The Colour of Magic

21

Zephyrus was in fact the Greek god of the soft west winds. The interactions of the gods in ‘The Sending of Eight’ strongly bring to mind the Godshome scenes in Leiber’s Swords series.

22

This entire section is a direct analogy to the workings of a normal electrical generator, with the Elemental Magical Force being the electromotive force we all know and love from high school physics lessons.

23

It is physically impossible for convex octagons (the ones we usually think of when we hear the word ‘octagon’) to tile a plane. Unless, of course, space itself would somehow be strangely distorted (one of the hallmarks of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos). It is possible, however, to tile a plane with non-convex octagons (and Terry nowhere says or implies he meant convex tiles). Proof is left as an exercise to the reader.

24

I don’t think too many people will have missed that this section echoes the two main methods of nuclear waste disposal: sealing drums in deep salt mines, and dropping the drums into trenches at subduction zones. Of these two methods, the trench dumping has only been theorised about and not actually employed.

25

Reference to the sword Excalibur from the King Arthur legend. There’s another reference to that legend later: “‘This could have been an anvil’”.

Some people were also reminded of the black sword Stormbringer, from Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga.

26

Swords and ploughshares have always been connected through a proverb originating in a famous phrase from the Bible, in Isaiah 2:4: “[…] and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more”.

27

Death is addressing Rincewind here, so the use of what looks like a different name is confusing. Terry explains: “Cully still just about hangs on in parts of the UK as a mildly negative term meaning variously ‘yer bastard’, ‘man’, ‘you there’ and so on. It’s quite old, but then, Death is a history kind of guy.”

The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer (a 19th century reference book; see also the Words From The Master section in chapter 5) explains ‘cully’ as being a contracted form of ‘cullion’, “a despicable creature” (from the Italian: coglione). An Italian correspondent subsequently informed me that “coglione” is actually a popular term for testicle, which is often used to signify a stupid and gullible person. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘cully’ may also have been a gypsy word.

— The entire Lure of the Wyrm section parodies the Pern novels (an sf/fantasy series) by Anne McCaffrey. The heroine of the first Pern novel Dragonflight is called Lessa, and the exclamation mark in Terry’s dragonriders’ names parallels the similar use of apostrophes in McCaffrey’s names.

28

This section in italics (continued later with Ninereeds) is another Pern reference, in this case to the way McCaffrey depicts the mental communications from the dragons.

29

The ‘half an hour afterwards’ quip is more conventionally made about Chinese food.

30

Although singing swords are common as dirt in myths and folklore, we do know that Terry is familiar with many old computer games, so the description of Kring may be a passing reference to the prototypical computer adventure game ADVENT (later versions of which were also known as Adventure or Colossal Cave). In this game, a room exists where a sword is stuck in an anvil. The next line of the room’s description goes: “The sword is singing to itself”.

31

A reference to our world’s Blue, Brown, Crimson, Green, etc., Fairy Books, edited by Andrew Lang.

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