Non.Fiction.The.Folklore.Of.Discworld.2008 by Pratchett Terry

Author:Pratchett, Terry [Pratchett, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407034249
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Gnarly Ground

Gnarly ground is hard to see, let alone describe. There’s a patch of it on the highest part of the moorlands, beyond the forest and among the mountains. If you look at it in one way, it’s just a pathless stretch of heather and furze, less than a mile across (even if the furze is horribly matted and thorny), and at one point there’s a little stream which has cut a groove among the rocks, scarcely more than a foot deep. You could easily jump it. Yet somebody has laid a broad stone slab across it, as a bridge. Now look at the scene the other way … You see an endless, nasty-looking, desolate expanse; a long, narrow, dizzying bridge spanning a ravine; a raging torrent far below. They say a deer will sometimes run on to gnarly ground if hard-pressed in the hunt, but it has to be pretty desperate.

‘What is gnarly ground?’ said Agnes.

‘There’s a lot of magic in these mountains, right?’ said Nanny. ‘And everyone knows mountains get made when lumps of land bang together, right? Well, when the magic gets trapped you … sort of … get a bit of land where the space is … sort of … scrunched up, right? It’d be quite big if it could, but it’s like a bit of gnarly wood in an ol’ tree. Or a used hanky … all folded up small but still big in a different way.’ [Carpe Jugulum]

In Carpe Jugulum, Granny Weatherwax sets out alone to cross the gnarly ground, and the younger witches go after her. Their socks, knitted from Lancre’s toughest, most wiry wool, protect them from the savage spikes of furze. But then comes the gorge, an abyss so deep one can barely see the river below, and a high, slender bridge that shifts and creaks underfoot. And then a cavern, some tunnels, a flash of fire.

It is a strange, perilous journey, but not unparalleled. Time and again, in myths and folk tales from all parts of the multiverse, those who take the road to the Otherworld must pass a water barrier by way of a Bridge Perilous. A Scottish ballad describes one leading from Purgatory to Paradise:

The brigge was as heigh as a tower,

And as scharpe as a rasour,

And naru it was also;

And the water that ther ran under

Brennd of lightning and of thunder,

That thought him mikle wo.

The closest match for Granny’s journey is the strange medieval funeral chant known as ‘The Lyke-Wake Dirge’, which Yorkshire women sang, as late as the sixteenth century, as they kept watch over a corpse. The tale it tells was already old; it had begun (in so far as such things can be said ever to begin) four hundred years before, as a vision which came to a German monk called Gottskalk in December 1189, as he lay sick of a fever. He saw the souls of the dead gathering on the edge of a great wild heath covered with thorns and furze.

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