The Science of Discworld II

other mammals, even quite intelligent ones like pigs. 7
    Just as dog-packs need an agreed recognition signal to identify their members, so each tribe needs to establish a distinct identity. The possession of big brains makes it possible to do this by means of elaborate, shared rituals.
    Ritual is by no means confined to humans: many species of birds, for instance, have special mating dances, or engage in strange devices to attract the female’s attention, like the decorative collections of berries and pebbles assembled by the male bower-bird. But humans, with their highly developed brains, have turned ritual into a way of life. Every tribe, and nowadays every culture, has developed a Make-a-Human kit whose object is to bring up the next generation to adopt the tribal or cultural norms and pass them on to their own children.
    It doesn’t always work, especially nowadays when the world has shrunk and cultures clash across non-geographical boundaries – Iranian teenagers accessing the Internet, for example – but it still works surprisingly well. Corporations have taken up the same idea, with ‘corporate bonding’ sessions. This is what the wizards were up to with their paintballs. Studies have shown that sessions of this kind have no useful effect, but businesses still waste billions on them every year. The second most probable reason is that such sessions are fun anyway. The first most probable is that everyone likes an opportunity to shoot Mr Davis in Human Resources. And one important reason is that it sounds as though it ought to work; our culture is full of stories where such things do.
    An important part of the Make-a-Human kit is the Story. We tell our children stories, and through those stories they learn what it is like to be a member of our tribe or our culture. They learn from the story of Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in Rabbit’s hole that greed can lead to constraints on food. From the Three Little Pigs (a civilising story, not a tribal one) they learn that if you watch your enemy for repetitive patterns, you can outwit him. We use stories to build our brains, and then we use the brains to tell ourselves, and each other, stories.
    As time passes, those tribal stories acquire their own status, and people cease to question them because they are traditional tribal stories. They acquire a veneer of – well, the elves would call it ‘glamour’. They seem wonderful, despite numerous obvious faults, and most people do not question them. On Discworld, precisely this process occurred with stories and folk-memories about elves, as we can illustrate with three quotations from Lords and Ladies . In the first, the god of all small furry prey, Herne the Hunted, has just come to the terrified realisation that ‘ They’re all coming back !’. Jason Ogg, who is a blacksmith, the eldest son of the witch Nanny Ogg, and not very bright, asks her who They are:
    â€˜The Lords and Ladies,’ she said.
    â€˜Who’re they?’
    Nanny looked around. But, after all, this was a forge … It wasn’t just a place of iron, it was a place where iron died and was reborn. If you couldn’t speak the words here, you couldn’t speak ’em anywhere.
    Even so, she’d rather not.
    â€˜ You know,’ she said. ‘The Fair Folk. The Gentry. The Shining Ones. The Star People. You know.’
    â€˜What?’
    Nanny put her hand on the anvil, just in case, and said the word.
    Jason’s frown very gently cleared, at about the same speed as a sunrise.
    â€˜Them?’ he said. ‘But aren’t they nice and—’
    â€˜See?’ said Nanny. ‘I told you you’d get it wrong!’
    You said: The Shining Ones. You said: The Fair Folk. And you spat, and touched iron. But generations later, you forgot about the spitting and the iron, and you forgot why you used those names for them, and you remembered only that they were beautiful … We’re stupid, and the memory plays tricks, and we remember the elves for their beauty and the way they move, and we forget what they were . We’re like mice saying, ‘Say what you like, cats have got real style .’
    Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
    Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
    Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
    Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
    Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
    Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
    The thing