The Folklore of Discworld

Scotland in the mid eighteenth century, people said the earth was an emblem of the corruptible body, and the salt of the immortal spirit. In nineteenth-century Sussex, they said that to sprinkle a good handful of salt over the body would prevent the Devil flying away with it. It is common for salt to be used in religion and magic to drive away evil spirits; this may be because it resists decay – salted meat and fish last much longer. (Western people now, who worry that too much salt is bad for one’s health, might find it hard to believe how important the getting and keeping of salt was to their ancestors.)
    The unspoken reason behind much of the ritual, on the Disc and on Earth too, is the need to prevent any demons who might be around from getting at the corpse before it is safely buried, and to stop the corpse itself from reviving as a malevolent zombie or vampire. So the dead must never be left alone; someone should sit with them, night and day, and there must always be candles or lamps burning. These keep the evil spirits and ghosts away, and light up the deceased’s journey to the otherworld. And they keep the watcher safe.
    Because sitting up with the dead is – well, just a little strange. Sometimes the body makes little noises in the night, or moves just a bit, and you have to remind yourself firmly that it’s simply because it’s cooling down. And there are so many stories of worse things. Suppose the candle goes out, and the corpse sits up, saying, ‘Isn’t it fun in the dark?’ They say that happened once in Iceland; luckily the watcher was a strong man, who flung himself on the corpse, forced it on to its back, and held it down till daybreak. Or suppose the Devil gets into the house and tries to carry off the body? Or suppose that, as Petunia tells Tiffany, a thousand vampire demons arrive, each with enormous teeth? (Never chronicled, as far as we know.)
    All things considered, it’s not surprising that in many parts of the multiverse people prefer to do their corpse-watching in groups and make a proper wake of it, with cards, tobacco, and a nip of whiskyto get them through the night. And a prayer or two doesn’t come amiss.
A N I NCURSION OF M ONSTERS
    All regions of the Discworld are at risk of invasion by predatory races from elsewhere in the multiverse, since one universe quite often collides with another. When this happens, the roaming predators may well find some weak or ‘thin’ place, where people are off their guard, and where they can open a door between the worlds. In the case of the Chalk, as we learn from The Wee Free Men , it is the Queen of the Fairies who finds a way through from her own small and icy world, where nothing grows and no sun shines, and everything has to be stolen from elsewhere. And with her come the monsters.
    ‘D’you know what’ll be turning up?’ asked Miss Tick. ‘All the things they locked away in those old stories. All those reasons why you shouldn’t stray off the path, or open the forbidden door, or say the wrong word, or spill salt. All the stories that give children nightmares. All the monsters from under the biggest bed in the world.’
    The first to arrive is Jenny Greenteeth, erupting out of a shallow stream, and trying to snatch Tiffany’s little brother. She has long skinny arms, a thin face with long sharp teeth, huge eyes, and dripping green hair like waterweed. She is, as Miss Tick explains, nothing more than a Grade One Prohibitory Monster – that is to say, a creature deliberately invented by adults to scare children away from dangerous places. But though the adults don’t believe they’re real, the children do, and so they become real. (This also happens in Ankh-Morpork, as we shall see later.)
    On Earth too, adults have invented many Prohibitory Monsters(also called Nursery Bogeys), including a Jenny or Ginny Greenteeth who lurks in deep pools of stagnant water, hiding under the duckweed. She was well known in Lancashire, Cheshire and Shropshire. Even in the 1980s, elderly people remembered being warned against her as children. In his Plant Lore (1995) the botanist and folklorist Roy Vickery records what one Merseyside woman told him:
    ‘As I recall, Ginny only lived in ponds which were covered in a green weed of the type that has tiny leaves, and covers the entire surface of the pond. The theory was that Ginny enticed little children into the pools by making them look like grass and safe to walk upon. As soon as the child