You can dress however you like to do the job, but you really should have a good pair of trompy old boots.
Summary
Once in the Queen’s kingdom, the Feegle explain that this is Fairyland to Tiffany. More grimhounds approach, but William plays them off with special pipes that hurt their ears. Rob explains that if her brother stays for too long, he’ll come back the same age, but he might never be able to properly wake to reality again. Tiffany begins to get frightened at her surroundings, and she wakes up suddenly in her home and goes to the kitchen where her mother had left a bowl on porridge for her. As she’s trying to tell herself it had all been a dream, the Feegle suddenly pour in from everywhere and tell her not to eat, while heading to fight a screaming monster that emerges from the oven. Tiffany wakes and learns that she’d been trapped by a drome, who puts you in dreams and eats you after you’ve starved to death. They continue on, Tiffany incensed now at the idea of the Queen taking her brother and having creatures that mimic her home (they are hers), but a bunch of small fairies show up to fight and it’s Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock who drives them off with terrible poetry. The Feegle explain that Fairyland has gotten worse because the Queen used to have a King, but they had a falling out.
They run into Roland, the baron’s son, who threatens Tiffany, so the Feegle cut the straps to his horse saddle. They’re taken by a drome again into a dream with a ball, and Tiffany almost eats cheese. She finds the drome disguised as Roland and kills it, which frightens the real Roland and sends him running. Tiffany is out of the dream, but the Feegle didn’t make it, so she finds she’s being herded by more drome, but walks into it knowingly. She finds Roland in there again, who tells her about the Queen’s realm, and finally, she finds Wentworth. The Queen appears and tells Tiffany that she cannot save her brother and that she wasn’t a monster for wanting company. Tiffany remembers when Granny Aching leveraged what she’d done for the Baron to protect a woman who was mentally ill in their village, and manages to tell the Queen off, make her angry and hit her with the frying pan. She runs with Wentworth and can just about make out Feegle voices. She tells Roland to crack the nut that’s about to be cracked in the dream and realizes something about the Queen: She is, in many ways, just a child who got old. The Feegle pour out of the cracked nut to defend her.
The Queen runs at the sight of them; they tell Tiffany to find the door so they can leave this place, picking up Roland to take along with them. The Queen sends nightmares after them, and the Feegle tell Tiffany to make a run for it while they hold them off, but she orders them to carry her to the trees so she can get them all out alive. They run to a drome and Tiffany creates her own dream from the Jolly Sailor tobacco that Granny Aching favored. They pile into a boat by the sea and head for the lighthouse. There’s a whale then, and it comes to swallow them, but the Jolly Sailor’s ship shows up so they can chase each other, just like Granny Aching said. Tiffany insists that the Feegle not kill the drome to get out because it seems happy here and she always wakes when she goes into the lighthouse. But the tide goes out and there’s wrecked ships calling to the Feegle with treasure and Tiffany realizes that the Queen is trying to trap them. She exits the dream and finds herself back in the Queen’s realm, but she sees the door. She drags Roland through it to the real world, but the door breaks, and the Queen is there. She tells Tiffany that she’s failed and would be better off dead.
Tiffany almost gives in, but she remembers her grandmother and her duty. She realizes that her selfishness can be a powerful weapon. She calls the specters of Granny Aching’s dogs to her and they herd the Queen’s storm. When they return, they are looking behind her, so Tiffany steels herself and turns to find Granny Aching… dressed in the shepherdess statue’s finery (except the boots), beaming at her. She disappears and the Queen is still there, but then the Feegle and Wentworth arrive with seawater and a dead shark, but the Queen sets a lawyer on the Nac Mac Feegle—which likely would have worked if it hadn’t turned out that Miss Tick’s toad definitely used to be a lawyer as well. As they argue, they vanish and the Queen tries to cow Tiffany again, but this time it doesn’t work. Tiffany can feel the power of her grandmother and the land around her, and she knows that the Queen cannot touch anything that’s hers. She also knows that she’ll never feel like this again, and she carries the Queen back to her realm and warns her to never return. She lets the Feegle heads off, sends Roland back with her brother, and Hamish drops in to let her know she’s got visitors… on broomsticks. She meets Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, who are deeply impressed and tell her that once she’s old enough to leave home, she can learn a bit from witches by staying with them for a while as a “maid” and such. The Baron is convinced that his son did all the rescuing; when Roland comes to visit, Tiffany makes it clear that she won’t tell anyone the truth—but this is her land, and she’ll always be watching it and him.
Commentary
This one makes me sob ugly tears at the end, full disclosure. I thought maybe I’d be spared this time around, but no.
Part of that is down to how well it comes together story-wise and emotionally, but the other part is just in being aware of how much like Tiffany I was as a child (aside from the ugly sobbing, of course). I’m sure anyone with a similar younger disposition will feel this. Tiffany uses her anger to help her get past fear for one, which is something I used all the time as a kid when I was frightened. It’s also something that Pratchett himself pointedly felt all the time; friends of his have talked about him having that well within, about how he claimed to use it as a fuse to power his work, and he imbues many of his best characters with that trait specifically. Tiffany has it, Sam Vimes has it, Granny has it.
But it also really resonated with me this time around that Pratchett is using witching as a sideways metaphor for neurodivergence as well. And this has a metatextual aspect because women who were pegged as witches were always somehow outside of accepted roles given by society. Some of them were women’s doctors, some of them were simply unmarried women with no family, and some were very likely neurodivergent individuals, or any combination of a number of these traits and more. So it’s literal while also being metaphorical.
The reason why I’m zeroing in on it this time was because this segment hit me like a truck this time around, being the Queen trying to tear down Tiffany in a very personal way:
“You dream that you are strong, sensible, logical… the kind of person who always has a bit of string. But that’s just your excuse for not being really, properly human. You’re just a brain, no heart at all. You didn’t even cry when Granny Aching died.”
And this is wrong, of course, because as I mentioned last week, this book is a half a treatise on the grief Tiffany is still feeling over Granny Aching’s death. Grief is one of those emotions that processes entirely differently for every person, and crying is not a prerequisite to feeling it whatsoever.
But also… that description sure sounds close to how some people on the autism spectrum are often described by the medical establishment, doesn’t it?
And Tiffany’s internal monologue absolutely aligns with this reading to my mind: She’s aware of the fact that the way she thinks and feels about others is “wrong” and the book keeps offering the little button of it being true because… she’s a witch. But it’s not just that. She feels that way because that’s how she feels. She’s different. And some of those things that are different seem easy to label as wrong or bad—not really loving your little brother for example. But, in point of fact, Tiffany does care for him in her own manner. She merely reframes that care as selfishness because her way of enacting care is not like the people around her.
It’s maybe more like Granny Aching’s way.
For Tiffany, she can’t say that what she feels for Wentworth is love because her irritation with Wentworth frequently overpowers any other emotion she has for him. But when she thinks of Wentworth as belonging to her, that feeling changes:
The turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours!
This story is about Tiffany grieving for her grandmother and taking up her mantle, but it is also a story about Tiffany learning how to use her way of being to her advantage. If what you feel is possessiveness, let that guide you to protect what’s yours and safeguard it against harm. If you don’t feel affection, let duty guide you. And don’t let anyone tell you that thinking about how you think (about how you think) is somehow a lesser way of being. It’s perfectly good and you are perfectly capable. You know that the gift of having power is giving it back, and you know it at the tender age of nine, because that’s what being different allotted to you.
And if I’m feeling some kind of ways about that, it’s only because I really wish I’d had this book when I was smaller. They are things I still need to hear now, but if I’d read this book at Tiffany’s age… I can’t imagine what kind of person I would have become.
Asides and little thoughts:
- To my mind, a lot of the dreams in Fairyland seem reminiscent of other fantasy narratives: The ballroom sequence feels very Labyrinth sans David Bowie, and the nut-breaking dream has a lot of Alice in Wonderland vibes, and so on.
- Okay, but I truly appreciate the realism of Tiffany asking for a sword in the dream and immediately getting one that’s too heavy to hold. People don’t realize how heavy broadswords are, and she’s only nine on top of it.
- I do love the seeding that the toad is a lawyer all the way through, with the constant streams of annoyance at how things are being run unsafely, bits of legal jargon…
Pratchettisms:
There was a sugary yellow teddy bear in the snow, made of 100% Artificial Additives.
Her Second Thoughts said: Let’s all calm down, please, because this is quite a small head.
He urged the horse forward with a jerk, and there there was one of those long moments, a moment when the whole universe said, “Uh-oh” and, still holding the dagger, the boy swiveled around the horse and landed in the snow.
This wasn’t food—it was what food became if it had been good and had gone to heaven.
The Queen glared, as people without a sense of humor do when they’re confronted with a smile.
Pictsies seemed very hard to kill. Perhaps believing you were already dead made you immune.
Is there any me at all? Or do my thoughts just dream of me?
She leaned down, and centuries bent with her.
Next week we start Monstrous Regiment. We’ll read up to:
“All smart, all neat, all legal. Go on, Perks, I gave you an order.”
Not very heavy at all, really. The heaviest swords made for one-handed use are less than 3lbs/1.5 kg, and even a claymore is still under 6 lbs/2.7 kg. A child of Tiffany’s age/size might well have problems wielding a broadsword, because it’s as long as she is and pretty awkward, but there’s no reason she shouldn’t be able to pick them up.
Thoughts on Emmet’s Thoughts
I hesitate to psychoanalyze Pratchett’s characters. While he was writing this book, Linda Richards (of January Magazine) interviewed him about a variety of things. On the topic of his impact on readers, he said: “The mother of an autistic child wrote to me once and said: Did I have an autistic child or know any autistic children or was I mildly autistic. And I said: No, none of these as far as I’m aware.”
So while you, or other readers, may see yourselves reflected in his characters, I don’t think this was his intent.
“Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours!” This makes perfect sense for a witch who’s protecting her steading, autistic or not, but in our world we see autistic tech titans weaponize it far beyond their steadings.
Another nugget from the interview is that Tiffany was the least witchy name he could think of and he only later found that the sounds in Gaelic mean land under waves.
Thoughts
I don’t remember if they do, but I hope Thunder and Lightning show up again.
The denouement of Chapter 14 was needed but the lesson of the book was at the end of Chapter 13. “We sleepwalk through our lives, because how could we live it we were always this awake.”
I loved Granny pulling the story out of the stones while Tiffany and Nanny Ogg discuss dancing in the nude, cackling, and houses made of sweets. Not to mention the reaction to giving the Nac Mac Feegle their lawyer Toad.
But, as a parent, I’m left with a question. Why did Tiffany think her mother would rather hear weewee men rather than crivens? It wouldn’t have been my choice.
Pratchettisms
“Them as can do has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.” (Granny Aching)
Rob struggled in Tiffany’s grip. “Quick, put me doon!” he yelled. “There’s gonna be poetry!”
Tiffany’s Second said: Hang on, was that a First Thought? And Tiffany thought: No, that was a Third Thought. I’m thinking about how I think about how I’m thinking. At least I think so. Her Second Thought said: Let’s all calm down, please, because this is a quite small head.
@1 – You’re right. A newborn lamb (perr Google) weighs 8 to 10 pounds and we know she could pick those up (although wielding them would be another issue) .
It must have been that, rather than steel, they were made of narrativium.
Tiffany’s feelings toward her little brother are justifiably mixed. She used to be the youngest until he showed up and became mom’s favorite. He is a sticky loud toddler and she probably gets tasked with minding him pretty often, which is an exhausting enough job for an adult, let alone for a nine year old. (Don’t get me started on all girls being expected to nurture and care for children.)
I do love the complete flipping of traditional gender roles, with Tiffany having all the agency and the boys (both Wentworth and Ronald) being mostly passive and needing to be rescued.
That business with the ocean receding to reveal wrecked ships, and then coming back with a roar, sounded more like a tsunami than a tide.
I highlighted the important bit. Along with every other autistic person I know, I am 100% certain that Pterry was one of us, and that it’s not even remotely surprising that he wouldn’t have been aware of it.
Let me be clear. I understand that people with ASD may feel that Pratchett speaks to them, here and in other books. But, as Granny Aching says “someone has to speak up for them as has no voices” and Pratchett does, not just for ASD sufferers, but for many others. Eloquently and effectively. It’s why we’re all here.
Still I don’t see anything in his life that would indicate that he suffered from ASD. He was the opposite of withdrawn. He was outgoing and gregarious. He sought out crowds and, at conventions and book signings, he interacted with fans on a personal level. He sought out and kept friends in all walks of life. None of these fits, IMHO, with ASD (and I speak as one with a nephew who has ASD and a sister-in-law who teaches children with ASD.
“People don’t realize how heavy broadswords are”
Clearly not!
Armour too, for that matter. Too many people think armoured knights were almost immobile and had to be winched onto their horses. Ridiculous.
(This is why small children need to be given swords as presents. IT’S EDUCATIONAL. And if they cut themselves THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON.)
@2 It could be because “crivens” is a minced oath, and Tiffany’s mother may have been aware or its origins.
More generally – I don’t recall any reference to “The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fairy_Feller%27s_Master-Stroke) in this recap – I believe that Pratchett referred to this painting himself in this book.
#9: You can see the painting itself here.
@7
Let me be clear: we have voices. Many of whom are SFF writers. We have always been disproportionately represented among both creators and fans of SFF. We do not need neurotypicals to speak for us.
Possibly you know less about his life than you think. Definitely you know less about autistic people than you think.
He was very often withdrawn. He was also sociable sometimes, particularly when surrounded by people who shared his interests. Many of us are. We’re pretty much responsible for there even being such a thing as cons, tbh. It’s gotten a little more mainstream now, but in the olden days there was nobody there but us chickens.
As indeed do I.
And I speak as an autistic person from a family of autistic people whose social circle is mostly made up of autistic people and who works in a field heavily populated by autistic and/or ADHD* people.
*Which may indeed be parts of the same spectrum and are unquestionably very often co-occurring
Quick reminder to keep the tone of the discussion civil and avoid making disagreements personal. Thanks!
Relevant quote from Pippi Longstocking:
‘No, I don’t suffer from freckles.’
‘But, my dear child, your whole face is covered with freckles!’
‘I know it,’ said Pippi, ‘but I don’t suffer from them. I love them.’
“He was the opposite of withdrawn. He was outgoing and gregarious. He sought out crowds and, at conventions and book signings, he interacted with fans on a personal level.”
This is an almost exact description of the friend of mine who was diagnosed with ASD in his thirties.
(It is of course also a description of several other friends who weren’t!)
@9 That painting, with its unsettling depiction of fairy-land, also has a central role in the haunting novel “The Good Neighbours” by Nina Allan. Well worth checking out.
In re: swords, as someone who has had occasion to use them:
It’s not the weight that’s the problem, it’s the leverage. Lifting a five-pound dumbbell is different than holding it out at arm’s length, which is different from holding a five-pound bar by one end without letting it wobble. Picture a sword as a see-saw: you’re trying to keep the weight of the far end up in the air mainly using the little muscles in your hand, wrist and forearm, not your bigger lifting muscles. A sword with a heavier pommel and a lighter blade is easier because the balance point is closer to the body. When a person tries to use a sword that’s the wrong size for them, they can pick it up just fine, but when they try to actually point it at someone the tip droops and weaves because their grip strength isn’t enough to make up for the length. So, I picture Tiffany lifting the hilt end of the broadsword just fine, but unable to get the tip much above knee level because it’s about two-thirds as long as a nine-year-old is tall. She’d probably get on better with an equally heavy short sword or hunting knife because – like the frying pan! – it’s more compact.
@16 – Thanks for the reference, hadn’t seen that one. I’ve enjoyed all of the Nina Allan books I’ve read so far, but they’re a bit hard to come by where I live.
“He said it was better to belong where you don’t belong than not to belong where you used to belong, remembering that you used to belong there.” — Roland referring to Sneebs the nut-cracker, a human who escaped from Fairyland to his native home but then voluntarily returned to Fairyland.
One of the most relatable Discworld quotes, for me. I felt that way when visiting my beloved college after I graduated. I feel it intensely right now, as I’m attending the college’s Alumnx Weekend for the first time. Luckily, I also love and belong where I live, but it’s really hard to spend time in a beautiful place that used to be my home and can’t ever be my home again.
@0: a drome, who puts you in dreams and eats you after you’ve starved to death and rotted; give nightmares their due.
@2 (amplifying @9): “weewee” is something the mother expects from a small child who uses its toilet training as a threat; she expects he’ll grow out of it. “crivens” is something she was hoping he wouldn’t grow into for a while.
@5: well, yes, that’s rather the point (that Tiffany realizes).
A belated question: are there multiple fairylands with multiple queens, or did the king disappear again after taking the queen away in Lords and Ladies? The Annotations quote Terry that this takes place at or after Carpe Jugulum, which ISTR is some time after we first meet the elves.
@21 – As I read the books, there’s only one King and one Queen who rule all of Fairyland. The Queen can pull things from other realms which seem to be part of Fairyland but it’s unclear whether they are different kinds of fairies or something else.
In later Tiffany books the King and Queen will be back and we will learn more about them and Fairyland politics.
Self-correction: Sneebs is relatively humanoid, but probably not human. And is in the scene based on the Fairy Feller painting, but isn’t the person cracking the nut, IIRC. I haven’t reread this part of the book yet, on account of traveling.
Lifting a five-pound dumbbell is different than holding it out at arm’s length, which is different from holding a five-pound bar by one end without letting it wobble.
Well, first of all, only the longest swords weighed five pounds – the huge two-handed jobs. What we think of as a typical sword, the cross-hilted straight-bladed thing that comes into your mind when you hear “sword”, weighed less than half that.
And, second, if you’ve ever picked up a sword you’ll note that it’s got one very important difference from a metal bar of the same length – the centre of gravity. A metal bar’s centre of gravity is halfway down it. A sword’s centre of gravity is a couple of inches down the blade – if you balance it on your finger, your finger will be just in front of the hilt.
And that’s pretty much true regardless of the length of the sword. The kind of fake swords used by Renaissance Faire people may be different – I’ve never handled one – but a military-issue claymore or broadsword will have a point of balance just in front of the hilt. Even a cutting sword like a cavalry sabre will still have a point of balance only a few inches from the hilt. The overall length of the sword doesn’t really matter when you’re thinking about how to wield it – it’s the distance between your hand and the centre of gravity. (And you certainly don’t wander around holding your sword out at arm’s length!)
A frying pan, meanwhile, has the centre of gravity pretty much in the middle of the pan, because the pan is a big thick metal thing and the handle is much lighter by comparison. Not only is it heavier than a sword, it’s also far more ungainly, because that centre of gravity is about ten inches from your grip.
Sword versus frying pan
I think the key word is wield. A sword is wielded with the wrist. Even with the arm lending power to a slash, it’s the wrist that controls the sword’s blade and point orientation. Without training, Tiff would be useless with anything that we would call a sword (and Old Vimes makes this point to young Vimes in the last book.
A cast iron frying pan, OTOH, is wielded with the arm. This is something that Tiff can manage (she knows how to chop wood, for example). It’s size makes it much easier to hit a target with at least part of the pan and it’s weight gives it momentum so that even a partial hit will have power.
25 very good point. Hitting something with a sword does a lot less damage if you get the angle slightly wrong – same with an axe if anyone’s every chopped wood – and that’s a matter of fine control with the wrist and hand. Hitting something with a frying pan, the angle doesn’t make nearly as much difference, it’s still a big heavy metal thing in motion.
William tells Tiffany that her own world (the Disc) is “nearly real.” That’s nearly meta.
In Fairyland and in the drome dreams, distant things look blurry and rudimentary — ‘just swirls and blobs of color,’ as described at one point. That’s probably similar to the way distant and not-so-distant things *always* look to me, thanks to my visual impairment. So if I were in Fairyland, I might not notice that particular oddity.
I understand Wentworth crying because he’s surrounded by sweets and if he takes one, he won’t be taking the others at the same time. I get that feeling when I want to *immediately* reread multiple Discworld books. But I don’t cry about it.
Tiffany imagines dromes in the real world, sitting invisibly and altering peoples’ thoughts until those people want to die. Then she wonders how many dromes are actually doing so. That’s too believable.
The Wee Free Men won the 2003 W.H. Smith Teen Choice Award, 2003 Parenting Book of the Year Award, 2004 American Library Association’s Best Book for Young Adults, 2004 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Novel, and Center for Children’s Books Blue Ribbon.
Pratchettisms:
‘The moan rolled around the clearing, as mournful as a month of Mondays.’
“The universe is a lot more complicated than it looks from the outside.” — Rob Anybody
Tiffany: Whales aren’t dangerous, because they just eat very small things.
Rob Anybody: Row like the blazes, lads!
Looking ahead:
Tiffany is curious about foreign cheeses she’s only seen in pictures, ‘including the legendary Lancre blue, which had to be nailed to the table to keep it from attacking other cheeses.’ She’s going to create one of those, and won’t enjoy the resulting antics.
Tiffany will meet the Elf Queen again, in much more unusual circumstances, and their dynamic will get much more complex.