The Folklore of Discworld

cudgelling, wrestling and, as the ale and the sun both went down, brawling, drunkenness and, after dark, ‘making your own entertainment’.
    But there is more to Lancre’s Long Man – much, much more. At the foot of the long mound three large irregular stones form a low cave. One wall has a drawing scratched on it, showing an owl-eyed man wearing an animal skin and horns, who appears to be dancing. A shaman, performing a magical hunting ritual? A god, half human and half beast? A shaman, dressed as this god? Whoever and whatever he is, he has an identical twin brother on Earth, painted several thousand years ago on the wall of the Trois Frères cave in the south of France.
    Force the stones apart, and the opening reveals steps leading down into the vast underground network of the Lancre Caves. This too is an entrance to an elf world – but this is the other elf world, the one the Queen’s elves don’t talk about, the one which is an integral part of Lancre, not a malevolent, parasitic universe. A spiral path goes further and further down under the Long Man, till one comes to a hot, dark, steamy tent of skins, a shaman’s sweat-lodge. There, sprawled half asleep beside a bowl of red-hot stones, lies the huge figure of the Antlered One, the only god for whom Nanny Ogg has a soft spot. He is the Lord of the Elves, the Queen’s estranged husband; at Nanny’s request, he forces the Queen to give up her attack on Lancre, as described in Lords and Ladies .
    Will Shakespeare, whose finely tuned mind often unconsciously picked up the particles of information which drift from one universe to another, echoed the strained relations between the Elf Queen and her husband when he described the quarrel of Titania and Oberon inhis play A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Yet he had no inkling of the true nature and appearance of the Antlered Elf Lord. In fact, it is less than a hundred years since this image began to coalesce in the imaginations of English witches and pagans. It has been built up out of bits and pieces of various myths, some far older than others – the figure in the Trois Frères cave, the Greek Pan, the Celtic antlered god Cernunnos, the medieval idea that the Devil has bull’s horns and goat’s feet. Plus the fact that horns are a natural, universal symbol of a male animal’s strength and sexuality. Put all this together, and you get what modern witches call The Horned God – the incarnation of maleness, the personification of the ever-renewed vital force of Nature. Some now say he is the oldest god man has created. And on the Discworld, he is real.
Sleeping Warriors
    There are other things too in the labyrinthine Lancre Caves, for these are one of those areas where the normal rules of time and space do not apply. When Nanny Ogg goes there with the dwarf Casanunda, they pass a certain cavern:
    There were hundreds of dust-covered slabs ranged around the cavern in a spiral; at the centre of the spiral was a huge bell, suspended on a rope that disappeared into the darkness of the ceiling. Just under the hanging bell was one pile of silver coins and one pile of gold coins.
    ‘Don’t touch the money,’ said Nanny. ‘’Ere, watch this, my dad told me about this, it’s a good trick.’
    She reached out and tapped the bell very gently, causing a faint ting .
    Dust cascaded off the nearest slab. What Casanunda had thought was just a carving sat up, in a creaky way. It was an armed warrior … He focused deepset eyes on Nanny Ogg.
    ‘What bloody tyme d’you call thys , then?’
    ‘Not time yet,’ said Nanny.
    ‘What did you goe and bang the bell for? I don’t know, I haven’t had a wynke of sleep for two hundred years, some sodde alwayes bangs the bell. Go awaye .’
    The warrior lay back.
    ‘It’s some old king and his warriors,’ whispered Nanny as they hurried away. ‘Some kind of magical sleep, I’m told. Some old wizard did it. They’re supposed to wake up for some final battle when a wolf eats the sun.’ [ Lords and Ladies ]
    The legend of the Sleeping Warriors recurs so often that its narrativium drive must be unusually powerful. On the Discworld it has been found in at least three other places, far from Lancre.
    First, in a huge burial mound on the Counterweight Continent there are seven thousand terracotta warriors, each seven foot tall, who form an invincible Red Army when aroused. Their Earthly counterparts were discovered by archaeologists some years ago, drawn up in military array