The Folklore of Discworld

get free beer and food and some extra cash. They would appear at seasonal festivals such as May Day and Whitsun, and alsoat whichever date the local fair was held; in winter they would go round performing outside the houses of the wealthy. This was a great asset when times were hard, as they so often were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nowadays, Morris teams usually perform outside pubs and in town centres; they still take up a collection, but simply to cover their expenses or for a charity.
    Some English teams used to go out on tour for several weeks, and even visit towns. At a fair in London in 1823, for example, there was:
    a group of young rustics attired in garments decorated with numerous bows of ribbon. They had small jingling bells fastened to their knees and ankles. Some waved white handkerchiefs and others wands … keeping time by striking their wands against one another.
    It was so pleasant, wrote another London eyewitness in 1830,
    to observe the monotony of some long dull street of dingy houses broken by the simple music of the pipe and tabor, and the ringing of the bells on the legs of the morris-dancers … There seems a patch of old-time merriment in the active motions of the ruddy and sunburnt countrymen.
    Just how old was the merriment? When and why did it come to be such an essential part of the rose-tinted picture of the happy, simple, country life of Old England? A theory popular in the eighteenth century was that the name ‘Morris’ was a corruption of the Spanish word morisco , ‘Moorish’, and that it was a fashion introduced from Spain in the fourteenth century. This would imply that at first it was danced by the upper classes, not among country folk, and that they called it ‘Moorish’ not just for being foreign, but because it was so wild and energetic, in contrast to the stately dances of the Court. It is a plausible suggestion, but apart from the name itself there is no actual evidence for it.
    Then, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a dramatic new theory emerged and became instantly popular and widely accepted. The origins of the Morris, it was claimed, lay in the fertility rituals of prehistoric Europe; the noisy bells, the waving hankies, and aggressive sticks were meant to drive away evil spirits; the high leaps into the air were meant to make the crops grow tall. On this level, the third and for many people the most important one, Morris dancing is an immensely ancient magical rite for the promotion of life. There is no evidence for this either, but as the English scholar Keith Chandler recently wrote, ‘viewing a dance which is supposedly several thousand years old appears to satisfy some indefinable need in the human psyche’.
    Whether or not this theory holds good on Earth, it is well known to be the truth of the matter on the Disc. There, Morris dancing is done to bring good luck and drive bad things away; there’s nothing like the jangle of little iron bells for getting rid of elves. What’s more, it’s all about the cycles of growth and decay, summer and winter, life and death. It involves the Light Morris, yes, but the Dark Morris too.
    This is why there’s one village in the Ramtops, the one where they really do know what they are doing, where the Morris Men dance twice, and twice only, in every year (we shall have more to say on this in the next chapter). The first time is at dawn on the first day of spring, and everyone is welcome to watch. But the second time is in autumn, and it’s private.
    On a certain day when the nights are drawing in, the dancers leave work early and take, from attics and cupboards, the other costume, the black one, and the other bells. And they go by separate ways to a valley among the leafless trees. They don’t speak. There is no music. It’s very hard to imagine what kind there could be.
    The bells don’t ring. They’re made of octiron, a magic metal. But they’re not, precisely, silent bells. Silence is merely theabsence of noise. They make the opposite of noise, a sort of heavily textured silence.
    And in the cold afternoon, as the light drains from the sky, among the frosty leaves and in the damp air, they dance the other Morris. Because of the balance of things.
    You’ve got to dance both, they say. Otherwise you can’t dance either. [ Reaper Man ]
    This is the Dark Morris Nanny Ogg was keeping quiet about. If it is danced elsewhere in the multiverse – and it surely is – people there