Hello, my name is Andy Shamel and I am the chaplain of Lincoln College in Oxford, and I wrote my doctoral thesis on the way that human beings tell stories in order to encounter the world as meaningful. And a big part of that thesis was reflection on the way that modern fantasy literature represents a kind of this myth-making impulse. And Terry Pratchett was amongst the authors I studied in this way.
In what follows, I will give an introduction to Pratchett's largest body of stories, the Discworld novels, and a bit of an examination of how fantasy and the real world interact in fantasy fiction in general, and the Discworld novels in particular. Being based as we are here at Oxford, I will take a bit of a look at Unseen University, the disc's premier institution of higher learning. And so we begin. In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions in an astral plane that was never meant to fly,
the curling star mists waver and part. See great A'Tuin the turtle comes swimming slowly through the interstellar Gulf hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, rheum his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea sized eyes that are crusted with room and asteroid dust, he stares fixedly at the destination. In a brain bigger than a city with geological slowness, he thinks only of the weight.
Most of the weight is, of course, accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the disc of the world rests garlanded, but the long blue waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby blue vault of heaven. So begins 'The colour of magic', the first of the novels set on this strange and unlikely World and Mirror of Worlds.
Those of a spiritual persuasion in our own world have sometimes spoken of certain islands, mountains, forests, waterfalls as thin places where the boundaries between the temporal and the eternal are less formidable than usual. The whole of the Discworld is a thin place between the impossible and the actual. And though as a setting for Terry Pratchett's forty-one Discworld novels, it has its own integrity. It also seems especially prone to influences bleeding over from our own world.
The series of novels begins as a kind of parody of the 20th century pulp fantasies of people like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Fritz Leiber, which featured burly warrior heroes, stinking cities and wicked, decadent sorcerers. The musclebound Conan is replaced in the Discworld by the wiry and ancient Cohen the Barbarian, the world's only octogenarian hero.
The foetid and treacherous city of Lankmar is replaced by Ankh-Morpok, which is a kind of cross between 14th century London and 19th century New York City. And the schemes and devious plots that characterise the evil sorcerers of pulp fantasy are transformed in time into the politics and petty rivalries of tenured faculty, the unseen university, which, as mentioned, is like an Oxford College seen in distorted reflection.
As the series goes on, the influences from other worlds become more pronounced. There are topical books on Discworld treatments of everything from films in 'Mving pictures' and music with rocks in 'Soul music'. To the development of the printing press in 'The truth' and early ruminations on the moral status of A.I. in 'Feet of clay', a story about golems.
Then there are more incidental or thematic conclusions, fairy godmothers who are reflective on their identity as fairy godmothers, a vampire going through caffeine withdrawal, who begins to have flashovers to the Vietnam War. And there's a whole continent on the Discworld called Fourecks that while it is not Australia, it is very Australian.
The end result of all of this is a pastiche, a composite setting that participates freely in the tropes and expectations of the fantasy novel while being able to borrow freely from and distort with wild abandon familiar images, characters and cultural references from our own.
Theorists of fantasy have long noted the way that fantasy fiction is able to take issues in our own world and defamiliarise them to the extent that one is able to see them anew or indeed to see them at all in a way that is at least somewhat protected from the anxieties of our own discourses.
The Discworld novels do this with an almost manic degree, and yet with such charm, humour and felicity that by and large the reader can believe in the world, Pratchett has woven and at the same time see our own world in a different way. Our world shapes the Discworld and the Discworld reflects our world back to us.
This dynamic is not unique to Pratchett's novels, of course, I will leave it up to art historians and theorists of literature to say whether all art does this, but we can safely say, I think that lots of art shows us ourselves reflected in a certain light. What is peculiar about fantasy literature in general and the Discworld novels in particular, is the way that this process is mediated and influenced by magic.
The Discworld is famously suffused with magic. Its presence is what renders the world susceptible to influences from other worlds, and it conditions and changes the rules of what in our world we might call physics. We learn early on, for instance, that light travels more slowly in a magical field, which accounts for why, even though the sun rises each day over a flat disk of a world, the Discworld world still has what we might call time zones.
Dawn oozes lazily across the disc, as does nightfall. One of the characteristic features of fantasy literature as a genre is the tendency, though by no means necessity, of that which is conceptual, spiritual or the province of symbolic and ritual practise in our world to be rendered as objective, palpable and accessible to the realm of the senses in the fantasy world.
For instance, in the Discworld, the gods quite literally live on the top of a very tall mountain at the centre of the disk, you could go there, as Cohen the Barbarian does in the illustrated novella 'The Last Hero'. In our world, magic has always been something that exists in a realm closer to what otherwise might be classified as religion. A marshalling of spiritual forces and the interpretation of dreams and their spiritual meanings.
In the Discworld, however, magic is very pragmatically real and is something more like technology. To study magic becomes something more like the study of physics, engineering and even psychology. The wonder of scientific discovery and the mysteries of the spiritual universe coincide. Before I continue, it is worth noting that in the Discworld novels, Magic is with a couple of notable exceptions, strictly gendered.
There is Witch magic and there is wizard magic. Magic of witches tends to be more psychological and less flashy, more relational and protective, which as we learn guard the borders, borders between worlds, between people, between the interior and exterior of the self. Wizard magic is more technological, emerging from experimentation and rote memorisation and resulting in devices, spectacular displays and often no small amount of mayhem.
Many people have written on the gender and sexual politics of the Discworld novels, which are often surprisingly complex and almost always self questioning. For now, suffice it to say that though magic remains broadly gendered and wizardly magic is given more social prestige in the novels. It can be argued that in the lights of the novels, it is ultimately judged the inferior sort, destructive and often self-centred as it is often seen to be.
However, in keeping with the ancient customs of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which are now blessedly abandoned, the Discworld Unseen University is an all male establishment, like the celibate dons of bygone Oxford generations. The wizards of UU must be men and they cannot be married.
I will leave you to make of this what you will, but it is an important aspect of the way in which the Real World University, from which I am now speaking, impinges upon its fantasy analogue and the reflection which Unseen university casts back upon us here. Gender is, of course, a huge marker of privilege in our society, even today, as well as that of the Discworld. It is only in the last hundred years that women here have been allowed to vote in most modern democracies,
let alone attend the institutions of higher learning. Magic in the Discworld is arguably power made manifes; magic can do anything it is doing as an abstract idea turned into something objectively manipulable. The restrictions placed on its study are therefore inseparable from restrictions placed on its exercise. It is a classic case of not wanting the wrong sort to have power that they cannot be expected responsibly to use.
Thankfully today, though the patriarchy continues to hinder the full participation of most people in the hierarchies of power, the gender requirements of admission to the halls of the academy have been cast aside.
And while we may continue to find the high bar of entry to universities such as Oxford to be unjust and the advantage it still offers to those of a certain family and regional upbringing, we may at least count ourselves lucky that the requirement for entry is not as strictly determined by birth as the traditional qualification for the university in the Discworld that is to be the eighth son of an eighth son.
The modern university is sometimes criticised for its support of very niche subjects or departments that seem disconnected from the nitty gritty of real life, which is itself a category that can mean many things to many people. The study of literature, for instance, often comes up for ridicule, let alone the visual arts and music in an increasingly competitive and materially oriented world.
These subjects sound to many outside the university as irrelevant as the study of recent runes inadvisably applied magic and cruel and unusual geography,
all of which are offered at Unseen University. However, as silly as those course titles may be, it is important to recall that the subject under consideration is magic and that the terminology of a discipline or a fandom or a hobby will always sound strange and a bit absurd to those on the outside, like the abstruse subjects of the real world, the study of magic Unseen university is ultimately the pursuit of the nature of things.
It is a manifestation of the innate human desire to know what is over the next hill. What is under that rock? What happens if I press this big red button? It is about the fundamental wonderment that we as a species have for the situation in which we find ourselves. And so it is not a coincidence that academia and magic collapse into each other in the fantasy environment of Discworld. The university comes in for no little amount of mockery in the novels, but this is only to be expected.
They are fundamentally satire, laughing at the world in order to expose its contradictions, deflate its pomposity, and finally reveal its basic and precious humanity. This humanity is Pratchett's overriding concern, even as it is manifest in dwarfosity, goblinety and werewolfitude.
Throughout the novels, project uses the magical to make apparent the precious value of the ordinary, just as so much of academic study seeks to do to show how wonderful and terrible is culture, biology, politics or the recesses of human thought. In this fantasy world, riding through space on the back of four elephants standing on the back of an impossibly huge turtle.
We see the value of these things and the miracle of our humanity through the lens of the fantastic and so we discover our own being to be just a bit magical as well. Thank you.