The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 6: Wyrd Sisters

While Sourcery saw the return of Rincewind to varying degrees of success, Wyrd Sisters sees the return of another established character, but with greater impact to the series as a whole.

Granny Weatherwax had previously appeared in Equal Rites, third in the series, and was back for a second appearance. This time, though, she brought a coven with her…

Wyrd Sisters famously sends up Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but isn’t afraid to add several other plays and theatrical ideas into the mix, mostly in the form of play fragments that Hwel, a playwright who, um, plays a large part in the story, comes up with.

We also meet some of Granny Weatherwax’s colleagues in witchcraft and have her home turf explored more thoroughly. This is the first book in the Discworld series that spends most of its time in the one place and it really helps the atmosphere of the story: Lancre becomes a proper fantasy kingdom by the end of this book, far more than any other place on the Disc besides the city of Ankh-Morpork, which had featured prominently in every book prior to this (and does again here).

But let’s meet the coven first. The idea of the coven was ostensibly Magrat Garlick’s. She is the youngest of the three witches and the most earnest and keen. She is, as Granny calls her, “a wet hen,” and has some very obvious parallels with the modern witch seen in the late twentieth century in our world (it’s very likely that she and Anathema Device, one of the characters from Good Omens, share some DNA).

The third member of the coven is Nanny Ogg, a very earthy older lady who has had three husbands and many more partners. She and Granny are often at odds over Nanny’s morals (which is odd given that Granny doesn’t believe she has any) and frequently argue over the appropriate way of solving problems.

The structure of the coven references the classical mythological idea of “maiden, mother and crone” with Granny frequently annoyed because of which one she thinks she has wound up as, but it’s also an idea that gets explored a lot across the Witches books. Granny is also a bit different to how she appears in Equal Rites. Although my head canon is that it’s some years later and she’s forced to deal with other people a lot in this book, which is something she is good at but hates.

At any rate, the three witches get involved in the assassination of the king of Lancre (by his brother). They stop his infant son from being murdered and foster him off with a troupe of travelling actors, believing that he will be safe with them. As time passes – and in this book it passes with a little help from the witches – it becomes apparent that the kingdom needs a proper king again so the witches become involved in restoring the dead king’s son to the throne, which is when things become even more confusing…

But there’s other characters, of course: Verence, the dead king who is now reduced to haunting his castle and desperately trying to get the attention of anyone to inform them of his plight; the Fool, a jester who hates his job, and who often feels like the only sane man in a kingdom full of, well, fools; Lord and Lady Felmet, the brother and sister-in-law of the king, who successfully assassinate him and usurp the throne; the dwarven playwright Hwel, who is kept awake at night by snippets of plays that stream into his mind from places unknown… to him at least…; and Tomjon, the king’s infant son who is smuggled out of the kingdom by the witches and adopted by the manager of an acting troupe, with nothing to show that he’s the rightful king except a crown quickly consigned to the props box and the blessings of the witches in a rather touching pastiche of a scene from Sleeping Beauty, as well as an insight into what the witches each value or feel lacking in themselves.

“He will make friends easily,”

from Magrat

“A bloody good memory is what he ought to have…He’ll always remember the words.”

Nanny Ogg

“Let him be whoever he thinks he is… That’s all anybody could hope for in this world.”

Granny Weatherwax

This is probably the first book in the series that is genuinely brilliant. It features a convoluted plot, a heap of superbly-drawn characters, a setting that enhances the story, and it is written wonderfully. It’s still a Discworld novel, with its wonderful gags and wordplay, but it sets the tone for the rest of the series. In fact, it was so successful that a lot of the future Witch books would also take plots derived wholly or partly from other stories, beating them into submission with Granny’s lack of nonsense, Nanny’s pragmatism and Magrat’s idealism.

This was another phenomenally well-received book for Terry Pratchett. It was adapted as a play by Stephen Briggs, while Cosgrove Hall, the renowned animation company that had adapted Truckers (one of Sir Terry’s kid’s books, published a year or two after this) turned it into a 6-part cartoon, double-billing it with Soul Music. It’s an ambitious and star-studded production that only just fails to achieve the same heights as the novel. Radio 4 also adapted it for their listeners in a charming, but quite busy, retelling.

(For the record, I won’t be discussing the adaptations of this or the other novels terribly much, except where they directly apply to me, ie I’ve taken part in one of them. While I enjoy them, I have never really felt that many of them successfully capture the magic of the books, which for me, comes from the authorial asides which are frequently lost in translation to another medium)

So Wyrd Sisters proved that Terry Pratchett was not just a one-trick pony and also that the Discworld had some serious staying power to it. It does feature another fairly uneasy romance, though better handled than its counterpart in Sourcery, as well as characters who band together through circumstances rather than shared experiences and values. It’s a smoother read than the previous few novels and feels  a lot more confident in its setting: as I said, Lancre is a proper fantasy kingdom, reminiscent of the towns and forests that Pratchett grew up in, as well as the Shire of Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings and Thomas Hardy’s novels. It of course references the Scotland of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but it’s a country that feels familiar to anyone who’s read a reasonable amount of Fantasy. Ankh-Morpork puts in another appearance, while the Discworld itself plays no greater role than being the setting of the story.

When I read this I was in my second year of a teaching degree. As has become usual in teaching over the last half-century or so, I was outnumbered by female students by a factor of about a dozen to one. So this book came to me at a time when I was beginning to really appreciate feminist points of view. I was being taught by women with impeccable credentials, was learning alongside women who had grown up in an environment where they were able to achieve as much as their male counterparts, and (helpfully) I had been raised by a woman who strove for equality in her own dealings with people. So Wyrd Sisters just reinforced a lot of ideas that I was beginning to formulate in my own head about gender and sexual identity. I didn’t go so far as to classify my friends into “Grannys”, “Nannys” and “Magrats” (they would have killed me!) but I began to recognise that the world wasn’t made for just men any more.

And like the characters in this book, I was also realising that sometimes we had to take on roles that might not fit us, or even be the ones we thought we would have. The witches struggle with being part of a group or team as members of the coven; Felmet and the Fool struggle with doing what they feel they are driven to do by others in spite of what they really want; Hwel is a dwarf who wants to write plays for entertainment, unlike the rest of his brethren who just want to mine gold. As another aside, the idea of dwarves building new careers out of what they discover they are good at or love while struggling with the expectations of their more traditional families back in the mountains becomes a theme in many of the later books. While Pratchett uses fantasy creatures to explore different aspects of racism and culture, the dwarves will become a sort of symbol for the immigrant experience, or rather, the second generation of immigrants who often struggle to maintain their lives in a new culture with the expectations of those who haven’t had to live that experience.

The only character who seems not to be worried about what is expected of him because he’s already found his niche is Tomjon, the heir-apparent to the kingdom of Lancre: he’s skilled at acting, has a talent for direction and is bursting with confidence and ideas for his life (How much of this comes from his natural talent and how much comes from the blessings of the witches is left as an exercise for the reader).

For me, though, who was just beginning my journey into adulthood, it was reassuring to learn that while some people seemed to know what was what and where they should be, most folks were just making their way with only the semblance of a plan, or without even a desire or a clue as to where they were going.

Like the eventual king of Lancre, I was learning that the old ways of dealing with people were not always the best and that new ways weren’t necessarily better just because they were new.

Coming Up Next: We move to warmer climes as a young man has to deal with architecture, magic and his ancestors in Pyramids!