A To Z Blogging Challenge 2023: Folktale And Myth In Fiction - D Is For Discworld And Daughter Of The Forest

 Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are set on a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on the back of a massive turtle.  He didn’t invent that. It comes from Hindu mythology. 

But it works beautifully in his series. Sir Terry has created entire cultures set on this flat world including one which has theories about the sex of the star turtle Great A’Tuin and sends an expedition to find out. 

I will be mentioning the Discworld in future posts, because there are so many of the novels that are relevant to this theme, far too many to write about in one post. 

But he uses the folk tales, myths and legends of this world to build his own. 

The Discworld equivalent of Mt Olympus is Dunmanifestin(The joke of the name is that people in our world call their homes Dunroamin)where the gods live. The head god, Blind Io, is clearly meant to be Odin, with eyeballs that float around his head. A character who appears in a number of the books is a raven who interprets for the Death of Rats. He explains that he used to be one of the god’s ravens till he got on Blind Io’s wrong side because he just loves eating eyeballs…

Golems, which come from Jewish folklore, play a major role in this series, first appearing in Feet Of Clay, in which Dorfl, one of the many golems working in Ankh-Morpork, the main city of the  Discworld novels, becomes a member of the City Watch. In Going Postal other golems become postmen. 

Dwarfs in this world have an entire culture of their own, largely involving bread as a religion and not revealing your sex except eventually to the person you will marry. All dwarfs, male and female alike, have beards. To be honest, they are less about Norse mythology than having fun with Tolkien’s Dwarves, who also all have beards(not kidding, Tolkien even says so!) and make bread for travel, cram. But eventually it all goes back to Norse myth. 

There are a lot more references to folklore and myth in this series, but I’m holding back to talk more about them in other posts.

So, a bit more. D is also for Daughter Of The Forest by Juliet Marillier. Juliet Marillier is a fantasy novelist living in Western Australia. I was lucky enough to attend one of her seminars at Swancon, the annual Western Australian science fiction convention. She specialises in fairy tale adaptations. Most of her fiction is set in mediaeval Ireland(see B Is For Beauty And The Beast). 

This one is based on a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.  In it, the six boys of a royal family are turned into swans. Their younger sister finds out about it and goes to search for them, but the only way to save them is to knit them shirts made of nettles and, here is the thing, she isn’t allowed to speak while doing it. This nearly costs her life, when she is accused of witchcraft and can’t explain, but keeps knitting all the way to the stake. She does manage to get the shirts on to her brothers, though one is unfinished and a brother is stuck with a wing for one arm.

The novel based on this fairy tale is set in Ireland during the early Norman period in England. It manages, somehow, to make her husband, the young king, more sympathetic than in the original fairy tale.

This story, by the way, also inspired Nicholas Stuart Gray’s novel The Seventh Swan, which is set in Scotland, after the “happily ever after” has happened for everyone except the youngest prince, who has to cover his wing with a piece of plaid to hide it. If it’s still in print I haven’t seen it; I borrowed a friend’s copy when I read it years ago. Perhaps it’s available somewhere on ABEBooks. The Juliet Marillier novel should be easily available, as it’s the first of a series, Sevenwaters. 

Tomorrow: E Is For Elves!