The Folklore of Discworld

danger as a cat and as lithe as a panther. His life is one long string of adventures, which don’t surprise him in the least:
    ‘Oh,’ said Hrun, ‘I expect in a minute this dungeon door will be flung back and I’ll be dragged off to some sort of temple arena where I’ll fight maybe a couple of giant spiders and an eight-foot slave from the jungles of Klatch and then I’ll rescue some kind of princess from the altar and then kill off a few guards or whatever and then this girl will show me a secret passage out of the palace and we’ll liberate a couple of horses and escape with the treasure.’
    Hrun leaned back on his hands and looked up at the ceiling, whistling tunelessly.
    ‘All that?’ said Twoflower.
    ‘Usually.’
    Earth too knows heroes of this type, notably Conan the Barbarian from Cimmeria, whose many adventures as pirate, mercenary, and eventual war-lord and emperor were chronicled in America in the 1930s by the fantasy writer Robert E. Howard and others. An admirer wrote: ‘Conan is a true hero of Valhalla, battling and suffering great wounds by day, carousing and wenching by night, and plunging into fresh adventures tomorrow.’ Besides ordinary human enemies, he is forever attacking, or being attacked by, evil lords, sorcerers, witch-queens, magical monsters, dark gods. An indestructible stone toad-thing as bulky as a buffalo, with seven green-glowing eyes, crouching on an altar in a temple of lustreless black stone whose geometry obeys no human laws, is just the kind of thing he would meet. He always wins.
    A Barbarian Hero, like his Kingly counterpart, often possesses a remarkable sword. Hrun’s is called Kring, and he stole it from the impregnable palace of the Archimandrite of B’Ituni. It is forged from black meteoric iron, with highly ornate runes on the blade and rubies on the pommel. Not only does Kring have a name of its own, it has a soul; it talks incessantly in a voice like a claw being scraped across glass, and it has a very irritating personality. In the course of its multidimensional existence it has of course starred in numerousbattles, and at one point belonged to a pasha who used it to cut silk handkerchiefs in mid-air; on the other hand, it once spent two hundred years at the bottom of a lake, which was not really fun. Can this possibly mean that Kring has existed on Earth too – that Kring and Excalibur are aspects of a single entity? And is that why Kring remarks, when stuck in a tree branch, that ‘it could have been worse, it could have been an anvil’?
    Come to think of it, even the tree could be significant. The Volsungs, a family of Norse and Germanic heroes, had as their heirloom a sword which came to them by way of a test very like Arthur’s. Odin, the God of War, had driven it up to the hilt into a tree-trunk, challenging kings and warriors to pull it out: ‘Whoso draweth this sword from this tree shall have the same as a gift from me, and shall find in good sooth that never bare he better sword in hand than this.’ Sigmund the Volsung was the only one who could draw it out, and it served him well until in his last battle it broke against the spear-shaft of Odin himself. But when Sigmund’s son grew up (he is called Sigurd in Iceland, and Siegfried in Germany), he reforged the blade that was broken, naming it Gram, and became an even greater hero than his father had been. Perhaps this too is something Kring knows about.
    Many heroes undertake adventures just for the fun of it, while others (young Nijel in Sourcery , for instance) see themselves as ruled by a special kind of destiny called a ‘geas’. This is a form of the Irish word geis , and has nothing at all to do with large, waddling, grey or white birds. It means an obligation, enforced by magical penalties, to do or not to do some particular thing. A hero may be born with a geis (or more than one), or someone may lay it on him. Either way, it usually spells trouble, especially if he gets into a situation where two of his geissa clash. One great Irish warrior, Cú Chulainn, was trapped in this way. He was under two obligations: one was never to eat dog’s flesh, which seems simple enough, but the other was never to refuse an offer of food and hospitality. So when an enemy, knowing this, invited him to a meal of dog-stew he was forced to break either one rule or the other, and was doomed. Nijel, luckily, has no such dilemma.
    The greatest by far of the Discworld’s Barbarian Heroes is Cohen.