The Folklore of Discworld

shaped birthmark, rather like a crown. But still he resists the pressures of narrativium, and goes around ignoring his manifest destiny in a most irritating manner.
    Perhaps there have been Carrots on Earth, but if so, their strategy has been so successful that nobody has ever heard of them. In that universe, the nearest thing to Carrot’s attitude is the naïve simplicity of the teenage Arthur. As is well known, he had no idea he was a dead king’s son, and was simply acting as squire to his elder foster-brother Sir Kay. Kay needed a replacement sword to use in a tournament, and sent Arthur to find one. Arthur wandered off into a churchyard, where he noticed something which he thought would come in useful. As Malory writes in his Morte D’Arthur :
    there was seen in the churchyard … a great stone four square, like unto a marble stone, and in the midst thereof was like an anvil of steel a foot on high, and therein stuck a fair sword naked by the point, and letters there were written in gold about the sword that said thus:– Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England.
    Without bothering to read the inscription, Arthur casually pulled the sword out and took it to Kay. When people realized where it hadcome from, and also that when it was put back nobody but Arthur could get it to move at all, he was acknowledged to be the Long-Lost Heir.
    One might easily assume that this was the famed Excalibur which Arthur always bore in battle, but Malory says not – according to his account, the sword drawn from the stone was broken two or three years later in a duel between Arthur and Pellinore, but Merlin promised to find him another:
    So they rode till they came to a lake, the which was a fair water and broad, and in the midst of the lake Arthur was ’ware of an arm clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword in that hand. Lo! said Merlin, yonder is that sword that I spake of. With that they saw a damosel going upon the lake. What damosel is that? said Arthur. That is the Lady of the Lake, said Merlin … speak ye fair to her that she will give you that sword … And so they went into the ship, and when they came to the sword that the hand held, Sir Arthur took it up by the handles, and took it with him, and the arm and the hand went under the water.
    This is the true Excalibur, the one which the dying Arthur ordered Sir Bedivere to throw into a lake:
    Then Sir Bedivere [took up the sword and] went to the water side; and there he bound the girdle about the hilts, and then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might; and there came an arm and an hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.
    Whether King Arthur ever really died is a mystery. True, there was a tomb for him in the medieval Glastonbury Abbey, but it was a fake, and rumours abounded. As Malory wrote:
    Some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of Our Lord Jesu into another place, and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the Holy Cross. I will not say it shall be so, but rather I will say, here in this world he changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam Rexque futurus [‘Here lies Arthur, former King and future King’].
    This is no longer the tale of a Lost Heir. This is a Hero of another sort: the Sleeping King under the Mountain, the King who will come back from ‘another place’ to save his people and achieve heroic feats – a tale we have met already in Lancre and elsewhere. It is a powerful narrative pattern, widely scattered through the multiverse as a consolation and a source of inspiration and hope.
T HE B ARBARIAN H ERO
    There was no mistaking that shape. The wide chest, the neck like a tree trunk, the surprisingly small head under its wild thatch of black hair looking like a tomato on a coffin … Hrun was one of the Discworld’s more durable heroes: a fighter of dragons, a despoiler of temples, a hired sword, the kingpost of every street brawl. He could even speak words of more than two syllables, given time and maybe a hint or two. [ The Colour of Magic ]
    Hrun dresses only in a leopard-skin loincloth and numerous gold arm-bands and anklets. It goes without saying that he is totally fearless and unimaginative, while being at the same time as alert to any