Nothing like arriving back just in time to find out you’re getting married? Careful to keep away from the Dancers—we don’t want to attract any Lords and Ladies.
Summary
Granny Weatherwax encounters a woman inside a circle of iron stone in her youth; in present day, that same woman and her cohort plan to take over Lancre. Jason Ogg shoes Binky for Death, keeping a blindfold on, part of an ancient bargain. A crop circle appears. The witches arrive home after eight months away (in Genua and traveling). When Magrat arrives to see King Verence, he tells her all about his plans to make the kingdom better—and also that they’re getting married and that all the arrangements have been made. (Kings don’t have to ask people to marry them, they just do it, he’s been reading about it.) One of his new bean crops lays down in a circle. The coven meets and Granny and Nanny start talking about going up against some folk and “the Dancers,” but Magrat doesn’t know what they are. Granny refuses to tell her and she gets angry, tells them about her engagement and stomps off. She dumps her witching gear into the river. A fellow named William Scrope dies hunting a very special stag, and Granny and Nanny come across his body next to the Dancers (an iron stone circle).
Over at the Unseen University, Ridcully awakens for the day and knows something is amiss, though the Bursar seems to think he’s just aggravated over his new bald spot. Granny and Nanny check over the body and find Scrope was stabbed, and also that someone has inadvisably been dancing around the stones. Someone informs Ridcully of their invitation to Verence and Magrat’s wedding, and Ridcully’s fondness of the area (due to summers spent there in youth) has him organizing a group to go: himself, the Bursar, the Librarian, and young Ponder Stibbons. The wizards are also noticing more crop circles than usual, including one in oatmeal. Magrat wakes in a palace, no longer a witch, and now has a servant (Millie Chillum, who she’s known forever) and a lot of complicated new clothing to figure out how to wear. Granny goes to check on bees, the only mind she could never learn how to Borrow; they seem worried.
Buy the Book
Battle of the Linguist Mages
Nanny goes to visit her son’s forge, tells the men in town to look after Scrope’s widow, and asks Jason what’s new since they left. He finally admits that there’s a new coven about: Diamanda and Perdita and “that girl with the red hair from over in Bad Ass and them others.” Diamanda (who used to be Lucy Tockley until she changed it to sound more appropriately witchy) is leading the group and insists that they can teach themselves to be witches—they’re the ones who’ve been dancing around the stones. Nanny tries to explain to Jason that the people they’re courting by doing all that dancing are the “Lords and Ladies,” who are essentially the Fair Folk. She heads over to Granny’s to find her Borrowing and puts on a kettle to wait for her return. Granny wakes and they talk of what they’ve discovered: the new coven dancing all the time and thinning of the walls and the fact that something came into their world from another realm and killed Scrope. (It turns out to be a unicorn.) Granny can sense an Elf presence.
Perdita (who used to be Agnes Nitt) is learning about witchcraft from Diamanda, who she is very impressed by, only she’s not sure if what they’re doing is all that sound. Granny and Nanny crash their coven meeting, and Granny and Diamanda exchange some extremely heated words that lead Nanny to bite through the brim of her hat. They agree to meet at noon to show each other their skills—basically a duel but with witching. They leave and Granny and Nanny talk about how Agnes does have some real witching talent in her, but Diamanda was given that power by something else. Granny tells Nanny that she knows she shouldn’t have lost her temper and that she lets things get the best of her and now she has to fight this girl. Internally, Granny has a sense that she’s about to die, and she confronts the unicorn on her lawn and tells it to go back where it came from. She arrives in the middle of the town at noon for her face-off with Diamanda, which the other decides will be a staring contest. Only it won’t be the kind of staring contest Nanny and Granny are expecting…
Commentary
We’re back with our favorite coven, though they promptly break up, like every band that ever broke your heart.
The flashback with young Granny at the start of the book is great, though, particularly in seeing the ways in which Esme Weatherwax has changed… and the ways that she hasn’t. And, of course, Jason’s occasional employment by Death, and what you’re meant to do with the melted down iron from Binky’s shoes. The idea that iron shoed to Death’s horse would give you certain protection or power (provided you didn’t wear it) is properly magical, and also a great way of seeding a “Chekhov’s gun” of sorts right into the narrative.
Pratchett really keeps going with the Shakespeare references in this book, which aligns it more closely with Wyrd Sisters. (There are a couple in Witches Abroad, I believe, but not the sheer volume you see here.) Is it the environment that makes him want to dust those little winks through the text? Lancre is a Shakespearean kingdom, full stop? Or maybe he just had a bunch he meant to use in Wyrd Sisters, and saved them up when they couldn’t be added?
Fans of Discworld love to talk about the ways in which Pratchett used the various Wiccan and occult sects—essentially the “types” within witchcraft circles—in the creation of his witches, and now he’s adding to it with the new coven. This is the first time we’ve gotten the sort of thing I remember from my childhood: the “witch phase,” which is a given to many girls and afab folks in youth provided that those sorts of activities aren’t forbidden in a given household. Basically, the conceit is that most kids who are raised female will eventually go through a period where they get super into witchcraft and magic with their pals. It’s often thought of as a manner in which young women try to assert their combined power in a world that won’t allow them any.
The ‘90s had a bit of an upswing in acknowledging that, which is also how we got movies like The Craft and Hocus Pocus. Diamanda’s group is definitely that sort, even if her personal power is coming from a more nefarious avenue, with their interest in things like Ouija and tarot cards and wearing all that black lace to be dramatic. It’s extremely familiar for kids of a certain generation—I remember having my own tarot deck and a bag with rocks that had runes etched into them? An assortment of crystals and candles and that sort of thing (it helped that my mom was also big into all that stuff, so she encouraged it), too. I never wore black lace, but that’s because I was more of an Agnes i.e. in awe of the girls who could wear the black lace. I loved the goth and witchy aesthetic, but I never felt that I personally could pull it off.
But obviously, we’re meant to be wary of these girls because they’re not sure of what they’re doing… and one of them in particular is bad news. Isn’t that usually the way of things? It’s all fun and games until the leader of your occult meetings turns out to be in league with some real bad ye olde god? Or demon? Or, in this case, Elf?
Asides and little thoughts:
- Look, not to get people all angry about the Pratchett vs transphobia dust up again, but there’s that quote about Jason that says “Nanny Ogg had had an adventurous youth and wasn’t very good at counting, but she was pretty certain he was her son.” And obviously the joke here is that Nanny has had so many kids that she can’t properly remember which ones exited her body and which she maybe sort of accidentally adopted. But the other way you could take that quote is that Nanny Ogg is a trans woman, hence not being entirely sure which kids are hers. Is all I’m saying.
- I’ve said it before and I’ll say it every book, Nanny’s asides (“Bugger, I’ve bitten right through the brim. Right through.”) are… she is perfect and I adore her, even if she is a terror to her poor daughter-in-laws.
- I do love how Pratchett looked up those actual witches names from historical record, nabbed the ones he likes best, and just kept reusing them with slight variations. (This being how Agnes Nitt is similar to Agnes Nutter and Amanita DeVice is close to Anathema Device.)
Pratchettisms:
There was a badger in the privy.
Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people.
His subjects regarded him with the sort of good-natured contempt that is the fate of all those who work quietly and conscientiously for the public good.
Using metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red rag to a bu—was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it.
People were always telling him to make something of his life, and that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to make a bed of it.
Then it was moonlight. Now it was day.
“I like your black lace hanky,” said Nanny, not a bit abashed. “Very good for not showing the bogies.”
Next week we’ll read up to “So she never noticed the hollow near the stones, where eight men slept. And dreamed…”
I love this book so much. I know it’s not very highly regarded by the fans but it’s my favorite witches book and in my top 5 discworld books.
I had read Raymond Feist’ Faerie Tale a few years earlier, another truly excellent and under rated book, and it had me well primed for the Fair Folk being alien and scary. Anyway, I’ll leave you all with this quote from Sir Terry on the back of Lords and Ladies:
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.
I love Verence’s book learning. Having finished kingship, his attempts at marriage books, later on, are even more amusing.
Again, I truly dislike Granny. Her refusal to tell Magrat anything is cruel and destroys the coven at a time when Granny may need all the help she can get. She seems to have changed not a whit since Witches Abroad. At our current book club pace and, for that matter, in Discworld terms, it will be years before she changes and partially redeems herself.
As far as the Shakespeare, this will turn out to be a different play. The Macbeth/Hamlet of Wyrd Sisters is replaced by. Well, I won’t spoil it, but many of you have already guessed.
L-space credits the book The Lancashire Witches by William Harrison Ainsworth (1848) with the names here (and in Good Omens.
BTW, I totally agree with you about Pratchett not being in any way transphobic but Nanny Ogg? As far as major characters, it would be easier to see Granny as trans than Nanny (although I could see Nanny as bi) .
@1, genuine folklore elves aren’t necessarily bad but their standards are very different from ours and they’re pretty intolerant along with not knowing the meaning of proportional retaliation. Best to avoid them. If you can’t manage to keep out of their way, be polite, be honest and don’t try to get something out of them because that never turns out well.
Emmet: Pratchett really keeps going with the Shakespeare references in this book
There are many elements of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in this story. :)
This is one of my favourite Discworld books.
It feels right now like one of my favorites, but honestly whenever I think about a Pratchett book for too long, it becomes one of my favorites, This one, of course, is no exception. I think my favorite part, however, is in a later portion.
Following along in anticipation.
For those who find it slow (like @5), I have to agree. To me this is one of the slowest developing Discworld books. The first part is filled with portents but little else.
But it will change in the next section and the book is ultimately very good (although I do prefer Tiffany Aching’s encounters with the elves).
Scrope or Scrode?
@7 – Definitely Scrope! Fixed, thank you.
This could well be my favourite Discworld novel. Or, at least, the novel that has the most number of my favourite moments in it.
Perhaps it’s not Nanny who is trans, but Jason.
Harrison Ainsworth’s book uses the names of the actual defendants in the 1612 trial at Lancaster Castle of the Pendle witches which were detailed in a contemporary account The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the County of Lancaster. There were two witch families in feud: the Chattox group (Anne Whittle and her daughter Anne Redfearn) and the Device group, led by Old Demdike (died in prison) and comprising her daughter Elizabeth Sowtherns (“Squinting Lizzie”) and grandchildren Alison and James Device (Jennet Device, a nine year old third grandchild, was one of the chief prosecution witnesses.) Other defendants were John and Jane Bulcock, Kathleen Hewit (“Mouldheels”) and, of course, Alice Nutter, the only middle class one of the group. Ten ended up executed. They still have descendants in Lancashire and there’s a line of buses between Manchester and Burnley called “The Witch Way” named after them.
“Lancre” is pretty definitely a pun on “Lancaster”.
I’ve never been certain to what extent the title of “Lords and Ladies” is deliberately meant to evoke “lords-and-ladies”, the beautiful but poisonous plant common in English hedgerows, as a real-life example of something like the elves: lovely to look at but deadly to humans.
I adore this book, partly for its unprecedented combination of Wizard Shenanigans and Witch Escapades.
I don’t like Diamanda one bit, but I deeply relate to the way Agnes wants to be like her. I’ve had that envious, self-hating hero-worship for girls in my schools, not necessarily the prettiest or most popular but seeming to me the smartest, most talented, most accomplished, etc. (OK, I had a serious and entirely unacknowledged crush on at least one of them, which may not be the case here, but still.) Nowadays my life involves fewer people and almost nobody in my age group, so I direct those feelings toward fictional characters and Seanan McGuire.
Inquisitors would have thrown Nanny out of their ranks for being too nasty. Would the Quisition of Omnia throw her out? If they had allowed her in, that is.
Arms, 2; legs, 2; existential dread, 58%; randomized guilt, 94%; witchcraft, 0. I feel like that when I wake up sometimes.
Ridcully saying “continuinuinuinuum” reminds me of Nanny Ogg writing “banananana.”
The General Theory of L-Space, that the contents of books as yet unwritten can be deduced by those now in existence, makes sense to me. Any foray into TV Tropes gives me the dispiriting impression that everything anyone could think of to write has already been written.
@1: “No one ever said elves are nice.” No one who actually knows much about Discworld-adjacent elves would say they’re nice, but such a rumor did apparently start somehow, as Jason demonstrates.
Pratchettism:
You could find anything in a wizard’s pockets. Peas, unreasonable things with legs, small experimental universes, anything.
Looking ahead:
Agnes Nitt makes her debut, as does Perdita. The two are currently one person who’s allegedly coming to suspect that she doesn’t have an inner self despite the contradictory comments she sometimes hears in her mind.
Agnes had never heard Nanny sing. She evidently will eventually do so.
Diamanda might be a bit of a prototype for Annagramma Hawkin, who shows up late in the series — but Annagramma is crueler and more complex, and doesn’t get her witchcraft from elves.
At this point, guarding Lancre Castle is the province of anyone who didn’t have much of anything else to do at the moment and Shawn Ogg happens to be on duty when Magrat arrives. As it turns out, Shawn Ogg will continue to be the castle’s only guard, even when he has very much else to do at the moment (like in this scene), on account of also being numerous other castle staff and also Lancre’s entire standing army (except when he’s not standing) and civil service.
I always took that Nanny Ogg line as a twist on comediennes saying they don’t have any kids “that they know about”.
The reason counting is relevant is due to a certain biological process that takes nine months.
I’m pretty sure that Church law would have said otherwise.
@15: During the age of monarchy, the Catholic Church wholly supported this idea. It was their way of influencing the politics of Europe. As an example, look at Catherine of Aragon, most famous as the first wife of Henry VIII.
With the full approval of Pope Alexander VI (who was hoping to curry favor with Spain) Henry VII and Ferdinand and Isabel betrothed Catherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur, the future Henry VIII’s older brother, when he was 11 and she was 3 (yes, three).
“Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people.” A play on a quote from Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday,” in which a character was not a poet, but a cause of poetry in others. Lots of Chesterton gets echoed in Pratchett.
Ah, here we go with the exact quote, courtesy of Project Gutenberg:
”Even if the people were not “artists,” the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face—that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat—that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself?”
@16, I’m afraid that’s wrong. To start with Arthur and Catherine were only a year apart in age. Secondly according to Catholic canon law the consent of the intended couple is key to a licit marriage. Children could be betrothed at any age but they had to give their consent for the marriage to be completed. Granted since the age of consent was fourteen for boys and twelve for girls resistance to parental wish’s were unlikely. Also granted few women would turn a king down. Though Anne Boleyn rather famously did so.
@19
people who turned H8 down and stuck to it included Mary of Guise and Christine of Denmark. Anne Boleyn said yes when Henry met her conditions.
@19: You’re right about the age difference. I confused two references.
They were both about 3 when negotiations regarding the marriage started and about 11 when the Treaty of Medina del Campo, formalizing the agreement was signed. I used the first age for Catherine and the second for Arthur. My bad.
BUT, that said, since Arthur, not yet 14, was below the age of consent, a papal dispensation allowing the marriage was issued in February 1497, and the pair were betrothed by proxy.
They were married by proxy (which was not uncommon) on 19 May 1499 when Arthur was still over a year short of his majority in canon law.
Money and power (and politics) then and now, get you privilege, which literally means private law.
@6: that’s an interesting reaction; on returning to this book for the first time in possibly 20 years, my thought was that the stakes ramp up steeply right from the beginning, instead of gradually piling up. Consider the obvious clowns trying to conjure power in Guards! Guards! versus Esme standing up to massively dangerous temptation in the prolog here. It’s true there are portents in plenty — but this isn’t Roy Dreary in Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind blithering “This means something!”; it’s ratcheting up the tension so you have to guess what will break first.
Pratchettisms:
There’s a certain glint in her eye generally possessed by those people who have found that they are more intelligent than most people around them but who haven’t yet learned that one of the most intelligent things they can do is prevent said people ever finding this out.
Lancre was so small that you couldn’t lie down without a passport.
…Verence had kingship thrust upon him. Just in case the first few pages make you think this will be all A Midsummer Night’s Dream all the time. No, I don’t know why Lancre brings out the Shakespeare (or remember whether it does in subsequent books).
Verence was a great believer in knowledge derived from books. Another thing he has in common with Magrat. (The agricultural aspect of these scenes also brings to mind George III being known as the Farmer King, although he was certainly not an accidental monarch.)
There were plenty of people in Lancre for whom Nanny Ogg’s face had been the first and last thing they had ever seen, which had probably made all the bit in the middle seem quite uneventful by comparison.
Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare. I’m sure this is an echo, but don’t know the original.
@17: They’re both riffing on Shakespeare: Falstaff is not only witty in himself, but the cause of wit in other men.
@23: “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” (Falstaff, Henry IV Act 1 Scene 2)
Pratchett may have gotten the phrasing from Falstaff but by effectively changing “not only” to “not” he hits comedic gold.
@22 chip137 – Who called/calls George III “The Farmer King”? That misses out the pun that’s more than half the point…
My mistake — I should have looked up rather than trusting fading memory….
@25 @26:
Whether it was an inspiration for the character of Verence is debatable but according to the almighty Wikipedia:
“George III was dubbed “Farmer George” by satirists, at first to mock his interest in mundane matters rather than politics, but later to portray him as a man of the people, contrasting his homely thrift with his son’s grandiosity.[134] Under George III, the British Agricultural Revolution reached its peak”
@27 – Yes. My point was that he was known as “Farmer George”, which is a pun, not “The Farmer King”, which isn’t.