The Folklore of Discworld

had grown up and didn’t know who he was.’ [ Lords and Ladies ]
    These weird tricks of time always happen when someone is taken out of their own world into Elfland, as we noted in an earlier chapter. But in what sense are the stones themselves Dancers? Since the locals didn’t tell Wheelbrace, or if they did he wasn’t listening, we must look to the Earth for the explanation, thanks to some of those remarkable parallels and echoes between one universe and another.
    Stone circles are powerful or, at least, become cloaked in powerfulstories. In various parts of England – Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Derbyshire – there are circles of stones known as the Nine Ladies or Nine Maidens or Merry Maidens. There may or may not actually be nine of them (it’s a magical number, like eight is on the Disc), but their story is everywhere the same: there were once some girls who loved dancing so much that they would go off to the hills to dance together whenever they could, even on Sundays when they should have been in church. So one Sunday they were smitten by the Wrath of God, which turned them to stone. No more dancing for them – except maybe for the ones near Okehampton in Devon, where (some people say) they are allowed to take a few steps every day at noon. Sometimes one stone in the circle, or close beside it, is named the Piper or Fiddler; it is said he was playing the music for the girls to dance to, and was smitten too.
    Back in Lancre, Eric Wheelbrace insisted that there was a right of way across the Dancers, and that he would organize his Festival there. Dismissing local objections as mere superstition, and declaring that a determined rambler will laugh with scorn at threats, he set off to cross the circle one Midsummer Eve. His boots were found frozen solid, in a hedge a mile away. He has presumably now discovered that the Dancers are indeed, as legend claims, ‘a gateway into the kingdom of the elves’, and he may even understand that such gates are meant to be kept shut . That’s why the stones chosen for the job are reddish and magnetic; they contain a good deal of iron, a tried and trusted elf-repellent.
The Standing Stone
    On the crest of a moor in the Ramtops, there is a solitary bluish Standing Stone (well, sometimes there is). It is a painfully shy megalith, so although there is only one of it, nobody has ever been able to count it. If it sees anyone approaching with a calculating look, it shuffles off to hide among the gorse bushes or flops into a peat bog. There are rumours that other huge standing stones on themoor are mobile too, but are too keen on their privacy to let themselves be seen when on the move.
    The folklore of Earth is, as so often, remarkably close to the facts of the Disc. It is almost commonplace on Earth to be told that at midnight, or at dawn, a particular standing stone will spin round on its base, or dance, or walk down to the river to drink. But if someone tells you about this, do listen carefully – it could be folklore, or it could be a leg-pull. If what he said was, ‘That stone turns round whenever it hears the church clock strike midnight’, he’s speaking a very literal kind of truth, and what you have to ask yourself is, ‘How often does a stone hear a clock?’ Never, actually. That’s the leg-pull. On the other hand, if what he said was, ‘That stone turns round when the church clock strikes midnight’, he’s folk, and that’s lore.
    As for counting, Earthly megaliths absolutely hate being counted, and will do anything to prevent it. Stonehenge used to be very good at this – a rumour got around that anyone who reckoned up its stones and got the number right would be sure to die. And those who did try got wildly different results. Yet Daniel Defoe, writing in the 1720s, said he had seen them counted four times, and each time the total was 72; the only problem, he thought, was that many were fallen and half buried, so one could not easily tell whether one was seeing two parts of one stone, or two separate stones. In 1740 the antiquary William Stukeley published his count, making it 140 and exclaiming triumphantly, ‘Behold the solution of the mighty problem, the magical spell is broke which has so long perplexed the vulgar.’ Modern archaeologists disagree with them both; having tidied the place up and mapped it, they have settled on 96.
    In several places where there are ‘countless stones’, people have had the same bright idea: take a basket of loaves,