Title: The Folklore of Discworld
Author(s): Terry Pratchett, Jacqueline Simpson
Release year: 2008
Publisher: Doubleday
Why in Database: This book takes a look at various “things” used by Pratchett in his Discworld series. The most important and interesting part for TD is definitely the piece about A’Tuin, in this large fragment we have an interesting overview of the meaning of turtles in earthly folklore and mythology. In general, there are ten turtle fragments, we shown all of them below, most of them mentioning turtles in the Discworld context.
The first is a mention of a woman waiting in line for an autograph (not for herself) and her approach to Discworld:
She herself never, ever read novels of any kind, let alone Fantasy fiction. ‘I only want facts. What’s the point of reading about things that aren’t real? As for a world flying through space on a turtle…’
Short fragment about the nature of the Discworld:
The other is round-like-a-plate, and is moved at a more sedate pace by a team of elephants and a turtle. This is the Discworld.
The aforementioned long piece about turtles in earthly terms (with reference to Turtles all the way down):
THE ELEPHANTS AND THE TURTLE
The absolutely central, incontrovertible fact about the Discworld is that it is a disc. At least, it’s incontrovertible unless you adhere to the Omnian religion, in which case you must controvert it like billy-o. This disc rests upon four gigantic elephants (named Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen), whose bones are living iron, and whose nerves are living gold. These elephants themselves stand upon the shell of the Great A’Tuin, a ten-thousand-mile-long star turtle, which is swimming through space in a purposeful manner. What this purpose may be, is unknown.
A child once asked, ‘Why does the Turtle swim?’
A wise man replied, ‘Child, there is no Why. IT … IS … SO.’
And that could be said of many things.
On Earth ‘everyone knows’ that people used to believe that their planet was also flat, if they thought about it at all. In fact for several thousand years a growing number of educated people have shared the knowledge that it is a globe. Generally speaking it was wisest not to shout about it in the street, though, because of the unrest this could cause. No doubt scholars in the ancient Hindu India partook of this knowledge, but since truth comes in many forms, the age-old epic poems of India declare the world to be a disc.
Further details of Hindu cosmology vary. According to one myth, there are four (or eight) great elephants named the diggaja or di gaja, ‘elephants of the directions’, guarding the four (or eight) compass points of this disc, with a type of god called a lokapala riding on the back of each one. But the oldest texts do not claim that they carry the world. According to another myth, however, the world rests on the back of a single elephant, Maha-Padma, and he is standing on a tortoise named Chukwa.
Finally, it is said in yet another myth that the god Vishnu once took on the form of a vast tortoise or turtle (k rma), so huge that Mount Meru, the sacred central mountain of the world, could rest on his back and be used as a stick to churn the ocean. At some stage, though nobody knows just when, these insights began to blend, with the result that some (but not all) Hindu mythographers now say the world is a disc supported by four elephants supported by a turtle.
Variations of the myth spread out from India to other areas of the globe.1 One that has proved particularly popular involves an infinite regression of turtles. It is said that an arrogant Englishman once mocked a Hindu by asking what the turtle stood on; untroubled, the Hindu calmly replied, ‘Ah, Sahib, after that it’s turtles all the way down.’2 Another variation, briefly mentioned in the film A Thief of Baghdad, involves different creatures but is of value because it adds one vital factor, that of movement. It tells how the world rests on seven pillars, carried on the shoulders of a huge genie, who stands on an eagle, which perches on a bull, which stands on a fish – and this fish swims through the seas of eternity.
Chinese mythology also knows of an immense cosmic turtle, but with a difference. According to the Chinese, our world is not balanced upon the creature’s back (with or without elephants), but is sloshing about inside it. Its plastron contains the oceans upon which all our continents are floating, and when we look up at the dome of the night sky we are seeing the inside of its vast carapace, studded with innumerable stars.
Clearly, fragments of information have drifted through the multiverse and taken root here and there. But the full and glorious Truth is known only on the Discworld. The Turtle Moves!1.And some may be locally grown. Humanity seems predisposed to see the turtle as a massive carrier.
2. Yes, we know that there are several versions of this story!
Another mention of a turtle in the context of the Discworld:
Yet the legend itself poses great problems. If the Four Elephants mark the four quarters, where did the Fifth stand? Centrally, to form the pattern known as a quincunx? If it slipped and fell from the Turtle’s back, how could it strike the Disc – did it fall upwards?
Fragment about Om from Small Gods, one of Vishnu’s avatars is also mentioned:
The priests also claim that Om made the world, and revealed to them that it is not a disc carried by a turtle, but a perfectly smooth ball moving in a perfect circle round the sun, which is another perfectly smooth ball; this has become a vital dogma in the Omnian Church. Actually, Om now denies that he ever said this, or that he made the world – and if he had, he says, he wouldn’t have made it as a ball. Silly idea, a ball. People would fall off. Come to that, Om has only very vague memories of having met any prophets, and doesn’t recognize the things he is supposed to have said to them.
Om’s views on these matters are known because he spent three years or so in the world in the form of a tortoise. This was an embarrassing accident. He had meant to manifest himself briefly in some suitably impressive avatar – most likely, a bull – but what he got was a tortoise. Not a vast mountainbearing tortoise such as the Hindu god Vishnu once chose, but a mere common-or-garden tortoise.
Another fragment about Om, also about Aeschylus, another famous case of “throwing turtles”:
To make matters worse, Om-as-tortoise found his physical life in danger. Far too many people he met knew that ‘there’s good eating on one of those’. He was also being hunted by an eagle who had found out that if you carry off a tortoise in your talons and drop it on a rock from a great height, the result is a shattered shell and a rather fiddly meal. If, on the other hand, you drop it on somebody’s head, then you are recreating the Earth legend which claims that the Ancient Greek Dramaist Aeschylus was killed when a flying eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a rock.
That eagles in some places have learned to drop tortoises in order to crack them open has been attested to by various sources, and our suspension of disbelief in a bird’s ability to target humans in the course of breaking its lunch was occasioned by a Daily Telegraph obituary of Brigadier John Mackenzie. In the Second World War he worked with partisans in the mountains of Greece, and ‘… on one occasion a brigade rifle meeting on a mountain was disrupted when a flock of vultures carrying various small tortoises in their talons decided to drop them on the mountainside to crack their shells. Two soldiers sustained fractured skulls from the tortoises and there were other injuries; the meeting was abandoned.’
Om has been affected by his spell as a humble tortoise.
Another fragment is a quote directly from one of the footnotes from Sourcery, a description of Chimera:
It have thee legges of an mermade, the hair of an tortoise, the teeth of an fowel, and the winges of an snake. Of course, I have only my worde for it, the beast having the breathe of an furnace and the temperament of an rubber balloon in a hurricane. [Sourcery]
Mention of the events from book Pyramids:
Furthermore, Teppic had recently visited Ephebe, where he had heard the philosopher Xeno expounding his famous logical proof that if you shoot an arrow at a tortoise you cannot possibly hit it.
Quoted fragment from Jingo and a comment regarding the real world:
‘It puts me in mind,’ said Leonard, ‘of those nautical stories of giant turtles that sleep on the surface, thus causing sailors to think they are an island. Of course, you don’t get giant turtles that small.’ [Jingo]
In our world, in the absence of any turtles larger than, say, a decent-sized dining-table, traditional nautical lore warns instead of the risks involved in landing on a really, really big fish or whale which happens to be dozing on the surface.
The last fragment, a bit of Latin:
In Cambridge University Library and in the British Library there are manuscripts of a Latin Bestiary (that is, a Book of Beasts) dating from the early twelfth century. It includes a section about the sea-monster which gets mistaken for an island, beginning thus: There is an ocean monster which is called an aspido delone in Greek. On the other hand, it is called an aspido testudo in Latin. It is also called a Whale … This animal lifts its back out of the open sea above the watery waves … [transl. T. H. White]
Testudo is Latin for ‘tortoise’. Delone makes no sense, and must be a mistake for chelone, which is indeed a Greek word, meaning ‘turtle’. Why on earth should English monks a thousand years ago get the traditional whale mixed up with tortoises and turtles? Some echo from the Discworld, maybe? As for aspido, this must refer to a snake of some sort, so it would seem that the Sea Serpent has somehow got into the mix. It makes a good yarn even better.
Author: XYuriTT
