The Colour of Magic

as the idea of a Discworld itself.

The snow and glaciers seem to point specifically to the Norse mythology however, where the Midgard serpent Jormungand circles the world in the manner described.

43

It is stereotypical that in fantasy fiction (e.g. Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories) and role-playing games (e.g. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) spells are often named after their ‘creator’, e.g. ‘Bigby’s Crushing Hand’. And indeed, in our universe Augustin Fresnel was the 19th century inventor of the Fresnel lens, often used in lighthouses to concentrate the light beam. A Fresnel lens consists of concentric ring segments; its main advantage is that it is not as thick as a (large) normal lens would be. The disc Rincewind is referring to is a transparent lens twenty feet across.

44

From the famous opening voice-over to the Star Trek television series:

'Space… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations—to boldly go where no man has gone before.'

This became “where no-one has gone before” only in the newer, more politically correct Star Trek incarnations.

45

People have been wondering if this was perhaps a real sentence in some Scandinavian language (the letters used are from the Danish/Norwegian alphabet), but it isn’t.

Terry remarks: “The point is that Krullian isn’t Swedish—it’s just a language that looks foreign. In the same way, I hope the hell that when Witches Abroad is translated the translators use some common sense when dealing with Nanny Ogg’s fractured Esperanto.”

46

‘Widdershins’ is in fact an existing word meaning ‘counter-sunwise’, i.e. counter-clockwise in the Northern hemisphere, clockwise down South. A synonym for ‘turnwise’ is deosil, which helps explain Ankh-Morpork’s Deosil Gate as found on the The Streets of Ankh-Morpork Mappe.

Widdershins is also the name of the planet where Dom, the hero from The Dark Side of the Sun lives.

47

A presumably knowledgeable correspondent tells me that actually, if you do the calculations, it turns out that it would be the other way around (on average, the sun is closer to the hub than the rim, so the hub would be warmer).

Do not feel obliged to take his word for it, though. ‘Discworld Mechanics’ is one of alt.fan.pratchett’s favourite Perennial Discussion Topics, and I don’t think that any two given participants in such a thread have ever managed to agree on anything definite about the way in which the Discworld might ‘work’. See also the The Turtle Moves! section in Chapter 5 for more information about the physical aspects of the Discworld.