Greek, Roman, and Norse Mythology: Pratchett Mines the Myths
Pick any of the Discworld books at random and you'll soon know that Terry Pratchett is very familiar with Greek, Roman, Norse, and Celtic mythology. Go on. We dare you. First, look at the Disc itself. In the world of Norse mythology, Earth is a flat disc in the branches of a tree called Yggdrasil. (Not a name you'd stick on a baby these days.) In Pratchett's world, the earth is a flat disc mounted on the backs of four elephants standing on a humongous turtle traveling through the multiverse (rather than the universe). That turtle is based on a myth he read as a child. More on that myth later.
Second, check out the population. As you remember from high school or even middle school if you went to a fancy one, in Greek and Roman mythology, there are creatures like centaurs, fauns, satyrs, naiads, dryads, nymphs. But intervening or interfering in their lives are gods/goddesses such as Zeus, Hera, Minerva/Athena, Ares, and so on, who live on Mount Olympus. (Yeah, yeah. Like in the old
Xena: Warrior Princess
and
Hercules: The Legendary Journey
shows.) In Norse mythology, the gods/goddesses Odin, Thor, Eir, and so on live in Valhalla. Let's begin our population examination (it won't hurt) with the Discworld pantheon.
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The Gods Must Be Crazy.
In the pantheon of Discworld, there's a smidgen of Greek and Roman mythology, plus a smattering of Norse as well. Instead of the two-eyed chief god Zeus (Jupiter in
Roman mythology); Thor, the Norse thunder god; or even Thor's father, Odin, the one-eyed chief of the Aesir gods in Norse mythology, Blind Io, the thunder god, is the chief of the Discworld gods. Instead of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine, there's Bibulous, the god of wine and things on sticks. Instead of Loki, the trickster god kicked out of Valhalla, there's Hoki the Jokester. Instead of Aphrodite/Venus, the goddess of love, there's Astoria (like the hotel). And who can forget Pratchett's Fedecksâthe messenger of the gods? (“When it absolutely has to be there overnight,” as a FedEx advertising slogan proclaimed.) He can give Hermes, the messenger god (Mercury in Roman mythology), a run for his money. And of course, Discworld has minor deities similar to those in Greek and Roman mythology: Vulcan (the Greek Vulcan) and Hephaistos (the Greek Hephaestus).
Pratchett includes unique gods and goddesses as well, like Anoia, the minor goddess of things that stick in drawers (and also lost corkscrews and things that roll under furniture), and Aniger, the goddess of squashed animals. (She must work overtime.)
Although we said we wouldn't talk about architecture, we can't help mentioning one placeâDunmanifestin, the place where the gods apparently were
done manifesting.
In
The Last Hero,
Ghengiz Cohen (a.k.a. Cohen the Barbarian with a bit of Genghis Khan, the Mongolian conqueror of the thirteenth century) and his posse, the Silver Horde, argue with the Valkyries who want to take them to the Halls of the Slain in Dunmanifestin on Cori Celesti. Well, Dunmanifestin is referred to as “the stuccoed Valhalla” in
Guards! Guards!
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(The Valkyries, the female warriors who take the dead to Valhalla, come from Norse mythology.)
According to
Fairies and How to Avoid Them
by Miss Perspicacia Tick (a book mentioned in
Hat Full of Sky
), the Nac Mac Feegles believe that Earth is like Valhalla.
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Other Stories (But the Gods Are in Them, Too).
Not content to tweak just the gods of Greek myths, Pratchett tweaks other people or their situations to include in Discworld. For example, you know the story of King Midas, right? An allusion to the greedy king's story appears early in
Witches Abroad,
which seems to be a veritable “
glod
mine” of allusions. Instead of King Midas, there is Seriph Al-Ybi, whose curse by a god with poor spelling causes everything he touches to turn to a dwarf named Glod.
And how about the story of Daedalus and Icarus? It gets a send-up in
Jingo
and
The Last Hero.
Leonard of Quirm, Pratchett's answer to Leonardo da Vinci (more on them in
chapter 19
), has a similar goal of perfecting the art of flying, but not airline food.
And of course, there is the story of Prometheus, the Titan and creator of man (according to the Greek myth) who dared to steal fire from the gods and suffered for it by having his liver eaten by an eagle every day. (But not with bacon or onions.) He's Mazda in Discworld and his theft is the inspiration for
The Last Hero,
where Ghengiz Cohen and the Silver Horde try to return fire to the gods by blowing them up. (A weird way of saying thanks. Flowers would've been better.)
At this point, we have to mention another placeâthe Underworld, or realm of the dead. The Greeks and Romans had it in their mythology. This kingdom is ruled by Hades and surrounded by rivers that include Acheron, Styx, and Lethe. A three-headed dog named Cerberus guards this realm.
Discworld not only has an Underworld, it has an inferno similar to the one described in
The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. (See “The Devil Made Me Do It” later in the chapter.) In
Wintersmith,
the Nac Mac Feegles and Roland de Chumsfanleigh journey through the Underworld to wake up the Summer Lady and meet an unnamed, overcharging ferryman. Pratchett cleverly reminds us where they are by having one
of the Feegles shout, “We're right oot in the Styx noo!”
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The three-headed dog, however, meets its end thanks to the loads of boggles in the Underworld.
As the Feegles explain, a trip through the Underworld is traditional for heroes, because a number of heroes in classical mythology journeyed through it. We're told of a myth of Ephebeâthe rescue of Euniphon by Orpheo,
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which is an allusion to two Greek myths: (1) The story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus, the son of Apollo (the god of fine arts) and Calliope (a muse), was a poet and musician known especially for playing the lyre. (In Pratchett's book, a lute and a lyre are mentioned.) He sorrowed so much when his wife, Eurydice, died, that Hades allowed her to return to Earth with him on one conditionâthat Orpheus not look back until he returned above ground. (In
Wintersmith,
Rob Anybody cautions Roland in a similar manner.) But in a move like that of Lot's wife in the Bible, Orpheus looked back and Eurydice returned to the Underworld. (2) The story of Persephone, whose enforced stay in the Underworld caused winter on earth. But in Discworld, the rescue is all about the return of summerâhence the Summer Lady's stay in the Underworld.
As we read this journey, we couldn't help thinking of Odysseus, whose trip through the Underworld to seek the aid of Tiresias, a blind prophet, is chronicled in
The Odyssey
by another architect of worldsâHomer (but not Simpson).
Speaking of Homer (still not Simpson), both of his epics,
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey,
and Virgil's
The Aeneid
have a place in Discworld mythology. In
Eric,
the Trojan Wars from
The Iliad
and
The Aeneid
are the Tsortean Wars in which the Ephebians (the Greeks) fight the Tsorteans (the Trojans), because of Elenor, the Helen of Troy of the story. Lavaeolus, the Odysseus of the story, is trying to return home.
The Tsortean Wars are woven even tighter into the fabric of Discworld mythology when Nanny Ogg refers to them (and an Achilles's heel situation) in
Witches Abroad.
Lest we forget, Roland de Chumsfanleigh is an allusion to Roland, the hero of
Chanson de Roland
(Song of Roland) the twelfth-century French epic by Turoldus.
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A Nod to the Norse Myths.
Moving on to Norse mythology, some of its population find equal opportunity in Discworld, namely elves, dwarfs (or dwarves, as Tolkien popularized), trolls (the faithful Sergeant Detritus), werewolves (of sorts), and Valkyries.
The large number of werewolves prowling around Uberwald owe their fictional lives to the long history of werewolf stories, starting with Loki's wolf son, Fenrirâwho was so fearsome that the other gods had to bind him to prevent him from killing themâand continuing with “White Wolf of the Harz Mountains,” an 1839 story by Frederick Marryat, and the 1941 Lon Chaney movie
The Wolf Man
. (More on werewolves in
chapter 4
.)
European Folklore and History
I Dream of Jenny with the Light Green Teeth.
Although
The Lord of the Rings
was meant to be a mythology of sorts for England, many folktales already existed around the British Isles. Some of these folktales derived from tales elsewhere in Europe and the world. Take, for example, the tale of Jenny Green-Teeth, whom Pratchett mentions in
The Wee Free Men.
Jenny, a hag of the river and a “Grade 1 Prohibitory Monster”
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according to Miss Tick (see
chapter 6
), was known to lure children to their doomâa fate that nearly befalls Tiffany's sticky brother, Wentworth. She's a sort of antiondine or undineâa water elemental of folklore
based on Ondine, a water nymph in German myths, who fell in love with a faithless human. (Reminds you of “Little Mermaid,” doesn't it?) Whereas water nymphs are said to be beautiful and helpful (if helping suits their needs), Jenny's the Ugly Betty of the water spirit world. She's not so much concerned about gaining a soul, which undines seek (if you read Hans Christian Andersen's “Little Mermaid,” you know that was the goal). She just wants lunch, as other famous child-eating witches (Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian folklore, or the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”) could relate to.
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Freaks and Geats, Plus ArthurâWarts and All. Prat
chett admits to reading
Beowulf,
the thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon epic, as a boy. Beowulf, the great Geat hero with amazing strength, had the gumption to fight the monster Grendel with his bare hands. And who doesn't know the story of King Arthur, told in a cycle of medieval stories?
Beowulf,
supposedly written by a monk, and the legend of King Arthurârealized by Sir Thomas Malory (
Le Morte d'Arthur
, based on French and English tales) and T. H. White in
The Once and Future King
and
The Book of Merlyn
âset the standard for heroic tales.
Carrot Ironfoundersson, who was named after a guy with red hair who worked on Pratchett's house, has both the manner of a Beowulf-type hero and the legacy of a King Arthur, even though he considers himself a dwarf. Like King Arthur, formerly known as Wart in
Once and Future King,
Carrot is an orphan who is probably the rightful king of the land. Both have heirloom swords. Unlike Arthur, Carrot was raised by dwarfs and is content to remain a simple watchman for now, rather than rule over corrupt Ankh-Morpork.
In
The Fifth Elephant,
Carrot agrees to fight a werewolf with his bare hands. Shades of the Beowulf-Grendel match perhaps? Only Pratchett knows. But a direct allusion to the monsters in Beowulf occurs in
Guards! Guards!
when one hero says to another, “Monsters
are getting more uppity, too. I heard where this guy, he killed this monster in this lake, no problem, stuck its arm up over the door ⦠. Its mum come and complained.”
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An allusion to the King Arthur legend occurs in
Wintersmith,
when Roland throws his sword into the river while in the Underworld. The sword is caught in a manner similar to that of the Lady of the Lake in the King Arthur stories, who caught the sword, Excalibur, when it was returned to herâher stipulation upon granting Arthur the sword.
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Historical Hijinks.
Another building block of Discworld involves Alexandre Dumas, a nineteenth-century French writer you probably read in high school, who used the drama of seventeenth-century France to tell his musketeer stories. In
The Truth,
an allusion to
The Man in the Iron Mask
is made when Lord Havelock Vetinari is asked about the fate of his doppelgänger, an unfortunate man named Charlie. Is he “in a deep cell, and made ⦠[to] wear a mask all the time, and have all his meals brought by a deaf and dumb jailer?”
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Philippe, the unfortunate mask-wearing prisoner of
Man in the Iron Mask
, was taken away from the Bastille in a carriage manned by a “deaf and dumb” postilion arranged by ex-musketeer Aramis.