The Folklore of Discworld

Tiffany:
    ‘Have you heard the stories about me, child?’ …
    ‘Er, that you have a demon in the cellar?’ Tiffany answered … ‘And you eat spiders? And get visited by kings and princes? And that any flower planted in your garden blooms black?’
    ‘Oh, do they say so?’ said Miss Treason, looking delighted. ‘I haven’t heard that last one. How nice. And did you hear that I walk around at night in the dark time of the year and reward those who have been good citizens with a purse of silver? But, if they have been bad, I slit open their bellies with my thumbnail like this?’
    Tiffany leaped backwards as a wrinkled hand twisted her round and Miss Treason’s yellow thumbnail scythed past her stomach. The old woman looked terrifying.
    ‘No! No, I haven’t heard that one,’ she gasped, pressing up against the sink.
    ‘What? And it was a wonderful story, with real historical antecedents!’ said Miss Treason, her vicious scowl becoming a smile. ‘And the one about me having a cow’s tail?’
    ‘A cow’s tail? No!’
    ‘Really? How very vexing … I fear the art of story-telling has got into a pretty bad way in these parts. I really shall have to do something.’ [ Wintersmith ]
    It is to be hoped that she did, for they are indeed splendid stories, and it would be a great pity if they were forgotten. Their historical antecedents have deep roots in the Scandinavian and German-speaking parts of the Earth. The cow’s tail is characteristic of elf-women in the mountain forests of Norway and Sweden. From in front, they look beautiful, and many a human huntsman or charcoal-burner has been seduced into making love with one of them. But if he gets a glimpse of her back, he will see either that it is hollow,mossy and rotten like an old tree-stump, or that it ends in a long, dirty cow’s tail. If he runs off in horror, she will chase him, and if she catches him she will tear him to bits. They are not to be trifled with, these forest elf-women.
    As for the stomach-slitting, here Miss Treason is surely thinking of some Discworld equivalent of a famous supernatural hag known as Frau Holle in Germany and Frau Perchte or Frau Berthe in Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland. Stories about her go back at least a thousand years. Some say she lives on a mountain peak, but others say up in the sky; when it snows in the human world everyone knows that she’s shaking out her feather beds until the feathers drift about in the wind. In midwinter, during the Twelve Days of Christmas, she comes to earth and travels round the countryside, checking on whether children have been good and obedient, and whether the village girls have worked hard on the farms, and spun as much flax or wool as they should have done in the course of the year. Then comes Twelfth Night itself, sometimes called Perchtanacht and reckoned to be the last night of the year. At midnight she comes into every house. Those who have been good and done their work properly may find a silver coin in their shoes, or in the milking pail. But as for those who haven’t, she will slit their bellies open, remove the contents, and fill them up with chopped straw, pebbles and dirt. Then she sews them up again, using a ploughshare as a needle and an iron chain as thread.
    Another notion which Miss Treason picked up from the tales of Earth is that of the External Soul. A good example is the legendary Russian evil wizard Koshchei the Deathless, who placed his Life or Soul in an egg. The egg was inside a duck, and the duck was inside a hare, and the hare was lying in a great hollow log floating in a pond in a forest on an island far, far away from Koshchei’s palace. Miss Treason’s version is less complicated. She wears a heavy iron clock on her belt, and is always winding it up. There is a story in the villages that this clock is her heart, which she has used ever since her first heart died.
    ‘Miss Treason,’ said Tiffany severely, ‘did you make up the story about your clock?’
    ‘Of course I did! And it’s a wonderful bit of folklore, a real corker. Miss Treason and her clockwork heart! Might even become a myth, if I’m lucky. They’ll remember Miss Treason for thousands of years!’
    She is brilliant at stage-setting too. Her all-black cottage is thick with cobwebs, though there are no spiders to be seen. The black candles by the loom are set in two skulls, and dribble wax all down them; one skull is carved with the Greek word for ‘guilt’, the other with the