarded on Earth as mere myths, useful only in poetry and heraldry. Confusingly, however, there are also on that world several species of flesh-and-blood lizards which are called ‘salamanders’. Throwing them into a fire as an experiment is not considered an environmentally friendly act.
T HE U NICORN
    This elegant but sometimes ferocious beast is an elvish creature, not native to the Discworld. The one which appeared in Lancre (as toldin Lords and Ladies ) came from an alternative universe where it was the Elf Queen’s pet; it had crossed accidentally, at one of those places where worlds come too close together, and the wall between them is thinner than one would wish. It could not