The Folklore of Discworld

of man and woman
    And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
    Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
    In Wintersmith we learn more about the Dark Morris, first brought to our attention in Reaper Man , when Tiffany is taken one icy midnight to a clearing in a leafless wood, where six men, their faces blacked and wearing black clothes, dance to the powerful beat of a silent drum, while shadowy forms look on. She already knows the white-clad Morris teams that dance on the village green to bring Summer in, but what is this? Unable to resist the beat, she runs forward and jumps into the dance, weaving to and fro in the space where a team’s Fool should go, and becoming aware for a few seconds that someone other than human is dancing with her.
    What she has seen is part of the never-ending Dance of the Seasons, in which the Wintersmith and the Summer Lady meet and change places in spring and autumn. Explaining this, Miss Treason shows her a picture in Chaffinch’s Ancient and Classical Mythology of a tall, blonde, beautiful Summer, carrying a cornucopia and dancing with old grey Winter, who has icicles in his beard.
    ‘The year is round! The wheel of the world must spin! That is why up here they dance the Dark Morris, to balance it. They welcome the winter because of the new summer deep inside it!’
    The spring and autumn Morris dances are a way of marking the moment when the season of ice and the season of fire meet briefly to exchange their dominion over the world. In our world, other ways have been found of bringing Summer in – a young man dressed inleaves and flowers fights and defeats an older man dressed in furs; girls carry an ugly straw figure called Winter or Death out of the village, tear it to bits or throw it into a river, and come back carrying leafy branches; people bring in the maypole. Frazer’s The Golden Bough has much to say about all this. At the other end of the year, the secrets are better kept, yet even so one can guess that in the season of bonfires and fireworks, nuts and apples, beer, beef, and new wine, there is an underlying celebration that Winter is taking over the power that is rightfully his – for a while. And at midwinter, there is guising, feasting, mummers’ plays, and yes, Morris dancing again. The wheel spins.
    But Tiffany has made a serious mistake by entering the dance herself. She has taken the place of the Summer Lady, attracting the attention of the Wintersmith, and now is trapped in her role. She is turning into a goddess, or at least an avatar, or an anthropomorphic personification.
    The first symptom is that she develops ‘Fertile Feet’ – wherever she treads with bare feet, flowers spring up. Even the floorboards in Nanny Ogg’s cottage, being wood, start sprouting leaves. Much the same thing happened to Prince Teppic of Djelibeybi as soon as the spirit of his father, a recently deceased pharaoh, entered into him, as is told in Pyramids . Even on the cobbled streets of Ankh-Morpork grass appeared where he put his feet, and in the bakers’ shops loaves cracked open and grew wheat.
    On Earth too, avatars of Spring or Summer are, very understandably, credited with the gift of Fertile Feet. In the medieval Welsh tale of ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ in the Mabinogion , it is said of the lovely young heroine that ‘four white trefoils sprang up behind her wherever she went, and for that reason was she called Olwen’ – which means ‘white track’. The Italian painter Botticelli represents Primavera (Spring) as a beautiful woman walking across a flower-filled glade, throwing down more flowers as she goes, which is the closest a painter can get to the idea that they spring up as she passes. And then there are four famous lines from a poemwritten by Alexander Pope in 1704, when he was only sixteen:
    Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;
    Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;
    Where’er you tread, the blushing flowers shall rise,
    And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.
    The poem is one of a set of four seasonal love-poems, and is entitled ‘Summer’. These particular lines are so famous because Handel set them to music in his opera Semele , as a song addressed by the god Jupiter to the human girl he loves. They are so appropriate to Tiffany’s situation that they cross over into the Discworld and into the mind of the schoolmistressy witch, Miss Tick:
    ‘The myth of the Summer Lady says that flowers grow wherever she walks,’ said