The Book Nook - E08 - Hogfather

[00:00:01] Okay, David, this is where we're supposed to choose a side. Green or black? John, my soul is as black as night. Your turn. I am black for life! So, we're not fighting? I thought this is where HBO wanted us to, like, pick sides and fight and stuff.

[00:00:24] Don't worry, I'm sure we'll find plenty to disagree about on the pod. But we seem to agree on one thing. We both really like this show. The politics, the drama, the lore! It was made for The Lorehounds.

[00:00:35] And since we just finished recapping season one, we couldn't be more ready to defend our black queen in the Dance of the Dragons.

[00:00:42] And with the season pass option in Supercast, listeners can get early ad-free access to each weekly scene-by-scene deep dive, plus our custom show guide with all the characters and connections. See you in The Lorehounds podcast feed each week for our dragonfire hot, but probably positive, takes.

[00:00:59] The Lorehounds House of the Dragon coverage is also safe for team green consumption. Side effects may include a deeper understanding of dragon lore, a heartened conflict with itself, and an inescapable urge to read the book Fire and Blood by George R.R. Martin. Dragon seeds may experience burning.

[00:01:27] Welcome to The Book Nook, we're the Lorehounds, your guides to the Discworld. I'm John. And I'm Marilyn. And this is our coverage of the Discworld holiday novel, Hogfather by Sir Terry Pratchett.

[00:01:39] We'll start off with some spoiler-free conversations about our thoughts on the book in general. Then we'll take a break and we'll move into a deeper conversation about whatever we want to talk about with the book. You know, the plot, the themes, and everything.

[00:01:53] While we enjoy discussing the book amongst ourselves, we also really want to hear from you too. So send us an email to book at the lorehounds.com or visit our website at the lorehounds.com slash contact. There you can find a contact form, or you could leave us a voicemail by using the built in device.

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[00:03:01] Now Marilyn, the first thing I have to say to you is ho ho ho. Ho ho ho ho. Because that's what I feel like death sounds like throughout this whole book. Well, now he's a little work master. Oh, what a joy this book is Marilyn.

[00:03:20] It is. It's just, it's delightful from beginning to end, even as it conveys some incredibly important truth. This is Sir Terry's gift. He can have you absolutely convulsed with laughter. And the next moment, there's a zinger that just goes right to your heart. Yep.

[00:03:39] And you're weeping with recognition and realization of, yeah, yeah, this is it. This is true. Marilyn, we haven't really talked much between each other even about our histories with Discworld. So do you want to talk about your history with the world, with Terry Pratchett in general?

[00:04:01] Sure. I was actually introduced to it by a listserv. There was a listserv for pagan scholars and several people mentioned it. And I said, well, what is, what's the Discworld? And all of a sudden, all these people were like, oh, it's this thing.

[00:04:17] And there's all these different series and you have to, you can read them in order and they interface with one another. And there's witches and there's wizards and it's a magical world, but it's sort of like Tolkien, but not really. It's sort of like our own world, but not really.

[00:04:33] And as I read through them and got to know that there's certain series about certain characters, so there's a series about witches, there's a series about wizards, there's a series about the city of Ankh-Morpork. And you realize that he has this incredible gift of being satirical, but never cynical.

[00:04:59] That was really refreshing to me that you could gently make fun of and mock or maybe not so gently, but at the same time, it wasn't out of a sense of sneering or distancing or making fun of.

[00:05:14] It was gently recognizing the foibles and follies of human beings, even though these are elves and dwarves and wizards and other creatures, not just humans. But fundamentally at heart, they're really all various types of human beings. And it's lovely to see what he does.

[00:05:32] Yeah. Terry Pratchett to me is Kurt Vonnegut after therapy. He's a, you know, Kurt Vonnegut if he learned to like overcome some of his trauma and sort of figure out that not the whole world is messed up. I mean, Kurt Vonnegut has this sort of pessimistic optimism too, where he's basically saying everything sucks, but let's try to be better anyway.

[00:05:56] And I think that Terry Pratchett has this worldview that's like, a lot of things suck, but the world's overall pretty good and we should keep trying to make it better. I think he on balance is a lot more positive than Vonnegut is.

[00:06:10] I would agree. He never entirely loses a sense of wonder. You can see it in little tiny bits here and there. And I think the earlier books were not as good as the later ones. He grew into his craft, he grew into what he wanted to say, but he worked as a journalist for a long time. So the craft of storytelling was part of his day job as it were.

[00:06:38] He came from working class family. And so you can hear that experience and some of the anger that he had from that experience in some of the different scenes and so forth. But overall, somehow, however it was, he managed to keep this. I think I can say he kept his love for people and situations in the world in general.

[00:07:06] And did his best to show how things could be in some respects. Never forgetting that they can be pretty distressing at times and there is loss and so forth. But his sense of humor, his wit, his use of words, just marvelous.

[00:07:30] His use of footnotes. That's his trademark. There's two things stylistically that you need to know about Terry Pratchett if you ever read his books. He hates chapters. He will not do chapters unless explicitly required like he was with Going Postal, which honestly sometimes I think is a detriment to the work. But I know he just hated chapters.

[00:07:52] And second is he loves a footnote. He uses them in the funniest ways. He'll just interrupt descendants. He'll footnote a footnote. He does that in this book once. And it's lovely. It is. It is. And one of his best ways of interpolating humor.

[00:08:07] Yeah. No one knows how to use a footnote like Terry Pratchett. I've never seen it used this way. And he uses it instead of whether people might use parenthesis. Right. It's a lovely style. Although, it does make it difficult when you're trying to summarize something.

[00:08:23] I can imagine. I can imagine. So for me, I'm just going to say I never read a Discworld novel until two or three years ago. And I was looking for a palate cleanser because I had just finished, I think I did my first or second run through The Silmarillion and some Wheel of Time 2, something like that.

[00:08:46] I did some heavy reading. And I said, I need something lighter. Can someone recommend me something? Somebody said, well, I like to put Discworld books between my epic fantasy. Huh.

[00:08:56] And I was like, huh. That's an interesting idea. So I picked up Guards Guards and that was my first entry. Oh, good one. Good one.

[00:09:02] And yeah, hilarious. Amazing entry. I would recommend that as an entry to anybody. Even this one I think is not a bad entry. I think there's very few bad entries to this series. Yes. And Hot Father Works.

[00:09:14] It all depends on how strongly you feel about reading things in sequence because it is referential. The different sub series do weave into one another. So you hear references to two or three of the major storylines in any particular book that you read.

[00:09:33] I started with Witches Abroad, which is an odd place to start because it's not the first of the Witches series. But I had this sort of sense that I really wanted to like this author and I wasn't sure about City Guards. I didn't, it's like, I don't know. I didn't really.

[00:09:52] But Witches, of course, were fine. And it was a perfect first book for me because the whole premise of it is the power of story. Okay. I haven't read that one. I've read the one that's great. Oh, well.

[00:10:06] Which is, that is, what's the name of it? It's the Macbeth one. Weird Sisters. Weird Sisters. Yeah. That one's super good too.

[00:10:14] That's another good entry point for sure. But I actually wound up teaching bits of that in my Women in Myth and Fairytale class one time, a couple of times. Oh, nice. That's a good one to include.

[00:10:27] Yes, stories have power. And here's some examples. And I challenged people to see if they could name all of the different stories that they were specifically referring to throughout the course of action of the book.

[00:10:43] I'm not going to say much more because I don't want to spoil it for you, but I'll just say Gollum actually puts in an appearance.

[00:10:47] Oh, wow. I got to read this. I'm up to it because I read Equal Rights. I read Weird Sisters. So I'm up to this.

[00:10:55] If you are just coming to Discworld for the first time and you don't know what it is, Discworld is I think about 40 books written by Sir Terry Pratchett.

[00:11:03] And they all take place on this one planet which is a flat disc that sits atop four elephants, which the four elephants sit atop a giant turtle, the great Atuin.

[00:11:15] So it's just a silly world. And he's like, I'm going to put all my stories on here. And most of Terry Pratchett's career he wrote on the Discworld. So there are different entry points. There are different sort of focal points for this series. There's witches, guards, death.

[00:11:34] And the hog father sits in the death line that focuses on the death character. Death is not a villain in Terry Pratchett's story. Death is a friend. Death is your friend at the end of your life.

[00:11:48] So I really love that he made his Christmas novel, his holiday novel all about death. It's so funny. And honestly, I'm going to sort of segue into General Impressions here. Sure.

[00:12:03] I was just blown away by this story. I thought it was fantastic. I haven't read a Discworld novel in a few months and I just felt right back in it. And I haven't read any of the other death novels. So this was my first death novel.

[00:12:18] I've seen death, of course, in other novels. He shows up all the time. I think he's in every single one. Okay. That would make sense. Yeah. But it really honestly was a great introduction to the character because he was just so lovable.

[00:12:33] He was just so well-intentioned, incompetent but also competent at the same time. It was just a great introduction. I find myself with Terry Pratchett, I don't usually burst out in laughter but I'm always chuckling. Interesting. I'm chuckling through the whole book. Interesting.

[00:12:53] That's how I react to most British humor, I find. It's just constant through chuckling. There are definitely some burst out loud laughing moments in a number of the books. The Death series is my favorite one. Yeah.

[00:13:05] And the second or third book of the series is my favorite of the Death series because of the humanity of it. But also it focuses around a pivot point. It's speaking ritually, speaking around the world, the wheel of time. There we go. The wheel of the year.

[00:13:27] In this case, May Day, the first of May and dancing the Morris dance. And he talks about, he being Sir Terry, talks about the other Morris dance that is danced at the opposite time of May Day, which is Samhain. Again, October 31st, Halloween.

[00:13:53] And how you have to dance both, otherwise you can't dance either of them. Interesting. Incredibly moving, incredibly moving and very insightful. Nice. Yeah, well, this is the fourth book, I believe, in the Death sequence.

[00:14:13] And I will link an image in the show notes that is a chart of where you can enter into these stories. You can really kind of just pick them up wherever you find them, but it certainly helps to know where they are in the timeline.

[00:14:27] And definitely if you pick one up and you don't like it, put it down and try another one. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of variety. How many times have you read Hogfather, Marilyn? Oh, golly, John, I really don't know. It's not like it's something I read every year.

[00:14:42] I do watch the TV version of it every year. I have done it for a couple of years now. But the book, I'm less likely to read and reread. So it might only be a handful of times. Okay.

[00:14:59] This is my first one, so you've got a leg up on me. Oh, wow. Good. I can't wait to hear your impressions. Yeah, I mean, so you and I both read the book recently and then watched the TV adaptation, which I also didn't even know existed.

[00:15:14] I'm always really nervous about TV adaptations of fantasy novels because they're usually just like, especially early 2000s adaptations when it wasn't, you know, they're dumping a bunch of money into this and they want to actually make it look great, like Game of Thrones and Rings of Power.

[00:15:29] And Wheel of Time, early 2000s, I'm like, oh boy, this could be real bad. And it was really good. It was – I think there were parts where they could have cut some out, cut some things out, and I think that they kept things because Terry Pratchett was involved.

[00:15:43] But overall, I think it worked really well. Yeah, I think what you just said, Terry Pratchett was involved, was one of the key reasons why it works so well. Right. He had a very direct involvement with the script.

[00:15:57] In fact, one of the credits in the opening scene says, mucked about by Terry Pratchett. That's funny. And he has a cameo. Oh, does he? Where is he? He's the toy maker. Is he? He is. Oh, that's so funny. I didn't realize that. Yeah.

[00:16:13] And he also does a cameo in the other TV series he did, which is Going Postal. Interesting. Yeah, I haven't seen that either. I did read Going Postal and I thought it was fun. Not my favorite work of his, but still very good.

[00:16:25] Yeah, it works very well as a TTV adaptation. In case of Hogfather, there's only one major piece that I can think of that didn't make it into the television series, which I understand. And there were one or two tiny changes that did some efficient cutting. Okay.

[00:16:46] So I think you'd have to have read slash watched both of them a couple of times before you could pick up on it. Yeah, I'm not familiar enough with it to really pick those out.

[00:16:56] And I think that feeling of it goes on long, to me, that is generated in part by the way they cut back and forth so fast. That really, well, it throws me out and I come back in again and suddenly I'm aware of how much time has passed.

[00:17:11] Whereas if you let it go for a long stretch of time, I'm inside the story, that makes it easier to stay with it. You think, oh my gosh, that was 15 minutes long. Wow, where did the time go? Okay.

[00:17:23] Well, if you are averse to reading and you're in the book Nook by accident, you can watch this about three hour series in three hours and it's not so bad to get through. It's a really good adaptation.

[00:17:36] I think you said this, Marilyn, they got all the iconic quotes in there. Everything that you really need to get the punch of it is in there. Yes. But I would still recommend the book. Not surprising since, you know, Sir Terry was overseeing it. Right.

[00:17:52] He's like, you're going to change my dialogue? Absolutely not. Anyway, so yeah, I mean I really love this book. I thought it was a lot of fun. I think it's a very unique take on Hogswatch Christmas. It's basically Christmas.

[00:18:05] I guess I should probably give a spoiler-free synopsis or spoiler-light synopsis of the beginning of it. I think that would be a good idea. Which is just an assassin sets out to kill Santa Claus, death fills in. That's basically the premise of the book. Basically.

[00:18:23] Though, of course, it leaves out the reason why the assassin set out to kill the Hogfather. Yes, but you'll get there. We'll get into that. We'll get into that. All right. So, Marilyn, what were your general impressions of the book? Oh, it's delightful.

[00:18:39] And, of course, my love of mythology and tales and so forth and rituals really drew me in because it talks a lot about the origins of the Demiurge in the middle of winter.

[00:18:56] And traces it all the way back in a very efficient and effective way to Stone Age peoples afraid that the sun would never come back, offering a sacrifice. And so, very early on, it starts off saying sooner or later all the stories are about blood.

[00:19:15] And that image of blood on the snow. That's why Santa Claus or Hogfather wears red and white. Because it's symbolic of that. Oh, wow.

[00:19:28] And so, you rapidly trace it all the way through the King of the Bean tradition where they bake a cake and there's a bean in it and everybody gets a slice.

[00:19:38] And whoever has the bean is king for a day or a month or a year depending upon your practice. And then at the end he gets killed ritually. So, again, this idea of sacrifice. Well, sacrifice to ensure that things will continue.

[00:19:55] And that's why one of the key phrases is we have to save the belief so the sun will come up. And Susan, ever the rational says, of course, the sun's going to come up. It could not come up. And that's the differentiation which Tolkien talked about.

[00:20:13] The difference between the sun as a flaming ball of gas, which heats our world, and the sun, which is life, which warms the world, which brings back the grain and the corn and the plants and the food and all the rest of that. Right. Right.

[00:20:39] Well, I think that's a good place to leave it for spoiler free talk. If you have come this far and you want to go watch it or read it before you join us on the Spoiler Takes, feel free. We're going to take a quick break.

[00:20:50] When we get back, we'll go full spoilers on the book. And we're back on the book, Nook. We are ready to talk about Sir Terry Pratchett's Hogfather in full, all spoilers. If you want to just listen to the synopsis, then stick around. Here we go.

[00:21:20] On the eve of Hogswatch, the Discworld equivalent to Christmas, a group of auditors hire a sociopathic assassin named T-Time to kill the Hogfather.

[00:21:30] T-Time and his crew steal the teeth of all the children of the world from the Tooth Fairy's world, using them to erase their belief in the Hogfather. Small gods fill the void in the Hogfather's absence.

[00:21:41] Death decides to fill in for the Hogfather to help save belief in him and ensure the sun continues to rise. Death's granddaughter, Susan, defeats T-Time in the Tooth Fairy realm and leaves Banjo, one of T-Time's hedgemen, turned good to guard the teeth.

[00:21:59] Back in the real world, the auditors transform into wolves and attempt to take the Hogfather's soul, but are defeated by Death. T-Time finds Death and threatens him and Susan with Death's sword, but Susan kills T-Time with her fire poker that could only kill monsters.

[00:22:14] Hogswatch goes on and the sun rises. Well, I think that about covers it. So I guess the podcast is over. What more can we say? Well, that's the basic premise, but I think this is the kind of thing where the journey is much more important than the destination.

[00:22:34] Yeah, yeah, for sure. And basically, you don't get much of anything by just that synopsis. Everything is about the little quips, is about the awkwardness of Death trying to go, oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.

[00:22:53] You know, all the little things, the exchanges like, you know, they're in the poor family's house. And he's like, well, why can't I just give him his presents? Oh, that wouldn't be right, sir. He's like, why not?

[00:23:07] And it's – Death is such a good choice to give that message because Death is like I am the equalizer, right? I come for all. I am last things. Right. And yeah, just everything is amazing in here. The dialogue is fantastic. All of the footnotes are really enjoyable.

[00:23:29] Ignorance was one of my favorite footnotes where he defines ignorance and he says, oh, well, that's when you know how to calculate this but you don't know how to like survive in the wilderness. Yeah, right, right. Cultural. Right. Cultural differentiation. Right.

[00:23:45] And Alfred who is himself a wizard who by magical shenanigans is still alive after hundreds of years only because he lives in Death's world which is timeless, gets a dispensation to come and be the little pixie who is the Hogfather's aide.

[00:24:00] So is that why he's not able to come back to the real world except through the Hogfather's magic? Right. The Hogfather's bubble. So if he comes back to the real world, he'll die? Is that the deal? Well, his time will come closer to running out. Okay.

[00:24:15] He's got his own. Death has time turners for everybody. And when the sands run out, he goes and he does his duty and releases your soul from your body and then you go on to something else.

[00:24:28] And so Alfred's time turner is kept very securely in Death's hall of time turners. But he has this dispensation to travel because they're in this sort of special magical time bubble. How else could he get around the whole world in one night and give presents to everybody, right?

[00:24:46] Right. But Alfred is concerned because he knows his master takes a great interest in these creatures that he works with, particularly humans.

[00:24:57] And as a situation arises, he tends to get so much more interested that he kind of loses track of who and what he is and what his mission is.

[00:25:09] And so when Death starts to say, you know, this isn't fair and Alfred says life isn't fair and Death says, well, why not? Alfred is a little worried because, uh-oh, here we go again.

[00:25:21] He's trying to understand these beings that he works with and meets only at their end in one of the most significant times of their life, which is the end of it. Right. When nobody has to worry about it. It's kind of like when Ernie dies, the cart driver.

[00:25:39] Right. And Death goes, he goes, well, I don't know what I'm going to tell my boss tomorrow. And Death says, well, on that note, I have good news for you. I have some good news for you, yes. I also have some bad news for you.

[00:25:51] And I love Death going, sorry, that was very rude of me. I wasn't listening. Yeah, right, right, right. Because he was thinking about what in the world is going on here. Yeah, yeah. Something we should explain about Susan. How can she be Death's granddaughter?

[00:26:07] Death in the earlier, in the first book about him, hired an apprentice, a human apprentice. Death also had an adopted daughter and we never really learned too much about the whys and hows of that situation.

[00:26:20] But as so often happens, you know, the two meet, they fall in love, get married. And through the course of the novel, Mort, the apprentice, becomes the Duchess, the Duke of Stow Lot. And they have a daughter named Susan.

[00:26:38] And in thinking about her life, she didn't understand why her parents were so set upon having her be logical and distinguish reality from stories. She knew now that they'd been trying to protect her.

[00:26:55] She hadn't known then that her father had been Death's apprentice for a while, and that her mother was Death's adopted daughter. She'd had a very dim recollections of being taken a few times to see someone who'd been quite, well, jolly in a strange thin way.

[00:27:12] And the visits, the visits had suddenly stopped. And she'd met him later. And yes, he had his good side. And for a while, she'd wondered why her parents had been so unfeeling. And she knew now why they'd tried to keep her away.

[00:27:25] It was far more to genetics than little squirmy spirals. She could walk through walls when she really had to. She could use a tone of voice that was more like actions than words, that somehow reached inside people and operated all the right switches. And her hair.

[00:27:42] That had happened only recently, though. It used to be unmanageable. But around the age of 17, she had found it more or less managed itself. Yeah, and they do that in the TV adaptation, too. They have her hair just kind of move around. Yeah.

[00:27:59] And she says she'd been making good progress, though. She could go now for days without feeling anything other than entirely human. But it was always the case, wasn't it? You could go out into the world, succeed in your own terms.

[00:28:10] And sooner or later, some embarrassing old relative was bound to turn up. In the in the show, and I think more in the show than in the book. She's very Wednesday Addams. Yes, yes. The actress who does a fabulous job plays it very straight in a way.

[00:28:26] Very kind of reserved. And I didn't read Susan that way necessarily. No, I didn't either. I thought she had more emotion than that. Yeah, yeah, I think so, too. So I think maybe it's partly Michelle Dockery's interpretation. Maybe that's how Terry Pratchett saw it, right?

[00:28:44] And that's maybe where the rum was. That's what he told her. She played Lady Mary in Downton Abbey, by the way. So if people look at her and say, where did I see her before? That's where, if you watched Downton Abbey. I haven't Downton or Abbeyed.

[00:28:56] Well, there you go. So, yeah, there's plenty of stuff here. I think you and I are going to have a pretty freewheeling discussion here because it's Hogswatch and we deserve some time to just chat. We do, we do, we do.

[00:29:10] So as far as your favorite scene, what would you say is your number one? If you were going to recommend people read one scene of this book and understand it, what would you pick? Oh, golly. Well, the favorite scene is the one towards the very end,

[00:29:27] the whole point of it all. So is that too much spoiler-y if I read that one? No, we're in full spoilers. Oh, we're in full spoilers. All right. You're on your own if you're still here. Okay, folks, you've been warned.

[00:29:39] So this is what it all means, the climax of this. They've managed to restore belief in the Hogfather, to foil Tea Time's nefarious plans, to restore all the teeth to free them from the spell, and get them taken care of by one of the former henchmen, Banjo,

[00:29:59] as you mentioned in your excellent summary. And Susan thinks, okay, we're good, I can go home. And suddenly her grandfather comes along and says, actually, no, they're still chasing him, they being the auditors. And by the way, the auditors are sort of non-entities.

[00:30:15] They only appear in gray robes, they do not recognize individuality, they talk in terms of we, even when there's only one of them. Can I ask you, are they in other Discworld books? Oh, yeah. Is this a recurring thing? Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, a couple of them.

[00:30:29] I haven't seen them before, that's why I was asking. Okay, well, they don't appear right away, but they do eventually. And they're very fascinating because they feel that human beings are like fungus on the world because they audit processes and things.

[00:30:43] They audit planets, and they audit temperatures, and they audit all. And human beings are messy, they're incalculable, they cannot be put into rows of numbers and columns of figures and so forth. So they're constantly trying to get around it.

[00:30:59] Yeah, I do love the scene where one of the auditors quotes a passage that says, me in it. Yes. And they go, you just said me. And he goes, well, I would never say that myself. Poof, and he goes away. Right.

[00:31:13] And then another one comes along and let us let that be a lesson to us all. Individuality is death. And that is kind of how they feel about things. So the auditors wanted to get rid of Hogfather, as we heard.

[00:31:27] And they're now feeling desperate, and so they do a very desperate act. They materialize. They turn into wolves, or large dogs if you prefer. And they're chasing the Hogfather, and Susan has to rescue the Hogfather

[00:31:42] who is currently in the form of a boar because death says this is a human thing. I cannot help him, but you must. So she manages to rescue him, and then the dogs are left on the other side of this icy cavernous gorge.

[00:31:56] And then death comes along and tells the auditors, okay, you made the mistake. You're going to pay for it. And so he quote unquote kills the forms that they're in, and they disappear. Mm-hmm. And so Susan comes back. And the excellent line, there's only one question left.

[00:32:18] Have you been naughty or nice? Ho, ho, ho. And so I love Susan's comment of, well, that about does it for this dress. But she's still saying, you know, why did we just go through all this? Of course the sun is going to come up, and death says,

[00:32:43] I wish I had your education. Yeah, death, you know what's funny is death does not, he never really dunks on anybody. He just very coolly accepts when other people do something foolish and points it out. He's remarkably polite.

[00:33:00] He really is, you know, for someone who brings about somebody's end. And he cares about his work. You know, the book opens with him at the bottom of the ocean, receiving the end of life of this tiny little delicate plant creature

[00:33:16] that is never going to see the light anyway and only live for about five days. But he's a consummate crafts person. He appreciates what he does, and he does it reliably and conscientiously. So Susan says, all right, I'm not stupid.

[00:33:35] You're saying humans need fantasies to make life bearable. Really? As if it was some kind of pink pill? No. Humans need fantasy to be human, to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. Two fairies? Hogfathers? Little? Yes.

[00:34:00] As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies so we can believe the big ones. Success, justice, mercy, duty, that sort of thing. They're not the same at all. You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder

[00:34:25] and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, death waved a hand, yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world,

[00:34:40] as if there is some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged. Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point? My point exactly. You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become, said death.

[00:35:04] Have you ever read the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari? I feel like it doesn't come up in our conversations. Yes, yes. Do you recall the portion where he talks about how religions are more than just God, more than just traditional religions?

[00:35:23] You need a symbol to have a functioning society. You need to all believe that the American flag means something, that freedom means something, things like that, things that are icons and allow you to stay together in a cohesive group.

[00:35:38] And I think that reminds me very much of this, right? Is justice, maybe it doesn't mean the same thing to everybody. Certainly it doesn't. But just the idea that we believe that there should be a right and a wrong,

[00:35:56] that there should be a judgment on what we perceive as evil, makes us better people. Yeah. Standards by which you can evaluate perhaps, would be a way of thinking of it. And of course the Civ comment, find me a molecule of justice, of mercy.

[00:36:20] That's I think just showing his worldview. I don't think that the whole world sees it that way. I think people of various religions would argue with that, say, well, the tipping point is my deity. But I think Terry Pratchett is just saying,

[00:36:38] even if you don't believe in anything, even if you don't believe that there is a God in the world, you believe in something and that belief is important. Right, right. I think what I get from this is that he is distinguishing the material

[00:36:53] from the non-material, whether you call that spiritual or belief or emotion, whatever it happens to be. Right. That materially you cannot point to something and say, this is materially justice. Justice is an idea. It's a concept. Right. And as you say, it can be a rallying point.

[00:37:21] It can also be a divisive point. It can lead to slaughter and murder. So this is the tipping point. This is the, as he says, this is where the fallen angel meets the rising ape. What is it that makes us human?

[00:37:42] We're not going to be angels, but we're not going to be apes either. Because we can see these things, we can conceive of these things, even though there is no material evidence for them. You know, you look at the natural world.

[00:37:58] Is it just that a wolf will eat a baby rabbit? Probably not to the baby rabbit, probably the wolf, particularly because the wolf is a mother and has nursing cubs to feed. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really beautiful message at the end of this.

[00:38:18] And it's much deeper than I thought I was going to get out of what was otherwise a pretty silly and fun novel. Yes. Right. And that's, I think, a trademark of Pratchett too is he'll do the silly thing, but there is a point somewhere. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:38:34] And there's a couple times here, I think, you know, when they're talking about rich kids versus poor kids, and there's this point about, you know, the importance of stories, the importance of fantasy. I think that there are several really good points in this.

[00:38:48] You know, even he even pokes fun at consumerism. I'll go into my favorite scene other than the end. My favorite scene other than the end is the entire thing at what it was named? Chumlee. Crumbly's department store. Crumbly. Yes. Absolutely unforgettable. Amazing. You know, death shows up.

[00:39:08] Albert says, let's do a public appearance. Right. And death like, yeah. All right. Ho ho ho. What do you want? And I love how at first, and they actually changed this in the show a little bit. He's kind of opposed to him right away in the show.

[00:39:24] But in the book, I think he's a little more like, all right, well, we got a hug father here or whatever. And as soon as he realizes, oh, he's giving things away. And it's not even my merchandise. Yep.

[00:39:37] He's like, I am so screwed when he goes, it's not about giving everything away. Well, it is, but you have to buy it first. It really gets to the heart of like, okay. Consumerism consumerism consumerism. Absolutely.

[00:39:49] There's there's that great scene in there where he gives the girl a sword. And the mom says, you, you can't give her a sword. Well, why not? I think it'll be a good learning experience. I don't remember the exact dialogue, but there's,

[00:40:05] there's good stuff. And he finally decides, all right, fine. I'll turn it wooden. But yeah, there's just so many good bits in there. I love the watch showing up and they, they go, well, has he committed a crime? Well, he's giving merchandise away.

[00:40:21] Oh, he's stealing your merchandise and giving it away. No, he's just giving other things away. So you want us to arrest the hog father on Chris on, on hogs watch for giving presents away. Yes. With all the children watching, right? You think it might look bad.

[00:40:41] I'll just make how it would look good, sir. I love the watch. I love especially knob, knob, knob, knob. He's delightful. He's so funny. And I do think they went a little over the top on the teeth in the show, but on the, on the false teeth,

[00:40:58] but I guess that's the vibe you're supposed to get from him anyway. The false teeth being on Navi. Oh yeah. Yeah. Really, really protruding for a teeth. Well, the thing is, is you read other novels,

[00:41:10] the descriptions of Nabi knobs make it one of the things he says is he had to have a science certificate saying that he wasn't vacuuming. Because he looks so different, you know, his, his height and his physical features and just all sorts of things make him very bizarre.

[00:41:26] I think that was about the closest they could come with the, Really getting into some tricky territory. Yeah. But he's, you know, he's a sharp one from way back. And yeah. I got to get back to my watch novel so that I can find out what happens

[00:41:38] to Karen. Yes. Oh yes. I have a feeling there's a lot of things there. Captain is pretty amazing coming on. Yeah. So which one are you reading right now? Oh, I haven't, I've only read guards guards out of the box. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:41:55] Out of this world, I've read guards, guards going postal. The first two, which is novels, this, and. I started small gods, but I couldn't get into it. I'm going to go back eventually. It's small guys is an excellent one. Because of some of the things they bring up,

[00:42:09] but you also get to see the childhood. Of. Have lock. Veterinary. Who eventually becomes the benevolent dictator. Yeah. Okay. And of course he goes to the school of assassins because that's where all the really. You know, top drawer people go. And, and the poor people, I mean,

[00:42:26] it's definitely a send up a box written Cambridge. Okay. But let's bracket that for a minute. Cause can I read the description of when the sled arrives? Please do. They're sweating and grunting in the place where the little kids are. And they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're,

[00:42:40] they're sweating and grunting. And they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're sweating and grunting. They're sweating and grunting in the place where the little piggies had been were. Well, he assumed they were pigs because hippopotamuses didn't have pointy ears and rings to their noses,

[00:42:57] but the creatures were huge and gray and bristly and a cloud of accurate mist hung over each one. And they didn't look sweet. There was nothing charming about them. One turned to look at him with small red eyes and didn't go. Which was the sound that Mr.

[00:43:13] Crumbly born and raised in the city had always associated with pigs. It went, Gnark! The sled had changed too. He'd been very pleased with that sleigh. It had delicate silver curly bits on it. He personally supervised the gluing out of every twinkling star,

[00:43:31] but the splendor of it was lying in glittering shards around a sleigh that looked as though it had been built of crudely sawn tree trunks laid on two massive wooden runners. It looked ancient and there were faces carved in the wood,

[00:43:44] nasty, crude, grinning faces that looked quite out of place. Parents were yelling and trying to pull their children away, but they weren't having much luck. The children were gravitating toward it like flies to jam. Mr. Crumbly ran toward the terrible thing, waving his hands.

[00:44:00] Stop that! Stop that! He screamed, You're frightening the kitties! He heard a small boy behind him say, I've got tusks! Cool! His sister said, Hey look, that one's doing a wee! Tremendous cloud of yellow steam arose. Look, it's going all the way down the stairs.

[00:44:10] All those who can't swim, hold on to the banisters. They eat you if you're bad, you know, said a small girl with obvious approval. All up, even the bones. They crunched them. A red and white figure pushed its way past through the crush and rammed a

[00:44:16] false beard into the back of the sleigh. The sleigh was a mess. It was a mess. It was a mess. It was a mess. It was a mess. It was a mess. It was a mess. It was a mess. It was a mess.

[00:44:35] So once it passed through the crush and rammed a false beard into Mr. Crommey's hands. That's it, said the old man in the hogfather costume. I don't mind the smell of oranges and the damp trousers, but I ain't putting up with this! He stamped off through the queue.

[00:44:48] Mr. Crommey heard him at and he's not even doing it right. Mr. Cromley forced his way onward. Mmm it's funny, it's much closer to the book than I remembered it. Because I, I just watched the, I finished the TV movie a little earlier today.

[00:45:07] It's much closer, yeah, than I remembered it. But yeah, I really liked the mall Santa getting all pissed and running away. Just every time Death gets one of the children on his knee, he goes, ho, ho, ho, say thank you. And the, thank you.

[00:45:28] Why are your hands on bits of string, child? The child looked down the length of its arms to the dangling mittens affixed to its sleeves. It held them up for inspection. Glops, it said. I see, very practical. He's very polite. Are you real? Said the bobble hat.

[00:45:49] What do you think? The bobble hat sniggered. I saw your piggy do a wee, it said. And implicit in the tone was the suggestion that this was unlikely to be dethroned as the most enthralling thing the bobble hat had ever seen. Oh, good.

[00:46:07] It had a great big, what do you want for Hogswatch? Said the hog father hurriedly. Mother took her economic cue again and said briskly, she wants a, the hog father snapped his fingers impatiently, the mother's mouth slammed shut. The child seemed to sense that here was a once

[00:46:25] in a lifetime opportunity and spoke quickly. I want an army and a big castle with plenty of bits, said the child, and a sword. What do you say? Prompted the hog father. A big sword? Said the child after a pause for deep cogitation. That's right.

[00:46:42] As opposed to thank you, uncle Hoey said. Are you sure? People don't normally. I meant they thanked the hog father, Alfred hissed, which is you, right? Yes, of course. You're supposed to say thank you. Thank you. And be good, this is part of the arrangement. Yes.

[00:47:07] Then we have a contract. It's so formal. Yeah, and then he pulls out the castle and the sword and everything else. And the mother's, you can't give her that, it's not safe. It's a sword, it's not meant to be safe. It'll be educational. Why does she cut herself?

[00:47:26] That will be an important lesson. And then Alfred tells him and he says, oh, well, it's not for me to argue, I suppose. And the blade went with him. So this whole thing with the assassins, tea time in general,

[00:47:41] I think we just have to address it head on. Tea time, teatime, teatima, whatever he wants to be called. Teatina. He's so funny. Honestly, he was much creepier in the show than he was in the book. I did not see him as Johnny Depp Willy Wonka

[00:48:00] like he was in the show. He was very like, hi, hello. And I think it honestly was too much. I think it took me out of it sometimes. But I don't know, how do you feel? Well, I was really creeped out the first time I saw the show

[00:48:14] and all the shadowy things and whatever. I mean, it gets better with rewatching, but yeah, they made it very scary, which they were supposed to do. I mean, the Tooth Fairy's castle is all the child's understanding of what the world is like

[00:48:31] in a child's world is full of very scary things and things that are not explained. And so, you know, I think the fact that the assassins themselves were rather afraid of tea time should have given us a clue.

[00:48:49] I mean, it opens by saying that they took him in as a charity case because both his parents were dead and then the parenthesis. After some consideration, they realized that perhaps they should have explored this a bit more thoroughly. It's funny, because by the end of that line,

[00:49:06] I was sold on the book. You know, like that's just, it's such a good opener. It absolutely is. It's wonderful. And you know, the assassins guild was one of the inspirations of Lord Vetinari who doesn't even get name checked in this book, but he's the benevolent dictator

[00:49:23] who took on a city that was in chaos and basically set up a bunch of guilds and said things like, okay, we're gonna have a thieves guild because they're gonna be thieves regardless. So let's make them a guild. Let's give them, you know, some order and requirements

[00:49:41] and, you know, rich people can pay a thief once a year. And if a thief tries to knock them over then they can pull out their card and say, nope, sorry, I paid it for the year. Find somebody else. I mean, things that at first glance seem,

[00:49:55] oh, really horrible, make a certain kind of sense and only the kind of sense that a Terry Pratchett could see. Right. So the assassins, Vetinari was himself trained in the assassin school. It's basically modeled after Eaton or Oxford or Cambridge or whatever.

[00:50:15] Mostly the children of very, very rich families come get the very best education. And oh, by the way, learn how to kill people quietly and efficiently for a fee for consideration. Again, very structured, but they do occasionally take on what they call charity cases.

[00:50:31] And I'm sure those individual students love to be called charity cases. Yeah, it definitely doesn't help their villain origin story, right? Like T-Ton. No, well, exactly, exactly. Even at the beginning, you have the, I forgot his title, but the head of the assassins going,

[00:50:48] yeah, I'm gonna have to quietly get rid of this guy. This is gonna become a problem. Right, well, when you're told that you're gonna be paid $3 million to eliminate the Hogfather, you wanna find somebody to at least make the attempt. Right. And if this particular one gets killed,

[00:51:06] the bargain, oh, well, what a shame. Right, yeah, it's interesting. He sends him out to fail and he was actually the person for the job. And he nearly succeeded. He almost succeeded. He almost succeeded. But this gives you the flavor of Lord Downey

[00:51:22] who's the head of the assassins guild, which is the one that runs the school. And he hears someone clearing their throat. Downey stopped writing, but did not raise his head. Then after what appeared to be some consideration, he said in a business-like voice, the doors are locked.

[00:51:44] The windows are barred. The dogs do not appear to have woken up. The squeaky floorboards haven't. Other little arrangements, which I will not specify, seem to have been bypassed. That severely limits the possibilities. I really doubt that you are a ghost

[00:52:01] and guards generally do not announce themselves so politely. You could of course be death, but I don't believe he bothers with such niceties. And besides, I am feeling quite well at the moment. Something hovered in air in front of his desk. My teeth are in fine condition,

[00:52:20] so you're unlikely to be the tooth fairy. I've always found that a stiff brandy before bedtime quite does away with the need for the sandman. And since I can carry a tune quite well, I suspect I'm not likely to attract the attention of old man trouble.

[00:52:36] I suppose a gnome could get through a mouse hole, but I have traps down. Down he went on. Bogeymen can walk through walls, but would be very loath to reveal themselves. Really, you have me to loss. And then he looked up and saw the auditor

[00:52:53] who didn't answer any of those descriptions. That's why none of his little traps were set off. But I love that one sentence, the squeaky floorboards haven't. Right. Yeah, there's so many good one-liners in this. He does a really good job of showing the contradictions within individuals.

[00:53:16] You have tea time playing with the dog. He goes, you get along with dogs, huh? Oh yeah, I like him. He seems to like me. I heard you killed the dog on your last job. It's like, yeah, well, I couldn't have him barking.

[00:53:27] He's like, you didn't wanna drug him or any other option besides? Right, right. Yeah, he's like, I didn't think of it. He lacked elegance and he promises elegance for the hog father job. Did it have elegance? I don't know, did it?

[00:53:45] Well, I mean, in tea time's estimation, who knows? He was certainly aiming for that. And it's really fascinating to see him in a student-professor relationship where he's definitely lower down and saying things like, I appreciate any correction and I always want to improve.

[00:54:05] Thank you for showing me the error of my ways. And then he utterly dominates his little band. He tries to dominate Susan, but Susan being a governess gets his number because she realizes that you're the little boy that looked up dolls' dresses.

[00:54:22] And finally gets under his skin so that he's getting angry and says something to the effect of, well, it's all right. I have my inner child well contained or whatever. And when she starts to irritate him and annoy him

[00:54:39] and so forth, and he's getting more and more edgy as she's saying these things about, you looked up dolls' dresses and nobody liked you and you were the weird kid. And then she says to him, he tries to kill her with death sword,

[00:54:53] but in this child's world, death does not exist. If people die, they disappear. So he tries to kill her and it doesn't work. And she says, hello, inner child. I'm the inner babysitter. That knocks him right over the side of the very tall part of the staircase.

[00:55:14] Not a very good babysitter apparently. Knocking the children off the- I think the response is appropriate to the individual. Yeah, no, for sure. I'm just making a little joke here. I know, I know. So speaking of the truth of various domain, what'd you think of it?

[00:55:29] It's an interesting concept for sure that you can control children through their teeth. As she says, ancient magic, ancient, ancient, ancient. And they allude to it a little bit when Archchancellor Ridcully, we haven't talked about the wizards at all, but how do you talk about them? They're so-

[00:55:45] They're so bizarre. They're just very strange. But he's had this new bathroom opened up for his private use and he's cutting his toenails afterwards and he said, you know, you can't be too careful somebody gets a toenail and they can have power over you.

[00:55:58] And that's, as Susan says, that's so ancient. You can hardly call it magic. It's just- Yeah, I've already added a subject after this now, which is the small gods that pop up, the O-gods. Oh yes, I think of them more as, well, they call them demiurges.

[00:56:15] A lot of them are like fairy folk or, I mean, it's a gnome, it's not a god per se. The O-god is the closest thing we get to new deities. Right. Yeah, because there's so much belief sloshing all around. Oh yeah, we talked about Hex, the thinking machine.

[00:56:29] Right. What a send up on computer nerds and AI. I mean, here's very beginning, very early discussions of AI and what that might look like and the fact that he tells the thinking machine to believe in the hog father so that belief is continuous.

[00:56:49] And then the next thing you know, the thinking machine is writing him a wishlist for Christmas and the hog father says, oh no, you can't. Oh, I suppose that's not right. You can write, can't you? All right, how old are you

[00:57:05] and have you been a good little thinking machine? Great interaction. Yeah, yeah, but as Ponder Stevens points out very proudly, Hex does solve it. All this extra belief washing around goes somewhere so whenever suddenly somebody names an imaginary figure like the Veruca gnome or the hair loss fairy

[00:57:29] or the eater of socks, or the oh God of hangovers. The oh God of hangovers cracked me up. You get a little. Just constantly vomiting. Yeah. And the next thing you know, there's an oh God of hangovers. Yes, he was very well conceived and also in the TV,

[00:57:46] I particularly liked the fact that he spoke with a Welsh accent. Okay, I didn't pick up on that. And he's got his toga. He looks like a frat boy. Yes, yes. You know, from one of the Greek pantheon. I love this whole, I've never even had a drink.

[00:58:02] Yes. Over the whole time. And as soon as he gets sober, all he wants to do get me six pints of ale. This is not gonna thing. It's just like I didn't sober you up so you could get drunk again. Right, right.

[00:58:15] A lot of really fun characters in here. And honestly, we could probably talk about Discworld all night, but this is a fun filled holiday romp. Yeah, and prepare to do a lot of laughing, whether it's chuckling or out loud or gasping for breath.

[00:58:35] I think it can produce all of those effects. Right. Well, Marilyn, it's been a pleasure hogfathering with you. And I hope people will check this out if they haven't. There's so much in here. There's so much in Discworld in general. I think we're in talks.

[00:58:53] Maybe we'll do some kind of Discworld theme book nook thing eventually. I'm not sure if it's gonna be the next thing we do, but I think there's plenty there for us to dig into. Oh, unquestionably, unquestionably. I mean, one could do an entire Discworld podcast

[00:59:05] and I'm sure people have. But yeah, it'd be nice to select the really the finest ones, although there's a Hobson's Choice right there. Well, actually that's not true. There are some that I read the very first two or three once and thought, okay, that's enough.

[00:59:24] I got some of the background of how this or that happened, but there's other better ones. Right. Well, all right, I wanna do a quick intro, outro here rather, we're going out not in. Yes. All right, we've got our two affiliate podcasts, Properly Howard Movie Review.

[00:59:40] They just did their season of remakes and now they are on the Severance feed where they're covering season one of Severance every Friday. And you can catch us on that feed starting in season two. We'll be covering the show in full with them. So definitely check that out.

[00:59:55] Also don't forget to check out our Star Wars Holiday Special coverage that we did with them because it was a lot of fun. I think even if you didn't watch it, it's a fun podcast. And yeah, I hope you'll check that out. Alicia is currently covering Beacon 23,

[01:00:09] which is a show on MGM Plus. I guess you can get the first episode free on Amazon, I think. So check that out. It's by Hugh Howey, who also did Silo. He was the author behind Silo. So if you like that show, you'll probably like this.

[01:00:22] I know people are loving it. Alicia is having a great time. She's doing coverage, I think, every other episode, something like that. So subscribe to Woolshift Dust. You can find all these feeds in the show notes. As far as the Lorehounds,

[01:00:34] we've got a lot of little projects coming out for the rest of the year. So you've got Hogfather now. You've got our second breakfast on Christmas that will be public. Usually that's just a Patreon exclusive benefit, but we wanted to give our top 10 list for the year

[01:00:49] to the public. And we'll be talking about all our favorite TV for the year. And Marilyn, you were on that because we are doing our interviews with our Istari. We're doing, for patrons, we took a community survey where we got people's opinions and we're gonna present some stats.

[01:01:03] So there's gonna be a lot of fun stuff here. It's gonna be a lot of fun talk about the best TV of the year. And of course, we've got a bunch of other stuff coming out this month. Skyrim with me and Brandon is finally coming out.

[01:01:16] We've got another Earthsea episode. If you like this, if you want more books, we've got another Earthsea episode probably out by now. And yeah, hope you'll join us on that one. Very quickly, I want to talk about our patrons.

[01:01:31] I mentioned our patrons got to do a community survey for their top 10 of the year. I think that was a lot of fun. We like to give a lot of benefits to our patrons. We have a tier as low as $3 a month,

[01:01:42] but we also have a tier that's 10 bucks a month. That's our top tier patrons. They are our lore masters. They are the ones helping us support our network tremendously. So they get a shout out every episode. They are Samartian, Cyrus, Mark H, Michael G,

[01:01:58] Michelle E, David W, Brian P, Nick W, SC, Peter O H, Bettina W, Adam S, Nancy M, Lavinia T, Dew71, Brian 8063, Frederick H, Sarah L, Gareth C, Eric F, Matthew M, Sarah M, DJ Mewa, Andra B, Kwong U, Laura G, Dead Eye Jedi, Bob, Nathan T,

[01:02:20] Alex V, Aaron T, Sub Zero, Aaron K, and Adrian, who will always be last on the list because he requested it. All right. They were released. Marilyn, it's always fun chatting with you, especially about books.

[01:02:34] And I can't wait to see what we're gonna do in the new year. Oh, all kinds of interesting things are on the way, I suspect. All right. All right, I'll see you then. Yes, good night. The Lore Hounds Podcast is produced and published by the Lore Hounds.

[01:02:50] You can send questions and feedback and voicemails at thelorehounds.com slash contact. Get early and ad-free access to all Lore Hounds podcasts at patreon.com slash the Lore Hounds. Any opinions stated are ours personally and do not reflect the opinion of

[01:03:05] or belong to any employers or other entities. Thanks for listening. Okay, David, this is where we're supposed to choose a side, green or black. John, my soul is as black as night. Your turn. I am black for life. So we're not fighting?

[01:03:31] I thought this is where HBO wanted us to like pick sides and fight and stuff. Don't worry, I'm sure we'll find plenty to disagree about on the pod, but we seem to agree on one thing. We both really like this show. The politics, the drama, the lore.

[01:03:44] It was made for the Lore Hounds. And since we just finished recapping season one, we couldn't be more ready to defend our black queen in the Dance of the Dragons. And with the season pass option in Supercast, listeners can get early ad-free access

[01:03:57] to each weekly scene by scene deep dive, plus our custom show guide with all the characters and connections. See you in the Lore Hounds podcast feed each week for our dragon fire hot, but probably positive takes. The Lore Hounds House of the Dragon coverage

[01:04:12] is also safe for team green consumption. Side effects may include a deeper understanding of dragon lore, a heart and conflict with itself and an inescapable urge to read the book Fire and Blood by George R.R. Martin. Dragon seeds may experience burning.