Discworld Annotations

              1. The Colour of Magic - part 2

                  Taken from the Internet

Continued from last issue

[p. 75/67] This is the first occurrence of the name
'Dunmanifestin' for the home of the Gods at the top of Cori
Celesti. It is used again in several places throughout the other
Discworld novels.  This is not only a reference to the many
British placenames that begin with 'Dun' (a Gaelic word meaning
castle or fort and hence town) but also a reference to the
supposedly traditional name for a twee retirement bungalow in the
suburbs. When people (especially the bourgeois middle classes)
retire to the suburbs they always, according to the stereotype,
give the house some 'cute' punning name. Since the Dun/Done
association is well-known, one of the more common names (though it
is a matter of discussion if anyone has ever actually seen a house
with this name) is 'Dunroamin' -- that is "done roaming" -- i.e.
the owners of the house have finished "travelling the world" and
are now settled down to a life of the Daily Mail, golf and coffee
mornings. From this, we get that a retirement home for gods not
possessing much taste, might just be named 'Dunmanifestin'.  A
correspondent tells me that 'Dun' is also an Old English word for
hill.

[p. 76/68] "[...] Zephyrus the god of slight breezes."
Zephyrus was in fact the Greek god of the soft west winds. The
interactions of the gods in 'The Sending of Eight' strongly bring
to mind the Godshome scenes in Leiber's Swords series.

[p. 78/70] The Sending of Eight
Just as the first chapter of The Colour of Magic has many
resonances with Fritz Leiber's Swords series, so can this chapter
be regarded as a light parody of the works of horror author H. P.
Lovecraft, who wrote many stories in a universe where unspeakable
Evil lives, and where Ancient Gods (with unpronounceable names)
play games with the lives of mortals.

[p. 92/82] "[...] the circle began to spin widdershins."
This entire section is a direct analogy to the workings of a
normal electrical generator, with the Elemental Magical Force
being the electromotive force we all know and love from high
school physics lessons.

[p. 98/87] "The floor was a continuous mosaic of eight-sided
tiles, [...]"
It is physically impossible for convex octagons (the ones we
usually think of when we hear the word 'octagon') to tile a plane.
Unless, of course, space itself would somehow be strangely
distorted (one of the hallmarks of the Cthulhu mythos). It is
possible, however, to tile a plane with non-convex octagons (and
Terry nowhere says or implies he meant convex tiles). Proof is
left as an exercise to the reader (I hate ASCII pictures).

[p. 101/89] "[...] the disposal of grimoires [...]"
I don't think too many people will have missed that this section
echoes the two main methods of nuclear waste disposal: sealing
drums in deep salt mines, and dropping the drums into trenches at
subduction zones. Of these two methods, the trench dumping has
only been theorised about and not actually employed.

[p. 114/101] "'I spent a couple of hundred years on the bottom of
a lake once.'"
Reference to the sword Excalibur from the King Arthur legend.
There's another reference to that legend on p. 128/113: "'This
could have been an anvil'".  Some people were also reminded of the
black sword Stormbringer, from Michael Moorcock's Elric saga.

[p. 114/101] "'What I'd really like to be is a ploughshare. I
don't know what that is, but it sounds like an existence with some
point to it.'"
Swords and ploughshares have always been connected through a
proverb originating in a famous phrase from the Bible, in Isaiah
2:4: "[...] and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and
their spears into pruning hooks:  nation shall not lift up sword
against nation, neither shall they learn war any more".

[p. 117/103] "I'LL GET YOU YET, CULLY, said Death [...]"
Death is addressing Rincewind here, so the use of what looks like
a different name is confusing. Terry explains: "Cully still just
about hangs on in parts of the UK as a mildly negative term
meaning variously 'yer bastard', 'man', 'you there' and so on.
It's quite old, but then, Death is a history kind of guy."  The
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer (a 19th
century reference book; see also the Words From The Master section
in chapter 5) explains 'cully' as being a contracted form of
'cullion', "a despicable creature" (from the Italian: coglione).
An Italian correspondent subsequently informed me that "coglione"
is actually a popular term for testicle, which is often used to
signify a stupid and gullible person. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, 'cully' may also have been a gypsy word.

[p. 118/104] The entire Lure of the Wyrm section parodies the Pern
novels (an sf/fantasy series) by Anne McCaffrey. The heroine of
the first Pern novel Dragonflight is called Lessa, and the
exclamation mark in Terry's dragonriders' names parallels the
similar use of apostrophes in McCaffrey's names.

[p. 124/109] "The dragons sense Liessa's presence."
This section in italics (continued later with Ninereeds) is
another Pern reference (see the annotation for p. 118/104), in
this case to the way McCaffrey depicts the mental communications
from the dragons.

[p. 125/110] "Oh, you know how it is with wizards. Half an hour
afterwards you could do with another one, the dragon grumbles."
The 'half an hour afterwards' quip is more conventionally made
about Chinese food.

[p. 130/114] "[...] it appeared to be singing to itself."
Although singing swords are common as dirt in myths and folklore,
we do know that Terry is familiar with many old computer games, so
the description of Kring may be a passing reference to the
prototypical computer adventure game ADVENT (later versions of
which were also known as Adventure or Colossal Cave). In this game,
a room exists where a sword is stuck in an anvil. The next line of
the room's description goes: "The sword is singing to itself".

[p. 141/123] "[...] he had been captivated by the pictures of the
fiery beasts in The Octarine Fairy Book."
A reference to our world's Blue, Brown, Crimson, Green, etc.,
Fairy Books, edited by Andrew Lang.

[p. 168/145] "At that moment Lianna's dragon flashed by, and Hrun
landed heavily across its neck. Lianna leaned over and kissed
him."
A strange error, since in the rest of the story the girl's name is
Liessa. Terry says the typo (which occurs in both the original
Colin Smythe hardcover and the 1st edition of the Corgi paperback,
but can also be found as late as the 5th edition of the US Signet
paperback) must have been introduced sometime during the
publishing process: they are not in his original manuscript.
Even so, the switch is kind of appropriate because Anne McCaffrey
has a tendency herself to suddenly change a character's name or
other attributes (T'ron becoming T'ton, etc.). At least one of my
correspondents thought Terry was changing Liessa's name on purpose
as an explicit parody.

[p. 169/146] After Rincewind and Twoflower escape from the
Wyrmberg they are flying a dragon one moment and a modern jetliner
the next.  Clearly they have been, get this, translated to another
plane (the last few paragraphs of this section seem to support the
theory that Terry actually intended this rather implicit pun).
Note also the "powerful travelling rune TWA" appearing on the
Luggage: Trans World Airlines.

[p. 171/148] 'Zweiblumen' is the (almost) literal German
translation of 'Twoflower' (it actually translates to
'Twoflowers', so a 'better' translation would have been the
singular form: 'Zweiblume').  'Rjinswand', however, is merely
something that was intended to sound foreign -- it is not a word
in any language known to the readers of alt.fan.pratchett.

[p. 172/149] "[...] a specialist in the breakaway oxidation
phenomena of certain nuclear reactors."
"Breakaway oxidation phenomena" is a reasonably well-known example
of doubletalk. Basically, what Terry's saying here is that Dr.
Rjinswand is an expert on uncontrolled fires in nuclear reactors.
And we all know what Terry's job was before he became a Famous
Author...

[p. 176/153] "'I am Goldeneyes Silverhand Dactylos,' said the
craftsman."
'Dactylos' means 'fingers' in dog Greek. See also the annotation
for p. 159/115 of Small Gods .

The fate of Dactylos has been suffered by craftsmen in our world
as well. In 1555 Ivan the Terrible ordered the construction of St.
Basil's Church in Moscow.  He was so pleased with this piece of
work by the two architects, Postnik and Barma, that he had them
blinded so they would never be able to design anything more
beautiful.

[p. 179/155] "[...] the incredibly dry desert known as the Great
Nef."
'Neff' is the name of an oven manufacturer, and 'nef' is of course
'fen' (i.e.  something incredibly wet) spelled backwards.

[p. 184/160] "The captain had long ago decided that he would, on
the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying."
Probably the best known version of this line is from Woody Allen,
who said: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I
want to achieve it through not dying".

[p. 184/160] "'His name is Tethis. He says he's a sea troll.'"
In Greek mythology Tethys or Thetis was the personification of the
feminine fecundity of the sea. She was the daughter of Uranus and
Gaia, and the youngest female Titan (or Titanide). Eventually she
married her brother Oceanus, and together they had more than 3000
children, namely all the rivers of the world.  Note that this is
one instance where Terry violates his own unwritten rule that
trolls should have 'mineral' names. Perhaps this is simply because
we are looking at this early book in the series with hindsight:
the only rock troll to appear up to this point lasted about three
paragraphs and didn't have a chance to introduce himself.  But even
if the unwritten rule was already established in Terry's mind at
this point, it seems logical that it should not apply to Tethis,
who is, after all, neither a rock troll, nor originally a Discworld
creature.

[p. 189/164] "'Ghlen Livid,' he said."
Glenlivet is a well-known Single Malt Scotch whisky. It's a wee
bit more expensive than Johnny Walker.

[p. 193/168] He told them of the world of Bathys, [...]"
'Bathys' is Greek for 'deep', as in for example bathyscaphe
deep-sea diving equipment.

[p. 194/168] "[...] the biggest dragon you could ever imagine,
covered in snow and glaciers and holding its tail in its mouth."
Tethis is describing a planet designed according to a
world-view that is about as ancient and as widespread as the idea
of a Discworld itself.  The snow and glaciers seem to point
specifically to the Norse mythology however, where the
Midgard serpent Jormungand circles the world in the manner
described.

[p. 198/172] "'Well, the disc itself would have been created by
Fresnel's Wonderful Concentrator,' said Rincewind,
authoritatively."
It is stereotypical that in fantasy fiction (e.g. Jack Vance's
Dying Earth stories) and role-playing games (e.g. Advanced
Dungeons & Dragons) spells are often named after their 'creator',
e.g. 'Bigby's Crushing Hand'. And indeed, in our universe Augustin
Fresnel was the 19th century inventor of the Fresnel lens, often
used in lighthouses to concentrate the light beam. A Fresnel lens
consists of concentric ring segments; its main advantage is that
it is not as thick as a (large) normal lens would be. The disc
Rincewind is referring to is a transparent lens twenty feet
across.

[p. 221/191] "Whoever would be wearing those suits, Rincewind
decided, was expecting to boldly go where no man [...] had boldly
gone before [...]"
From the famous opening voice-over to the Star Trek television
series:  "Space... the final frontier. These are the voyages of
the Starship Enterprise.  Its five-year mission: to explore
strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations --
to boldly go where no man has gone before."  (This became "where
no-one has gone before" only in the newer, more politically
correct Star Trek incarnations)

[p. 222/192] "'? Ty› yur †tl h› sooten g†trunen?'"
People have been wondering if this was perhaps a real sentence in
some Scandinavian language (the letters used are from the
Danish/Norwegian alphabet), but it isn't.

Terry remarks: "The point is that Krullian isn't Swedish -- it's
just a language that looks foreign. In the same way, I hope the
hell that when Witches Abroad is translated the translators use
some common sense when dealing with Nanny Ogg's fractured
Esperanto."

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