The Folklore of Discworld

treacherously captured and killed.
    Or again, in Ireland in St Patrick’s time, there was a robber called Macaldus who tried to trick the saint and make a fool of him, but then repented, and promised to do whatever penance was fitting. St Patrick wrapped a chain round him and padlocked it and threw the key in a river, and then set Macaldus adrift in a small boat, telling him to go wherever God sent him, and to wear the chain until the key was returned to him. The boat floated out to sea, and finally came to the Isle of Man, where Macaldus was taken into the Bishop’s household and led a holy life. One day the Bishop’s cook was puzzled to find a key inside a fish he was cleaning … so Macaldus was able to take the chain off. He eventually became Bishop of Man himself, and is reckoned to be a saint. There was also St Egwin, founder of Evesham Abbey and Bishop of Worcester from 692 till his death in 711. Falsely accused of crimes, he put fetters on his legs, threw the key into the Avon, and set off on pilgrimage to Rome to convince the Pope of his innocence. And there, in the market, he happened tobuy a fish … The Pope duly cleared him of all charges and restored him to his diocese.
    It is particularly striking that the fish which swallowed Tiffany’s pendant should be a pike, for in the Yorkshire town of Pickering people say it got its name because Pendirus, a legendary king of the Britons who is alleged to have reigned there about 270 BC, lost his ring while bathing in the river Costa, but later recovered it from the belly of a pike . Everyone knows pikes will swallow just about anything. So will some people. Nevertheless, there is a comfort in these stories, even for the godless. They suggest a kind of cosmic rightness. And they still turn up, every few years.
    PS: An odd thing happened to Terry once. He bought a ring in a small shop in Pike Place Market, Seattle. It was slightly over-sized and he soon lost it, and couldn’t find it anywhere. A year later he was back in the city, went to the same shop to buy a replacement, and in reaching into his jacket pocket (a jacket which, of course, he’d worn many times during the year) for some loose change, he put a finger through the very same ring. How could it have been otherwise? Rings try to find their way back to their owner. Someone ought to write a book about it.
T HE D ANCE OF W INTER AND S UMMER
    It has long been believed, and may very well be true, that the whole multiverse moves in one perpetual dance, though almost all its motions are either too swift or too slow for the human mind to grasp. Whirling electrons, wheeling galaxies, cycles of time, cycles of energy, the pulsations of the blood, angels in the skies or on the head of a pin – all make patterns in the cosmic dance. This is not a matter of couples moving independently (like a waltz), nor of a group simply dancing hand-in-hand in a ring; it involves complicated figures in which dancers change places and partners, advance and retreat, meet and part and meet again.
    Many poets have written about this. Sir John Davies in his Orchestra (1596) declared that everything in heaven and earth dances:
    Kind nature first doth cause all things to love,
    Love makes them dance, and in just order move.
    And so the sun dances with the earth, flowers with the wind, the tides with the moon:
    And lo the sea, that fleets about the land
And like a girdle clips her solid waist,
    Music and measure both doth understand;
    For his great crystal eye is ever cast
    Up to the moon and on her fixèd fast.
    And as she danceth in her pallid sphere,
    So danceth he about his centre here.
    In John Milton’s Comus (1637), a magician boasts that by dancing while others sleep, he and his companions are echoing the dance of time and nature:
    We that are of purer fire
    Imitate the starry choir,
    Who, in their nightly watchful spheres
    Lead in swift round the months and years.
    Oceans and seas, with all their finny drove,
    Now to the moon in wavering morrice move …
    Others too have sensed that the Morris has a particular affinity with the cycles of nature. T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker (1940) of glimpsing ghostly Morris Men round a bonfire on a summer midnight, with their ‘music of the weak pipe and the little drum’,
    Keeping time,
    Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
    As in their living in the living seasons
    The time of the seasons and the constellations
    The time of milking and the time of harvest
    The time of the coupling