The Folklore of Discworld

amen.
    The major gods, loosely organized into a rather grumpy pantheon, have chosen to make their home on the peak of a truly remarkable mountain, Cori Celesti – a spire of rock and ice, ten miles high, rising above the clouds at the very centre and hub of the Disc. The home itself is of course a vast marble palace, a pile of pillars, pilasters, pinnacles, pyramids, parapets, peristyles, porticos, porches, portals and pavilions, which they have decided to call Dunmanifestin. Gods are not noted for good taste or a sense of the ridiculous, nor indeed, in most cases, for intelligence.
    If the gods have the ability to look into other dimensions, then they will see some remarkable resemblances to themselves in the cosmic soap operas of Earth. One thing they have apparently taken notice of is fashions in divine accessories and lifestyles – thunderbolts, goat’s feet, a jackal’s head, and so on – whatever. If Zeus and his gang have a Mount Olympus, and Vishnu and his gang have aMount Meru, they get themselves their Cori Celesti, and it’s higher than the other two put together. This passion for keeping up with the Zeuses means that anyone with a working knowledge of inter-dimensional mythology who drops in at Dunmanifestin will feel quite at home there.
    The Disc gods will have noticed, too, that all pantheons pass their time in banqueting, and that many also like playing board games. For example, one of the first things the Norse gods did when they had finished creating the cosmos was to settle down for a happy session of hnefatafl , played with pieces made of pure gold. As hnefi is ‘fist’ and tafl is ‘table’ or ‘board’, the name means roughly ‘The Punch-up Board-Game’; it is a bit like draughts but much more like the Discworld game of Thud. It is thought that the run of play determines the destinies of men, gods, giants and the world itself. Apparently the game will be disrupted and the pieces scattered when gods and monsters fight at Ragnarok, the War at the End of the World, also known as the Doom of the Gods and the Twilight of the Gods. Afterwards, according to the Old Icelandic prophetic poem Völuspá , a new world will arise and the surviving younger generation of gods will restore both the cosmic order and the game which expressed it:
    Then once again in the grass are found
    Draughtsmen all of gold,
    The wondrous draughtsmen the gods had owned
    In the earliest days of old.
    On Earth, however, not everyone relishes the idea of being a pawn in a game played by gods. The twelfth-century Persian poet Omar Khayyám made a resigned but gloomy comment on life in his Rubâíyát :
    ’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
    The gods of the Discworld lack the patience and imagination to play chess, draughts, hnefatafl , or even chequers; their idea of amusement is a form of Snakes and Ladders (played with greased rungs), accompanied by heavy betting and a good deal of bluffing and cheating, which brings it nearer to poker. The currency staked is the souls of men. The gaming board is a finely carved map of the Disc, overprinted with squares. Occasionally, the playing pieces represent monsters; more often, they are beautifully detailed models of those human beings who have foolishly done something to get themselves noticed. It is said that these unfortunate mortals sometimes faintly hear, as they hasten to their doom, the rattle of dice in the celestial (skull-shaped) shaker.
    This is one of the reasons it’s wise to steer clear of the gods, as the wizard Rincewind knows:
    ‘I don’t like the idea of going anywhere near the gods. We’re
like toys to them, you know. And they don’t realize how easily
the arms and legs come off.’ [ The Last Hero ]
    Or maybe (and even Rincewind in his darkest moments didn’t think of this) they do realize, and find it funny. That at any rate is what Will Shakespeare thought when he wrote King Lear , in one of his darkest moments:
    As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
    The gods have an age-old feud with the Ice Giants, a species of super-troll the size of large houses, craggy and faceted, and composed entirely of ice which glints green and blue in the light – apart from their small, deep-sunken, coal-black eyes. Just as Zeus and theOlympians defeated the gigantic Titans and imprisoned them