Folklore of Discworld Read Free Page B

‘The Punch-up Board-Game’; it is a bit like draughts but much more like the Discworld game of Thud. It is thought that the run of play determines the destinies of men, gods, giants and the world itself. Apparently the game will be disrupted and the pieces scattered when gods and monsters fight at Ragnarok, the War at the End of the World, also known as the Doom of the Gods and the Twilight of the Gods. Afterwards, according to the Old Icelandic prophetic poem Völuspá , a new world will arise and the surviving younger generation of gods will restore both the cosmic order and the game which expressed it:
    Then once again in the grass are found
    Draughtsmen all of gold,
    The wondrous draughtsmen the gods had owned
    In the earliest days of old.
    On Earth, however, not everyone relishes the idea of being a pawn in a game played by gods. The twelfth-century Persian poet Omar Khayyám made a resigned but gloomy comment on life in his Rubâíyát :
    ’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
    The gods of the Discworld lack the patience and imagination to play chess, draughts, hnefatafl , or even chequers; their idea of amusement is a form of Snakes and Ladders (played with greased rungs), accompanied by heavy betting and a good deal of bluffing and cheating, which brings it nearer to poker. The currency staked is the souls of men. The gaming board is a finely carved map of the Disc, overprinted with squares. Occasionally, the playing pieces represent monsters; more often, they are beautifully detailed models of those human beings who have foolishly done something to get themselves noticed. It is said that these unfortunate mortals sometimes faintly hear, as they hasten to their doom, the rattle of dice in the celestial (skull-shaped) shaker.
    This is one of the reasons it’s wise to steer clear of the gods, as the wizard Rincewind knows:
    ‘I don’t like the idea of going anywhere near the gods. We’re
like toys to them, you know. And they don’t realize how easily
the arms and legs come off.’ [ The Last Hero ]
    Or maybe (and even Rincewind in his darkest moments didn’t think of this) they do realize, and find it funny. That at any rate is what Will Shakespeare thought when he wrote King Lear , in one of his darkest moments:
    As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
    The gods have an age-old feud with the Ice Giants, a species of super-troll the size of large houses, craggy and faceted, and composed entirely of ice which glints green and blue in the light – apart from their small, deep-sunken, coal-black eyes. Just as Zeus and theOlympians defeated the gigantic Titans and imprisoned them inside volcanoes such as Etna (where they still wriggle about, causing eruptions and earthquakes), so Blind Io and the other Discworld gods defeated the Ice Giants and imprisoned them under the eternal ice at the Hub. There is, however, a prophecy. A very Norse-sounding prophecy, a prophecy of End Time doom:
    At the end of the world they’ll break free at last, and ride out on their dreadful glaciers and regain their ancient domination, crushing out the flames of civilization until the world lies naked and frozen under the terrible cold stars until Time itself freezes over. Or something like that, apparently. [ Sourcery ]
    Whether it comes with ice ages, global warming, a nasty bang or a little whimper, the end of a world is never much fun.
Blind Io
    Io is the chief of the gods. He is elderly, white-haired and white-bearded, dressed in a toga and wearing a white blindfold which conceals the blank skin where his eyes should be. Despite this, and despite his name, he sees everything that is going on, since in fact he has a number of detached eyes (several dozen of them) which hover around him and keep a sharp look-out in all directions. His throne too is encrusted with