The Folklore of Discworld

shepherdess, can indeed turn into a myth – a local saint – maybe even a goddess. It’s been known before, and it still goes on, and not just on the Discworld. Go visit Biddy Early’s cottage.
    9 Regrettably, some things don’t change. Terry recalls a case in the USA some years ago when a somewhat New Age lady got a visit from her local sheriff after a neighbour reported that she was ‘saying spells’ in her garden. She’d been singing a Christian hymn – in Latin.
    10 But in the languages of Earth it comes from the same Greek root as ‘epiphany’, meaning ‘revelation of god”.

 
Chapter 11
THE CHALK

     
T HE L AND
    T HE REGION KNOWN TO ITS PEOPLE simply as ‘the Chalk’ lies on the Sto Plains about fifty miles from Lancre. It is a land of gentle, rolling, turf-covered hills with occasional patches of woodland, small villages and scattered farmsteads. Above all, it is good land for sheep.
    No other place on Discworld is so patently a thinly disguised part of Earth. The Tiffany Aching/Wee Free Men books are, whatever other splendid things they may be, a hymn to a time and a landscape. And here it’s found as it was in the time of our great-grandfathers – open country, unfenced, unploughed, turf-covered, a land fit for sheep.
    Green downlands roll under the hot midsummer sun … the flocks of sheep, moving slowly, drift over the short turf like clouds on a green sky. Here and there sheepdogs speed over the turf like comets.
    And then, as the eyes pull back, it is a long green mound, lying like a great whale on the world … [ The Wee Free Men ]
    In both worlds, these lands are full of memories of distant times:
    Men had been everywhere on the Chalk. There were stone circles, half fallen down, and burial mounds like green pimpleswhere, it was said, chieftains of the olden days had been buried with their treasure. No one fancied digging into them to find out.
    There were odd carvings in the chalk, too, which the shepherds sometimes weeded when they were out on the downs with the flocks and there was not a lot to do. The chalk was only a few inches under the turf. Hoofprints could last a season, but the carvings had lasted for thousands of years. They were pictures of horses and giants, but the strange thing was that you couldn’t see them properly from anywhere on the ground. They looked as if they’d been made for viewers in the sky.
    The oldest and most magical of the carvings on the Chalk is the White Horse, on a steep hillside at the head of a little valley (on Earth, the place is called Uffington, in Berkshire, and it is on the north slopes of the Berkshire Downs). It was cut out of the turf way back in the earliest times, perhaps by the same folk who raised the stone circles and buried their dead in the mounds, and for generation after generation people have kept it clear of grass and weeds. It doesn’t look much like a horse, not unless you look at it in the right way. It’s just lines – long, flowing lines that don’t even join up – but, as Granny Aching told Tiffany’s father when he was only a little boy, ‘’Tain’t what a horse looks like, it’s what a horse be .’ And if the Chalk has a guardian spirit, this is it.
    The landscape is full of stories. A hill near Tiffany’s home, for instance:
    There was a flat place at the top where nothing ever grew, and Tiffany knew there was a story that a hero had once fought a dragon up there and its blood had burned the ground where it fell. There was another story that said there was a heap of treasure under the hill, defended by the dragon, and another story that said a king was buried there in armour of solid gold.There were lots of stories about the hill; it was surprising it hadn’t sunk under the weight of them.
    In our world, there is just such a Dragon Hill, with just such a flat, bare top where a dragon’s blood was spilled – in that case, by St George. It is at Uffington, alongside the White Horse. Elsewhere, on the South Downs, there are many hills and burial mounds in which, according to local tales, there are pots of gold, or dead men lying in their golden armour.
    Interesting things can be found in or on the Chalk. There are small sharp flint arrowheads, made by men thousands of years before (on the Discworld, though alas not on our Chalk, shepherds still have the skill of chipping flints into very sharp little knives, for their own amusement; it is said that a good flint is sharper than a scalpel). Occasionally,