I do wish I could banish winter on my own schedule, though.
Summary
The winter gets worse and worse and all Tiffany can do is help Annagramma get better, and use the cornucopia to make sure there’s enough food to see people through; all the witches are running ragged trying to keep their villages alive through the bitter cold. The Wintersmith has finally completed a body and knows what it is to be a man. Granny wakes Tiffany one day and tells her she should go home and be with her people, and that she thinks she expected too much of the girl, thinking she’d come into Summer’s power. Except, she points out that Tiffany did make an oak sapling, and tells her that she suspects Tiffany will be stopping by Miss Treason’s cottage on her way home; Tiffany realizes that Granny knew what Tiffany and the other girls had been doing all along, and had probably planned it that way. Tiffany goes to Miss Treason’s and finds notes on her grave that villagers are leaving to get her help. The Wintersmith shows up, but Annagramma appears in full stereotypical witch garb (she bought the whole Boffo catalogue) to bat him away from Tiffany. She loads Tiffany onto her own broom—as Tiffany is a bit delirious from panic and lack of sleep—and sends her home.
Granny sends the Feegle to train Roland to be a Hero for the story, and to send him to the Underworld to fetch the Summer Lady. Tiffany continues her journey home and stops briefly at Mrs. Umbridge’s to sleep; she dreams of the Summer Lady telling her that she’s ruined everything. When she wakes, Mrs. Umbridge is there and she’s got all the mail for Tiffany that’s been held up, including three letters from Roland and a very expensive paint box. Tiffany makes it the rest of the way home while Granny and Nanny send the Feegles to their task. Once Tiffany is home she feels more herself; she gets to see her family, and feels the ground beneath her feet, and she paints with her new paint box. She knows that people from the Chalk will be asking for her help soon, and it feels like a good day. The Feegle show up in Roland’s room and realize that he doesn’t have any practical fighting experience. They bring him into the armory and get into a suit of armor so that he has someone to practice against. At home, Tiffany’s mother is confused about her inability to use magic to do housecleaning. Roland stands up to his aunts and pauses his fight training to see his father—if he doesn’t see the man every day, his father forgets who he is.
Wentworth, Tiffany’s brother, catches a very large pike from the river, and Tiffany cleans it out for supper the following day. As she finishes cleaning it, she goes to remove the lure and finds it’s actually her silver horse. The Wintersmith knows where she is, and she will have to face him, here, in her home. But first, she finds her father so they can see to their flock of sheep. And with that, we catch up to the start of the book: Tiffany has been taken by the Wintersmith and wakes in a palace he has made for her. Tiffany tries to cow him, but he’s getting better at being a man, and insists that he is keeping her safe from death here. The Feegles get Roland kitted out and are sending him to the Underworld to find the Summer Lady. He encounters bogles, and only manages to survive the encounter because he’s too scared to run. Rob tells him that’s alright, and they make it all the way to the ferry, where Death is waiting to take them across. (Death is not happy to see the Feegle again.) Roland gets rid of his sword because the Feegle admit it’s no use against the bogles. They tell him he’ll have to kiss Summer to wake her; Roland gets to her and she looks just like Tiffany.
The Wintersmith has finally worked out that Tiffany is not the Summer Lady. He promises to bring summer to the Chalk to make Tiffany happy and then they will be happy. Roland retrieves the Summer Lady and fights off the bogles with a sword made of light that he creates in his own head, that is never too heavy. Tiffany knows that the Wintersmith cannot be human because he constructed himself according to the folk song but cannot understand the last three lines because they are not things to build himself from, but attributes he cannot possess. She kisses him and brings down the sun, ending the story. The Summer Lady comes to retrieve her crown from Tiffany and means to give her a reward, but Tiffany refuses: Witches don’t accept payment. The Summer Lady shows Tiffany the beauty and terror of summer, warning her to fear it as much as winter. Tiffany visit Nanny Ogg to tell her the whole story, slips in to see that Annagramma is getting on alright, then heads to Granny Weatherwax’s, and tries to call her on the set-up with Annagramma. Granny doesn’t react. She asks about Tiffany’s new ring, made from the nail the Wintersmith used to become human. Then she brings Tiffany to the Morris dance in Lancre, and Tiffany asks her how to move pain out of a body so she can help the Baron. Granny tells her she’s playing with fire, but seems pleased at Tiffany’s choices. Tiffany sees Summer in the dance, and gives the iron ring to the Fool.
Commentary
Tiffany spends this story in the throes of growing up, and the whole conceit is framed as a romance… but ultimately ends with compassion. And this is true for the previous story as well, with the hiver, but it’s more personal here, of course. Because the Wintersmith believed he was in love with her, but also because she understands better what his mistake was in trying to make himself human, the aspects he would always lack.
There’s one line from the Wintersmith that is underplayed, but actually hit me the hardest, when he says that he and Tiffany will be together and happy: “Happiness is when things are correct.” The gaping flaw in that thought, partly being that plenty of people do think that’s the definition of happiness, but also that imposing “correctness” on the idea of happiness is in itself utterly backward. Ouch.
I also do love the moment when the Wintersmith palace realm creates that dress for Tiffany and we get this:
She was shocked, then angry. Then she wished she had a mirror, felt guilt about that, and went back to being angry again. And resolved that if by chance she did find a mirror, the only reason she’d look in it would be to check how angry she was.
Just the extremely relatable feeling of not having time for this nonsense! But being young and curious and kind of wishing that you did.
The idea that Tiffany’s formative romance, or formative idea of romance (because the Wintersmith is a concept more than a sentient being) is fundamentally tragic seems important as well. Whether it’s because she’s a witch, or because she’s more aligned to Esme Weatherwax’s manner of doing the job, it’s a clue to readers about the sort of adult Tiffany will become. While I appreciate that it feels entirely right for Tiffany, I always want a bit more of Nanny’s perspective on things like this. Just a little, for balance.
There’s the “reckoning” language that gets more prominent as the story finishes, with Tiffany thinking the word more and more frequently whenever she is angry, and I love how dramatic it is? Tiffany’s anger is always her clearest emotion, too, which is so refreshing to see both for the rarity of this being allowed to young women in fiction, but also for how it focuses her. When Tiffany is angry, she knows what she needs, what she has to do. Anger provides clarity. Which is a commonality among Pratchett’s protagonists, but I particularly love the way he executes it in her.
And the way these books seamlessly weave the Feegle plots in, much in the manner Pratchett uses with the university wizards: They’re here to cause mayhem and make jokes, but they’re so enjoyable that you’re never really sorry about it?
These endings with Tiffany and Granny, though… they bring the story back around to its heart, yet again. These moments when you can see how proud Granny is of Tiffany, how comforted she is in knowing that someone like her will be around when she’s gone, and the genuine childlike joy we get from Esme when she shares things with the girl. It anchors these stories in something far deeper than simple coming-of-age mechanics. Being a witch is so much more than that, after all.
Asides and little thoughts:
- FTW being for “Friendly To Witches” is excellent. And the “witch sign” to let people know about it is, of course, similar to the Hobo Code, a way that travelers used to leave each other notes made of symbols to help each other find safe places to rest and eat.
- Orpheo and Euniphon are, of course, just the Disc version of Orpheus and Eurydice, which gets reenacted by Roland here when he retrieves the Summer Lady. That’s why Rob tells him not to look back, of course, the tragic mistake Orpheus makes when enacting his own rescue.
- “He was great at air sword.” The entire bit about Roland’s difficulty with the heaviness of real swords… as a person who adores stage combat, but doesn’t have fully working wrists, and is also a bit small for your average broadsword, I feel all of Roland’s complaints in my bones. Literally.
- Rob on this particular Underworld: ’This one used tae be called Limbo, ye ken, ‘cuz the door was verra low.” How dare he make that joke. It is so good.
Pratchettisms:
The woods weren’t silent. They were holding their breath.
A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.
Before, he hadn’t been apart; he’d been a part, a part of the whole universe of tug and pressure, sound and light, flowing, dancing. He’d run storms against mountains forever, but he’d never known what a mountain was until today.
You couldn’t make a picture by pouring a lot of paint into a bucket. If you were human, you knew that.
Okay, one of them was a cheese that rolled around of its own accord, but nobody was perfect.
It was easier here, and because it was easier it was worse, because he was bringing winter into her heart.
There are times when everything that you can do has been done and there’s nothing for it now but to curl up and wait for the thunder to die down.
We’ve got a break into the new year, but we’ll be back in 2024 with Where’s My Cow?
Thoughts
Feegles are always a joy, for a given definition of joy, and a bane to spellcheckers everywhere. But I particularly liked seeing them deploy their ultimate weapon – the threat to not leave.
I disagree with the idea that YA SFF avoids anger as an emotion. While this may have been true in the past, anger is an increasing element of young women’s agency.
To me, the impossible romance with the Wintersmith is far less interesting than the possible romance with Roland.
I used to fence with foils and the lightness of the blade is key.
Pratchettisms
She was smiling, but with Granny Weatherwax this did not necessarily mean that something nice was happening.
The log was covered in Feegles. They all looked cheerful. Admittedly, certain death awaited them, but it did not involve – and this is important – having to spell anything.
No one who ever met the Nac Mac Feegles ever forgot them, even if they tried hard.
Aunt Denuda pulled herself together. She looked like Miss Tick in general outline but with the eyes of the perpetually offended and the mouth of an instant complainer.
It was a very large room. There was no furniture of any sort. It was just the sort of room a king would build to say “Look, I can afford to waste all this space!”
“I hope I’ve got it right, though,” said Roland. “My aunts say I’m too clever by half.” “Glad tae hear it,” said Rob Anybody, “‘ cuz that’s much better than bein’ too stupid by three quarters!”
First she visited Nanny Ogg, who had to be told everything. That saved some time, because once you’ve told Nanny Ogg, you’ve more or less told everyone else.
From the next room came the unmistakable voice of Annagramma at her most Annagrammatical.
Shoutbacks
Remember the pike that ate the twig that Tiffany tossed in the river? It’s baaaack!
Here the Feegles use “squiffy” in the traditional sense.
I have to ask about Mrs. Umbridge – the name is, possibly, a shout out to the Harry Potter character, who appeared 3 years before this book was published. I don’t think it’s reasonable to think that Pratchett had randomly chosen the name and didn’t notice it’s the same as the HP villain. But if he chose the name on purpose, I can’t see why.
@2: I noticed that too. The naming can hardly be coincidental, but the characters had no other resemblance besides being witches. And this isn’t the first time Discworld characters have been named after Harry Potter characters; in The Truth there were two characters named Hermione (as well as two named Ron and two named Harry)! IIRC a future book (Snuff?) had sisters named Hermione and Fleur also. But whether it all means anything except that Pterry had read the Potter books, I can’t tell. As we noted last week, Discworld characters often have seemingly significant names which nonetheless have little to do with the people who bear them.
I like the acknowledgment that the extreme of Summer is as terrifying as the extreme of Winter; too often we see Summer portrayed as all cheer.
@2: I wouldn’t assume Pratchett had read Harry Potter; his daughter was an adult by then so he wouldn’t have been reading them for her, and many fiction writers are wary of reading fiction in their genre to avoid having an idea stick that might seem like plagiarism. I get the impression that when he wasn’t writing, Pratchett read nonfiction on an assortment of topics, bits of which show up in the Discworld books when useful.
A Pratchettism:
…the drummer beat the drum a few times and the accordionist played a long-drawn-out chord, the legal signal that a Morris dance is about to begin, and people who hang around after this have only got themselves to blame.
@2,3
Umbridge is a wordplay on umbrage, as in to take offence. It’s not entirely unlikely that two English speakers would come up with it, and it certainly matches the pattern of Miss Treason and Old Mother Dismass (Dismas=Sunset in many Christian-influenced context, although apparently literally “to the west” in some dialect of Greek). Hermione isn’t that uncommon a name, and was moreso a couple hundred years ago in the times that the Sto Plains’ pseudo-English culture mostly derives from. That one is almost certainly simply another case of Rowling and Pratchett using common source material. Indeed, that’s what he always said whenever anyone asked him about similarities in their work, from the (patently ludicrous given the one way flow of time) accusation that he had plagiarized her due to (alleged) similarities between UU and Hogwarts to people asking if he felt she had plagiarized him (probably not
Why shouldn’t two authors from the same country writing at the same time occasionally use the same names? It would be stranger if they never did.
To my recollection, it’s unusual for a fantasy story to be centered on one hero’s mistake and its consequences in the way this book is. Though this may be more common in YA stories, which show a hero “growing up” in multiple ways and getting a new understanding of the world. But even reading it as an adult, it’s kind of…comforting and disconcerting and comforting again. Tiffany is awesomesauce in many ways, but she can still make mistakes, big ones, with dire consequences…and she can work to prevent or undo the worst of those consequences…even if she initially doesn’t want to and doesn’t know how.
‘The Wintersmith spoke. That is, there were a variety of noises, from the roar of a gale to the rattle of the sucking of the surf on a pebbled shore after a wrecking storm at sea.’ Makes me think of a Maine shore at low tide, of mats of knotted wrack with each long cord-like seaweed frond sheathed in thin, clear ice that breaks with the finest crunch and crackle at a touch.
“There’s not a lot of laughs in the underworld.” Pshaw. I found the scene here — an underworld-river crossing with a bunch of Feegles badly singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” while a cheese tries to sing along — among the funniest scenes in the whole series.
“I can feel the cold all around me, but I don’t feel cold, which would be pretty hard to explain to anyone else.” No, that makes sense to me. Like being underwater, tightly sheathed in a bubble, seeing the water and sort of feeling it but not touching it.
“I hate things that try to take away what you are. […] When you take away memories, you take away the person, everything they are.” Roland is looking at bogles and thinking of dromes, and of what’s happening to his father. But was it already happening to Practett at the time? This book was published the year before Pratchett was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Pratchettisms:
‘[…] cold had put a crispness on [the snow] that crackled like a stale loaf when Tiffany trod on it.’
‘Your hand, with those laughable waggly things on it, gave you touch. The holes on either side of your head let in sound. The holes at the front let in the wonderful smell. How clever of holes to know what to do.’ — the Wintersmith’s thoughts
Roland: “And he won her free by playing beautiful music. I think he played a lute, or maybe it was a lyre.”
Daft Wullie: “Ach, well, that’ll suit us fine. We’re experts at lootin’ and then lyin’ about it.”
“There be a lot of men who became heroes ’cause they was too scared to run.” — Rob Anybody
Looking back:
Trying to get rid of an item in a waterway, and then finding it in a fish, is another old story. Nanny described it precisely in Wyrd Sisters. Granny knew how the horse returned to Tiffany, and had probably known it was likely when she had Tiffany throw the horse in the river to buy them some time. better, but the only one in the vicinity was a disempowered Anoia). I, and presumably Tiffany, just thought her prediction of the Wintersmith returning to her meant he would find another way to locate her. Though the horse returned to her this way at this time *because* she went to the Chalk as directed by the other witches. I suppose they believe the story needs to play out to its end, and to do so in Tiffany’s home grounds where she’s most powerful and will be most angered by his destructiveness and threats.
Looking ahead:
Tiffany won’t have trouble with season elementals again, but the magical disturbance caused by her actions will wake a more malicious form of Trouble.
I’m told that the ancient Greeks regarded Summer as the season in which Persephone was underground, and the crops would not grow:
Persephone Is in the Underworld During the Summer, Not the Winter