The Folklore of Discworld

churches or temples up there, and so it was generally hoped that the gods would understand and look kindly on them. [ The Wee Free Men ]
    This was done on Earth, too: in some villages of the South Downs up to the 1930s shepherds were buried with a lock of wool in their hands, so that at the Last Judgement they could prove what their work had been, and why they had so often missed church on Sundays. Occasionally, a crook, shears and a sheep-bell were also put in the coffin. It all added up to the same thing: a hope and also perhaps a belief that one Good Shepherd would recognize another.
    Granny Aching’s grave was dug on the hill, alongside her hut, and after the funeral there was an additional and very unusual ceremony – the hut was burned. There wasn’t any shepherd, anywhere on the Chalk, who would use it after her. This was a mark of respect, almost unparalleled on Earth, where only Gypsies would think of making such a gesture.
T HE W ATCHING OF THE D EAD
    A newly dead corpse must be carefully prepared, watched over, protected – and treated with caution, for it might become dangerous.
    People died. It was sad, but they did. What did you do next? People expected the local witch to know. So you washed the body and did a few secret and squelchy things and dressed them in their best clothes and laid them out with bowls of earth and salt beside them (no one knew why you did this bit, but it had always been done) and you put two pennies on their eyes ‘for the ferryman’ and you sat with them the night before they were buried, because they shouldn’t be left alone.
    Exactly why was never properly explained, although everyone had been told the story of the old man who was slightly less dead than everyone thought and rose up off the spare bed in the middle of the night and got back into bed with his wife. [ Wintersmith ]
    Things were done in much the same way on Earth, in the days when people died at home (not in a hospital) and were laid out at home (not in an undertaker’s parlour). Laying out the corpse was both a practical necessity and a social duty; it was a woman’s task, and was often done by the local midwife. It involved washing the body, plugging its orifices, and closing the eyes and mouth – and ensuring that they remained closed, by laying a penny on each eye, and tying upthe jaws with a bandage under the chin which was knotted on top of the head. A man would be shaved, a woman would have her hair braided. Then the body would either be dressed in good clothes or wrapped tightly in a winding-sheet, with its legs straightened and tied at the ankles and its arms crossed over the chest. The face would not be covered. That way, everything looked clean and decent when family and neighbours came to ‘view the body’ before it was coffined.
    These actions were not just practical. Washing the body could be seen as a purification which echoes baptism, like the Catholic custom of sprinkling a corpse with holy water; a Suffolk woman who used to lay out the dead told the social historian Ruth Richardson in 1980 that ‘the washing is so you’re spotless to meet the Lamb of God’.
    The pennies had once had a mythical meaning too. In England in the seventeenth century, the antiquarian John Aubrey reported that some old-fashioned people still put a coin in the mouth of the dead ‘to give to St Peter’ at the gates of Heaven. Way back in Ancient Greek and Roman times people used to put a coin into the dead person’s mouth ‘to pay the ferryman’; his name was Charon, and he would row the dead across the river Styx, which was the boundary of the Underworld. And so too in the Discworld there is also (sometimes) a Styx to be crossed, and a cowled ferryman to be paid.
    ‘I have the money,’ Roland repeated. ‘Two pennies is the rate to cross the River of the Dead. It’s an old tradition. Two pennies to put on the eyes of the dead, to pay the ferryman.’ [ Wintersmith ]
    Nobody had given Tiffany any explanation for the bowls of salt and earth which she had to set down beside the corpse. In many countries on Earth the same thing was done, and various reasons were offered. The most common was that it prevents the body swelling – which might well work, if the dishes were heavy enough and were laid actually on the chest or belly, as they generally were. As one Welsh woman said, ‘There’s no weight so heavy as salt getswhen it is on the dead.’ Other people gave a religious explanation. In Highland