The Colour of Magic

that, in sharp contrast to many later writers in the field, Leiber himself already had a great sense of humour. Fafhrd and the Mouser are not to be taken altogether serious in his original version, either.

Given all this, I can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that Terry intended Ankh-Morpork to be a direct parody of the great city of Lankhmar in which many of the Swords adventures take place. However, Terry explicitly denied this when I suggested it on alt.fan.pratchett:

'Bravd and the Weasel were indeed takeoffs of Leiber characters—there was a lot of that sort of thing in The Colour of Magic. But I didn’t—at least consciously, I suppose I must say—create Ankh-Morpork as a takeoff of Lankhmar.'

6

The story behind Rincewind’s name goes back to 1924, when J. B. Morton took over authorship of the column ‘By The Way’ in the Daily Express, a London newspaper.

He inherited the pseudonym ‘Beachcomber’ from his predecessors on the job (the column had existed since 1917), but he was to make that name forever his own by virtue of his astonishing output and success: Morton wrote the column for over 50 years, six times a week, until 1965 when the column became a weekly feature, and continued to the last column in November 1975.

Beachcomber/Morton used an eccentric cast of regular characters in his sketches, which frequently caricatured self-important and highbrow public figures. One continual theme was the silliness of the law courts, featuring amongst others Mr Justice Cocklecarrot and the twelve Red-Bearded Dwarves. In one sketch, the names of those dwarfs were given as Sophus Barkayo-Tong, Amaninter Axling, Farjole Merrybody, Guttergorm Guttergormpton, Badly Oronparser, Cleveland Zackhouse, Molonay Tubilderborst, Edeledel Edel, Scorpion de Rooftrouser, Listenis Youghaupt, Frums Gillygottle, and, wait for it: Churm Rincewind. Terry says:

'I read of lot of Beachcomber in second-hand collections when I was around 13. Dave Langford pointed out the origin of Rincewind a few years ago, and I went back through all the books and found the name and thought, oh, blast, that’s where it came from. And then I thought, what the hell, anyway.'

7

Terry has this to say about the name ‘Twoflower’: “[…] there’s no joke in Twoflower. I just wanted a coherent way of making up ‘foreign’ names and I think I pinched the Mayan construction (Nine Turning Mirrors, Three Rabbits, etc.).”

8

On the covers of the first two Discworld books, Josh Kirby actually drew Twoflower with four physical eyes. Consensus on alt.fan.pratchett has it that Terry was trying to get across the fact that Twoflower was wearing glasses (‘four-eyes’ being a common insult thrown at bespectacled folks), but that Josh Kirby simply triggered on the literal text and went off in a direction of his own. Whether this action essentially shows Kirby’s interpretative genius (the KirbyFan explanation) or his inability to get the joke / read very carefully (the NonKirbyFan explanation) is a matter still under discussion.

9

The inn called ‘The Broken Drum’ gets burned down in this book. The later Discworld novels all feature an inn called ‘The Mended Drum’. The novel Strata contains an explanation of why you would call a pub ‘The Broken Drum’ in the first place: “You can’t beat it”.

10

One of the few clues to Rincewind’s age being younger rather than older, despite the tendency of every cover artist to depict him as at least sixtyish. No one ever draws him as looking like a weasel, either.

11

The name of the Discworld’s premier scientific institution resonates with that of the Invisible College, formed by the secret organisation of the Rosicrucians, whose members were called the Invisibles because they never dared to reveal themselves in public. The Invisible College was a conclave of scientists, philosophers and other progressive thinkers which, in later times and under Stuart patronage, became the Royal Society.

In the Brief Lives arc of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic, Dream visits the Invisible College, where a scientist is happily dissecting a dead orangutan. I don’t think that scene was entirely coincidental…

12

An American reader was puzzled by the fact that in Ankh-Morpork the unit of currency is the dollar, instead of, for instance, something more British, like the pound. Terry explained:

'The dollar is quite an elderly unit of currency, from the German ‘thaler’, I believe, and the use of the term for the unit of currency isn’t restricted to the US. I just needed a nice easy monetary unit and didn’t want to opt for the ‘gold pieces’ cliche. Sure, I live in the UK, but I haven’t a clue what the appropriate unit of currency is for a city in a world on the back of a turtle:-)…'

13

A very old British slang word for ready money is ‘rhino’, which Brewer thinks may be related to the phrase ‘to pay through the nose’, since ‘rhinos’ means ‘nose’ in Greek.

14

An interesting consideration is just when Lord Vetinari became Patrician. Clearly this isn’t him (Vetinari eating crystallised jellyfish? —I don’t think so. Besides, Interesting Times makes it quite clear