Y Coch a'r y Gwyn – det Røde og det Hvide
The Red and the White
Or even
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A longer tale based on a single paragraph written for The Ankh-Morpork Times – News of The Disc on Facebook. I wrote a one paragraph response to a posting, recognised its ultimate source (primal British myth shared by Celt, Saxon and Norman alike), and thought – why stop here?
Short interim chapter - might be a little while before i can get back to it - life at the moment felels like work-sleep-work... here the witches talk comparative linguistics...
Historical Note, prepared by Miss Alice Band (Guild of Historians), principal tutor in History, Archaeology (Stealth and Conventional), Climbing, Traps, Evasion and Archery, at the Assassins' Guild School.
The relationship between history, narrative, fact and fiction is so much more fluid and interesting than anyone imagines.
"Hmmph." Nimue Weatherwax said. She'd had a trying day.
The two other Witches watched her, cautiously.
"This new Queen." Morgana Garlleg said, tentatively.
"What about her?" asked Nimue, tetchily.
"Wellll. She's the probllllem, isn't she?"
"Could be a nice girl. But she's bin brung up wrong. Get her used to Lancre and our ways of thinkin', and you never know." Gerontia Ogg remarked.
"Bloody spoilt brat, if you asks me." Nimue grunted. "Things hereabouts was…. satisfactory… till Uther took it into his head to go out and get a wife. Daft bugger."
"Only natural, Nim." Gerontia Ogg said. She was twenty-eight and on her second husband. (1)
"I grant it's different for kings." Nimue ploughed on, with an expression on her face suggesting she was exploring a mouth ulcer with her tongue. "So he has to go looking for a spare Princess some other King has got to spare. Then he gets one, from that country in forn parts where they gives the wheat a thumpin'. What do they call it, Corn-a-Whack…"
Mogranna Garlleg sighed slightly.
"Kernawac, Nimue." she said, patiently. "It's not that far away. A llittlllle country, in between Llamedos and Hergen. They speak a llanguage like ours. Rellated to Llamedosian."
"Says he's heard they has a fair and lovely Princess, generous, gentle, easy on the eye, modest, delightful of character, all her own teeth. And this King Mark says, oh, I got one of those, why not drop by and make an offer? Then after Uther signs the marriage contact unseen, silly bugger, Mark tells him, actually, that's my older daughter, she's spoken for, this is her little sister…"
"And he travels off to that place, what do they call it, Tint-A-Girl, realises he's been had, but King Mark signs over a dowry of rich tin mines to sweeten the deal, and he gets this one. The spare."
"Tintagel." Morganna said, patiently, but Nimue wasn't quite listening.
"Tint-A-Girl. Hah!" Nimue said. "Nobody gets that sort of blonde hair naturally. Some serious tintin' went on with that girl!"
"Well, act'lly, Nim. Up towards the Hub they says people are born with hair that shade. Pretty common up there, they says. And them Hublandish buggers is a problem on the coast. Come round in their longships rapin' and pillagin'…"
Nimue wasn't listening to Gerontia either. Hublandish raiders in longships weren't much of a problem in a landlocked country several hundred miles inland.(2) Somebody else's problem.
"Vain little bugger. And dim as a penny candle." Nimue said, dismissively. "And what has this Corn-a-Whack place got, anyway? Clotted cream in tin cans? Nothin' much to be proud of."
"Uther should have thought on." Gerontia said. "If he reads the note sayin', Spare Princess, Yours To A Good Kingdom, All Serious Offers Considered, and her father throws in a couple of tin mines as part of the deal, what's that sayin'? It's sayin', Desperate Father Driven Spare By Demanding Grasping Little Madam, I Needs To Get Shot Before She Drives Me Mad, that's what it's sayin'."
"And he fell for it. And we gets her." Nimue said. She shook her head. "What's her name, Grainier. What sort of a name is that when it's at home? Grainer? As in More Cornier Than Usual?"
"Err.. Nimue? It's a Hergenian name, originalllly…" Morganna was ignored.
"Grainier." Nimue repeated. "As in "really blurry picture which when you gets up close is full of gritty smeary blurry bits"
"Well, actualllly…"
"Hergenian names." Gerontia mused.
"Peoplle in Kernawac speak a llanguage like Llamedosian." Morgana said, getting in quickly. "We're on one side. Hergen's on the other. So their language has llots of Hergenian in it. Gràinne is a fertillity Goddess in Hergen. She makes the barley and the corn grow. The King named his younger daughter after her. It does no harm to name a child after a Goddess. Especialllly a Goddess from the more powerfull country next door where the warriors get touchy. But it's the Kernawacesian spelling of a Hergenian name. Errr."
"Hergenian names." Gerontia mused.
"Pronounced Gron-ya." Morganna interposed, quickly.
"An' it's spelt G-R-A-I-N-N-E." Nimue said, darkly. " Gron-ya. What sort of spellin' is THAT?"
Nimue spoke with the outrage of one whose education was basic, who had learnt basic literacy slowly, doggedly and painfully, who was now seeing hard-learnt principles of orthography and representation of spoken sounds being ripped up by people from forn parts, with no idea as to how the letters of the alphabet were supposed to behave on the page.
"Says Grainier, to my mind. We got twenty-nine letters of the alphabet.(3) They all got sounds. Can't have people from forn parts goin' around givin' 'em new sounds. No wonder people ends up speakin' foreign, if they gives perfectly good letters the wrong sounds. And Hergenian's worse than Llamedosian for that sort of goin'-on."
"Apparently some God put a geese on the Hergenians, back in the dawn of Time." Gerontia remarked. "Cursed 'em with a great curse, that however they said their names, when they wrote 'em down on paper they'd look nothin' like. Which means they gets all stroppy when people can't say 'em right."
The witches considered this.
"As if Hergenians needs a reason to get stroppy and pick a fight." Nimue remarked.
"They had this warlord once. Called Colin. Thing is, his name was Cu Chullain or something. And if anyone couldn't pronounce it proper, which was everyone, he flew into a right strop and thumped six kinds out of people. All down to this bloody Goddess called Errata, 'cos she made damn sure his name got writ down the way it was."
There was a brief silence. Gerontia filled it.
"Met this Hergenian witch called Siobhan, once." Gerontia said. "Got sisters, called Medhbh and Niamh."
Gerontia then spelt out the names as they appeared on paper. There was a short silence.
"Shiv-VAUGHN". Nimue said, darkly. "May-ve. Neeve. In what possible language is there a "V" in there?" (4)
"Hergenian." Morgana said, quickly. "Llamedosian does the same. With our "-dd-" sound… err…"
"So you puts two D's back-to back in Llamedosian and it becomes a sort of vee sound?" Nimue said, exploring the unfamiliar concept of mutable consonants.
"Well, so does we." Gerontia said. "A "P" is one thing. But bung a "h" next to it, an'…"
"Hmmph." Nimue said, her grunt expressing deep dissatisfaction with un-necessary subtleties in linguistics. There was a longer silence. The Witches contemplated.
"This business up at the Castle." Morganna said, trying to prompt the discussion down a different avenue. "The King keeps trying to build a new castle. But every night it falls down again."
"I got a good idea." Nimue said. She did not elaborate.
"Went well at first." Gerontia remarked. "New queen comes home, she gets all appalled at the livin' conditions, demands a better castle like the one her mum and dad have. Nags at Uther, he gives in, so he gets Dwarfs in, grasping little buggers, to dig into the hill, so as to make the dungeons and the sub-dungeons what Her Nibs says is essential to a castle."
She took a drink.
"So them little sods, you have to say they're good at diggin', get three sub-floors of dungeon together and set up the foundations to support everythin' that has to go above. Weigh heavy, do castle walls. All's goin' well. Then Her Nibs asks 'em to go deeper."
"One of them oubliyettey things." Nimue said. "A deep pit you can chuck people in if they gets annoyin'. She sez any modern castle needs one."
"They'll end up usin' it as a garderobe pit." Gerontia said. "Mark my words."
"And by then, they've already gone deep. But she wants 'em to go deeper still. And Uther's payin', so they get stuck in and she gets her oubliette."
Nimue took a reflective sip.
"They gets down fifty feet or so, then them Dwarfs what are diggin' come back up quicker than a rat up a drainpipe. They has a conversation in Dwarfish, everyone downs picks, they sounds worried, then they up sticks and buggered off sharpish, not a word to anyone. Never bin seen since."
Morgana looked worried.
"They say there are tunnells and caves underneath the Castle Mount." Morgana said. Her voice faltered for an instant.
"Oh, we got them alright, love!" Gerontia agreed. "Every bloody where in Lancre."
"So what if…" Morgana's voice dropped. "The Dwarfs dug too deep, opened a long-forgotten pit, lleading to the dark realm of Annwyn, and returned a great evil to the world?"
The other two considered this.
"Nah." Gerontia said. "Good thought, love, but Balgrogs is extinct. Last of 'em got killed by this bloody wizard, or so he claims, durin' the Dark Wars."(5)
"Just like a man." Nimue said. "See an endangered species, and make it even more endangered. Hmmph."
Gerontia gave her old friend a sly appraising grin.
"And how are you getting' on with that wizard, anyway? You bin seein' a lot of him these last few days, I notices."
It might be a while before I get back to this – so I'm keen to give the readership something to be getting on with… call this an interim half-chapter, for now
Notes Dump
Where the magic(k)al fallout from any misunderstandings between a Wizard and a Witch is safely contained.
The quote attributed to Alice Band is taken from a Guardian feature on the making of the big drama series "The Crown", about the British royal family. The full excerpt in context is:
He {producer Peter Morgan} is well aware of the possibility of his fiction's being mistaken for fact – even of his made-up accounts shading into the factual record. He has seen it happen. In the 2006 film The Queen, Morgan invented a scene depicting Blair's first private audience. In 2010, Blair published his autobiography. When Morgan came to read the ex-prime minister's account of that same moment, "I remember thinking, 'Hang on, that's dialogue I wrote, that I didn't get from him – so either I fluked it, clairvoyantly, or he was blurring the facts of his own memory with my fiction.'" I looked it up, and Morgan is right: the encounter described in A Journey feels remarkably similar in tone and shape to the scene in the film. Morgan argues that the relationship "between history, narrative, fact and fiction [is] so much more fluid and unreliable, but also more interesting, than anyone imagines".
(1) The second official one, anyway.
(2) An optimistic former King had experimented with a Royal Lancrastrian Navy, because every self-respecting kingdom has got to have one. But the rowing boat had comer to grief on the rocks in Lancre Gorge.
(3) Nimue and the rest are speaking Old Morporkian, reproduced here in modern Morporkian for convenience. It has most (3.1) of the twenty-six letters we know and love plus the ð, the þ and the ƒ, and sometimes the ø, although this last is seen as a suspicious economic migrant from the Hubland language family. As Tolkein might have noted were he to be writing this, the Old Common Tongue is charted in a synchronous linguistic manner as Old English/Anglo-Saxon travelling through Middle to Modern English as it progresses through the centuries. Look, just imagine the witches are speaking Anglo-Saxon, albeit with a Welsh accent in one case.
(3.1) Z was a late entrant. It contended with the famous ƒ beloved of comedians, which looks like a small-case f but which was used to denote a hard vocalised "s" sound. Z was relatively new to the alphabet in Shakespeare's time, leading to the memorable curse and insult "Thou whoreson zed! Thou un-necessary letter!" Z and ƒ contended for the same phoneme for a couple of centuries, and as we know, Z eventually won whilst ƒ became comic fodder in words like "it ƒucketh"
(4) Comedian Lee Mack does a bloody funny stand-up spiel on Irish names and how they are perceived by people who only speak English. Mack was brought up in England to Irish parents and therefore claims this gives him a licence to make Irish jokes.
(5) The Dark Wars had happened a few hundred years earlier. The Dark Unholy Empire had emerged in Überwald and had during its life redrawn the political and geographical map of the Central Continent. Among other things, waves of displaced peoples had surged out of the contested area, and the effects of this mass migration had collapsed the Latatian Empire. Whole horse tribes surged out of the Vortex Plains at about this time, bringing their languages with them. Latatia's remnants clung on in places like Brindisi, Toleda, Skund and Quirm where the peoples spoke dialects which were a mutated and changed version of Latatian; and languages very like Llamedosian and Hergenian, formerly spoken over a far wider area, had in their turn been forced Turnwise, to lands on the coast of the ocean. Even Lancre had been changed to the point where it now spoke a language Queen Ynci would not have recognised. But somehow it remained Lancre and unchanged.
Original story:
On the FB site, a page of a mediaeval manuscript showing two dragons locked in battle was repurposed with the legend
For just five shillings a month
You can provide dragons like these
With the food and shelter and medical attention they need
Act now!(6)
The idea was to present it as a flyer for the Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons. Recognising the source, I wrote a quick paragraph:
Ah, the Llamedosian Red and the Chalk White playing out their age-old enmity. This bloody Wizard turned up and said it was a metaphor for something or other, two peoples locked in age old enmity, but as he chundered on about it for so long, a local Witch called Nimue Jenkins locked him in a soundproof crystal box in a vain attempt to shut him up - local myth says he's still there, explaining poetic metaphor and its place in history, to this day...
Since then I've been having Ideas to repurpose this as a longer story. As you do.
I'm not sure if the longer story will fit here – so in the spirit of recent musings on elephants with wings, the "original" is going here together with credit for the inspiration, and the expanded and reworked story will fit in elsewhere.
Yes, I do know the title is half in Danish – found smething that appeared to work in Anglo-Saxon, though...
(6) Thanks to Jake Campbell and Maureen Fedarb
