Discworld Blog 3 (and blog two-ish)

In Discworld: The Colour of Magic, the first installment in a comic fantasy novel series, author Terry Pratchett uses myriad intertextual and cultural codes, drawing on nearly everything from ancient mythology to contemporary theoretical physics, to build his characters’ semic codes and set up the proairetics of his parody of the hero’s journey conventional form. The arch of Rincewind, Discworld’s unassuming protagonist, follows mythologist Joseph Campbell’s outline of the heroic story in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

The premise of Discworld, that the world is a disc balanced on the back of a cosmic turtle (Pratchett, 1), Pratchett borrows straight from an ancient Chinese myth. However, Pratchett writes that Discworld is, “a world that only exists because every improbability curve must have its far end,” and also a quantum shift into a parallel universe fits into the boon of Rincewind’s arch (Pratchett, 46 108). Together, these intertextual codes from Chinese Mythology and theoretical physics put Discworld in the science fiction/fantasy genre by posing the question: What if there is a parallel universe full cosmic turtles with oceans and continents on their backs?

Pratchett implicitly declares that Discworld is a parody of the hero convention when he introduces a literal “hero” in Hrun the Barbarian, “who was practically an academic by Hub standards in that he could think without moving his lips (Pratchett, 20).” Hrun, is a reference to the Old English epic Beowulf, about a Christian hero who kills the monster Grendel and his mother, but then is killed by a dragon. Pratchett links Hrun to Beowulf by starting his name with “hr.” In Beowulf, the “hr” sound starts many names such as Hrothgar the King and Hrunting the sword. This intertextual reference to Beowulf builds Hrun’s semic code by calling up the images of the barbarian heroes of Old English and Germanic Lore: brave but arrogant. The connection to Beowulf contributes to Discworld’s proairetics as well because it is known that Beowulf  died of wounds acquired while slaying a dragon. Therefore, when Hrun the Barbarian battles dragons in Discworld, one expects him to die, increasing the dramatic effect when Pratchett writes that Hrun is saved at the very last moment (Pratchett, 106).

Hrun’s talking magic sword Kring is also a vehicle for intertextual codes. Pratchett writes that Kring says to Rincewind, “I spent a couple of hundred years on the bottom of a lake once (Pratchett, 71),” which is an intertextual reference to King Arthur’s sword Excalibur which in every version of the legend is at least thrown into a lake when Arthur dies. This furthers Pratchett’s parody of the heroic journey, because Hrun is portrayed as a selfish warrior contrasting with his sword’s previous owner, a beloved ruler. Kring also says, “What I’d really like is to be a ploughshare. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds like an existence with some point to it,” which is a paraphrase of the Old Testament, Isaiah 2:4:

“And He will judge between the nations, And will render decisions for many peoples; And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they learn war.”