The Folklore of Discworld

foot deep. You could easily jump it. Yet somebody has laid a broad stone slab across it, as a bridge. Now look at the scene the other way …You see an endless, nasty-looking, desolate expanse; a long, narrow, dizzying bridge spanning a ravine; a raging torrent far below. They say a deer will sometimes run on to gnarly ground if hard-pressed in the hunt, but it has to be pretty desperate.
    ‘What is gnarly ground?’ said Agnes.
    ‘There’s a lot of magic in these mountains, right?’ said Nanny. ‘And everyone knows mountains get made when lumps of land bang together, right? Well, when the magic gets trapped you … sort of … get a bit of land where the space is … sort of … scrunched up, right? It’d be quite big if it could, but it’s like a bit of gnarly wood in an ol’ tree. Or a used hanky … all folded up small but still big in a different way.’ [ Carpe Jugulum ]
    In Carpe Jugulum , Granny Weatherwax sets out alone to cross the gnarly ground, and the younger witches go after her. Their socks, knitted from Lancre’s toughest, most wiry wool, protect them from the savage spikes of furze. But then comes the gorge, an abyss so deep one can barely see the river below, and a high, slender bridge that shifts and creaks underfoot. And then a cavern, some tunnels, a flash of fire.
    It is a strange, perilous journey, but not unparalleled. Time and again, in myths and folk tales from all parts of the multiverse, those who take the road to the Otherworld must pass a water barrier by way of a Bridge Perilous. A Scottish ballad describes one leading from Purgatory to Paradise:
    The brigge was as heigh as a tower,
    And as scharpe as a rasour,
    And naru it was also;
    And the water that ther ran under
    Brennd of lightning and of thunder,
    That thought him mikle wo.
    The closest match for Granny’s journey is the strange medieval funeral chant known as ‘The Lyke-Wake Dirge’, which Yorkshire women sang, as late as the sixteenth century, as they kept watch over a corpse. The tale it tells was already old; it had begun (in so far as such things can be said ever to begin) four hundred years before, as a vision which came to a German monk called Gottskalk in December 1189, as he lay sick of a fever. He saw the souls of the dead gathering on the edge of a great wild heath covered with thorns and furze. There was a tree nearby, its branches loaded with pairs of shoes, but the newly dead soul must cross the thorny ground barefoot – unless, while alive, he or she had given socks and shoes as alms to the poor. And so the Yorkshire women sang:
    If ever thou gavest hosen or shoon,
    Every night and all,
    Sit thee down and put them on,
    And Christ receive thy soul.
    If hosen and shoon thou never gave none,
    Every night and all,
    The whinnies shall prick thee to the bare bone,
    And Christ receive thy soul.
    Having passed over Whinny Moor, the soul comes to The Bridge of Dread, which is ‘no broader than a thread’, and finally to Purgatory Fire. Those who once gave food and drink to the needy will not shrink from its flames; those who never did will be burned to the bare bone. The song stops at this point, but since in Christian belief Purgatory is never a final state, simply the last stage on a sinner’s journey to God in Heaven, we can assume a happy ending.
    As for Granny Weatherwax, the message she sends the world is, I ATE’NT DEAD YET.
B ELIEFS OF L ANCRE
    The people of Lancre are, on the whole, remarkably free from irrational beliefs. Things which in another universe would be considered superstitions are plain commonsensical everyday facts in Lancre. People there don’t believe that a horseshoe over the door keeps you safe from elves, they know it, and if you ask them why it works they can explain just why (the magnetic effect of iron disrupts the sixth sense so vital to an elf’s well-being). Beekeepers are careful to tell their bees everything important that concerns the family and household – births, marriages, deaths, a new set of curtains, and suchlike. But that’s not superstition, just the practical observation that if you don’t tell them, they will fly indoors to find out for themselves.
    Or take the matter of controlling horses. On the Earth, there were farriers and farm workers who had learned the secret magic of the ‘Horseman’s Word’. They could make any horse follow them, or utterly refuse to move on, by whispering it into its ear. To become a Horse Whisperer or Toadman wasn’t easy.