The Folklore of Discworld

return. Terrified and enraged, it became a danger – for a large stallion with a twelve-inch razor-sharp horn growing from its forehead is not to be treated lightly.
    Yet Granny Weatherwax was able to cope. When the unicorn charged at her, she created an invisible wall into which it crashed, and as it writhed on the ground she let down her hair, and broke off a single hair at the root.
    Granny Weatherwax’s hands made a complicated motion in the air as she made a noose out of something almost too thin to see. She ignored the thrashing horn and dropped it over the unicorn’s neck. Then she pulled.
    Struggling, its unshod hooves kicking up great clods of mud, the unicorn struggled to its feet.
    ‘That’ll never hold it,’ said Nanny, sidling around the tree.
    ‘I could hold it with a cobweb, Gytha Ogg. With a cobweb .’
    And so indeed she does, dragging the unicorn to Jason Ogg’s forge, where its hooves are shod – not with iron, of course, since that would kill an elvish animal, but with silver horseshoes made from Granny’s own best tea-set. Her ability to control the beast should not surprise anybody, for, as Nanny Ogg says, there are some things which everybody knows about trapping unicorns – ‘who is qualified to trap ’em is what I’m delicately hintin’ at.’ It takes a maiden to do it, in any universe. And Granny may be old, but she is qualified.
    Granny emerged from the forge, leading the unicorn … It walked politely alongside the witch until she reached the centre of the square. Then she turned it loose, and gave it a slight slap on the rump.
    It whinnied softly, turned, and galloped down the street, towards the forest …
    ‘ She’ll never get it back, though she calls for it for a thousand years,’ said Granny, speaking to the world in general …
    The unicorn reached the forest, and galloped onwards.
    There are clear affinities here with what people on Earth have long been saying, though, regrettably, in that world the fate of the captured unicorn is more cruel. As early as the seventh century, the Spaniard Isidore of Seville described the unicorn, and how to hunt it:
    The unicorn is a most savage beast. It has this name because in the middle of its forehead it has a horn, four foot long. And that horn is so sharp and so strong that it knocks down or pierces everything it strikes. This beast often fights against the elephant and pierces him in the belly and throws him to the ground. And the unicorn is so strong that he cannot be taken by the might of hunters. But men who write about the nature of animals say that a maiden is brought where the unicorn may come; and she opens her lap and the unicorn lays his head on it, and abandons all his fierceness, and falls asleep there. And thus the beast is caught, and slain by the huntsmen’s spears.
    Granny’s device of using a hair as a noose and leash is a remarkable piece of magical skill, and very rare. In Earthly legends one occasionally reads about a maiden tying a defeated dragon with the girdle of her robe and leading it away – St Martha did this, at Tarascon in southern France, and so did the girl St George rescued – but a hair, no. However, a few malevolent hags in the Scottish Highlands did know the trick. If one of these hags found a huntsman sheltering in a mountain bothy, she would kill him, provided she was safe from his dog. So she would ask him to tie the dog up with oneof her own long hairs. When she cried, ‘Tighten and choke, hair!’ the dog died.
    But that is an unpleasant thought. Instead, let us turn to what the poet Alexander Pope has to say about a girl’s charming ringlets:
    Love in these labyrinths his slaves detains,
And mighty hearts are held in slender chains.
Fair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.
T HE L UGGAGE
    Perhaps the strangest of all life-forms on the Disc is the Luggage. It is certainly made of wood, yet its multiple legs and strong aggressive instincts are equally certainly proof that it is no mere plant or plant-product. And very, very certainly it has a mind of its own. ‘Vegetable with animal connections’ is a fair summary. Yet much mystery remains, even after careful study of various Earthly traditions which help to throw light on its possible evolution.
    On Earth, there was a time when travelling was truly Travelling, not just a matter of hopping on to a jet for a five-day break on the Costa del Sol. People said, ‘I go south in the