The Folklore of Discworld

observers:
    They set upon one another and fought fiercely, so swiftly that they could not be followed with the eye, but neither managed to wound the other. When men looked again, they had vanished, and in their place were two dogs, biting one another furiously; and when they least expected it, the dogs disappeared too, and they heard a noise going on in the air. They looked upand saw two eagles flying there, and each tore out the other’s feathers with claws and beak so that blood fell onto the earth. The end was that one fell dead to the ground, but the other flew away, and they did not know which one it was.
    That was a well-matched fight, but sometimes one of the magicians is simply trying to escape. A medieval Welsh tale tells how the witch Ceridwen has spent a year and a day boiling a magic potion. She sets a boy called Gwion to keep the fire going under the cauldron. But the potion splutters, and three scalding drops splash Gwion’s finger, so he automatically sucks it – and all the magic power becomes his. He flees, in the form of a hare. The furious Ceridwen turns into a greyhound. He runs to the river, and changes into a fish. She chases him, as an otter. He becomes a small bird, she a hawk. He becomes a grain of wheat, and she a high-crested black hen – and swallows him. And that, Ceridwen must have thought, was that. But not so. The grain of corn made her pregnant, and the son she bore (who was really Gwion) grew up to be the great seer and poet Taliesin.
    It is interesting that in her contest with Cutangle, Granny Weatherwax does not counter-attack aggressively, but chooses forms which restrain and control. For the snake, an Indian snake charmer’s basket; for the dinosaur, a coating of ice; for the tiger, sticky tar; for the eagle, a falconer’s hood. Granny is always a careful minimalist in the magic arts.
C HANGING THE S HAPES OF O THERS
    Throughout the multiverse, there is a persistent story that if you annoy a witch she will utter a curse which turns you into some small and unpleasant animal, probably a frog. And an animal you will be for ever, unless somebody finds a way to break the spell. This idea is common in fairy tales and old ballads, where the witch is quite oftenthe victim’s Wicked Stepmother. In this world, there used to be people who seriously believed that a witch might change you temporarily into a horse, if she wanted to ride to a sabbat. At Pendle in Lancashire in 1633, according to the records of a witch trial there, a young boy accused a neighbour of having done this to him. He later admitted he was lying.
    The annals of the Discworld record only three clear instances of such a transformation. One occurred when the malicious witch Lilith of Genua turned two coachmen into beetles, and trod on them, as told in Witches Abroad . The second case concerns the talking toad which is the familiar of Miss Perspicacia Tick, a witch of the Chalk Country (see The Wee Free Men ); though initially suffering from memory loss, he later recalls that he was once a human lawyer, who foolishly took a witch to court for supplying substandard magic. The third was when Tiffany, under the influence of the hiver, turned a useless wizard, Brian, into a frog, as described in A Hatful of Sky . Admittedly, there have also been one or two occasions when Granny Weatherwax messed with someone’s head, causing him to believe that he was a frog, but she knew the effect would wear off fairly soon.
    What is far more common on the Disc is the reverse process, where a witch uses her power to transform an animal’s outward appearance (and, to a lesser extent, its behaviour) into that of a human. But here too the result is unstable. The three witches of Lancre encountered some nasty examples of this type of magic when they travelled to Genua (as told in Witches Abroad ) – the work of Lilith (real name Lily), whose hobby was to enslave the wills of those around her and force them to re-enact the plots of fairy tales, whether they wanted to or not. She, meanwhile, kept all true power in her own hands, because she was the one in charge of the stories. As part of her plans, she had turned a swamp frog into a prince – but the spell held only during daylight hours, so at night he turned back into his old shape, and had to have a pond in his bedroom. Lilith also turned two snakes into apparent women, to guard the potentialheroine of the tale she was concocting, and mice into horses to draw her coach.
    Faced with