The Science of Discworld II

adults, the original nursery stories like Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin. In late medieval times, Cinderella’s slipper had been a fur one, not glass. And that was a euphemism, because (at least in the German version) the girls gave the prince their ‘fur slipper’ to try on … The story came to us through the French, and in that language ‘ verre ’ can either be ‘glass’ or ‘fur’. The Grimm brothers went for the hygienic alternative, saving parents the danger of embarrassing explanations.
    Rumpelstiltskin was an interestingly sexual parable, too, a tale to programme the idea that female masturbation leads to sterility. Remember the tale? The miller’s daughter, put in the barn to ‘spin straw into gold’, virginally sits on a little stick that becomes a little man … The dénouement has the little man, when his name is finally identified, jumping in to ‘plug’ the lady very intimately, and the assembled soldiers can’t pull him out. In the modern bowdlerised version, this survives vestigially as the little man pushing his foot through the floor and not being able to pull it out, a total non sequitur . So none of those concerned, king, miller or queen, can procreate (the stolen first child has been killed by the soldiers), and it all ends in tears. If you doubt this interpretation, enjoy the indirection: ‘What is his name? What is his name?’ recurs in the story. What is his name? What is a stilt with a rumpled skin? Whoops. The name has an equivalent derivation in many languages, too. (In Discworld, Nanny Ogg claimed to have written a children’s story called ‘the Little Man Who Grew Too Big’, but, then, Mrs Oggalways believed that a double entendre can mean only one thing.)
    Why do we like stories? Why are their messages embedded so deeply in the human psyche?
    Our brains have evolved to understand the world through patterns. These may be visual patterns, such as the tiger’s stripes, or aural ones, like the howl of the coyote. Or smells. Or tastes. Or narratives. Stories are little mental models of the world, sequences of ideas strung like beads on a necklace. Each bead leads inexorably to the next bead; we know that the second little pig is going to get the chop: the world would not be working properly if it didn’t.
    We deal not just in patterns, but also in meta-patterns. Patterns of patterns. We watch archer-fish shooting down insects with jets of water, we enjoy the elephant using its nose to acquire doughnuts from zoo visitors (less these days, alas); we delight in the flight of house-martins (there are fewer swallows to enjoy now) and the songs of garden-birds. We admire the weaver birds’ nests, the silk moths’ cocoons, the cheetahs’ speed. All these things are characteristic of the creatures concerned. And what is characteristic of us? Stories. So, by the same token, we enjoy the stories of people. We are the storytelling chimpanzee, and we appreciate the meta-pattern involved in that.
    When we became more social, collecting into groups of a hundred or more, probably with agriculture, more stories appeared in our extelligence, to guide us. We had to have rules for behaviour, ways to deal with the infirm and the handicapped, ways to divert violence. In early and present-day tribal societies, everything that is not forbidden is mandatory. Stories point to difficult situations, like the Good Samaritan story in the New Testament; the Prodigal Son, too, is instructive by indirection, like Rumpelstiltskin. To drive that home, here is a tale from the Nigerian Hausa tribe, Blind Man’s Lantern .
    A young man is coming home late from seeing his girlfriend in the next village; it is very dark under a starry sky and the path back to his own village is not easy to follow. He sees a lantern bobbing towards him, but when it gets closer he sees that it is carried by the Blind Man of his own village.
    â€˜Hey, Blind Man,’ he says. ‘You whose darkness is no darker thanyour noonday! What do you carry a lantern for?’
    â€˜It is not for my need I carry this lantern,’ says the Blind Man. ‘It is to keep off you fools with eyes!’
    We, as a species, don’t only specialise in storytelling. Just as with the other specialities above, our species has a few more oddities. Probably the most odd characteristic that our elvish observer would note is our obsessive regard for