Hogfather, Pig slaughter traditions in Europe

By


Hogswatch 

Pig slaughter traditions in Europe



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reaper Man : DEATH or death?

By
Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man. DEATH or death? Back to the Discworld for a new reading I, like so many, have been touched by details of character or story which youth and enthusiasm missed, so keen were we for the meat of the action. Returning to these books is like taking on foot, roads formerly dashed down by car. My overriding impression is that Pratchett is first and foremost a comedian, willing to sacrifice consistency for the gag, for the flow of the story. Ditto in his public persona. Watching interviews with him he frequently goes for laughs. It seems he may well have been like that behind the scenes too. I heard Marc Burrows, an unofficial biographer, interviewed on a podcast (now un-refindable of course). He recounted that part of his decision to write the book was due to his disappointment at having narrowly missed an opportunity to meet Pratchett. He had not been able to go when a friend of his was involved in the BBC radio programme A Museum of Curiosities when Pratchett w...
Read more

Soul Music foreshadowing in Mort

By
  From Mort, some foreshadowing and descriptions "In short, Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag full of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe." "YES? “Well, I think it was because you were up to your knees in horseshit, to tell you the truth.” Death looked at him for a long time. Mort shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. ABSOLUTELY CORRECT, snapped Death. CLARITY OF THOUGHT. REALISTIC APPROACH. VERY IMPORTANT IN A JOB LIKE OURS." Ysabel : "She had silver hair, and eyes with a pearly sheen to them, and the kind of interesting but impractical long, dress that tends to be worn by tragic heroines who clasp single roses to their bosom while gazing soulfully at the moon. Mort had never heard the phrase “Pre-Raphaelite,” which was a pity because it would have been almost the right description. However, such girls tend to be on the translucent, consumptive side, whereas this one had a sli...
Read more

TP's Witches

By
Some notes on STP’s portrayal of Witches * The witch-midwife. Researching the history of witchcraft shows a major inconsistency between the historical records and Terry Pratchett’s ideas. The historian in this BBC History Extra podcast confirms witch activity being defined as maleficorum. Only that. (https://podcastaddict.com/episode/140412687) It's obvious there's a contradiction, but I didn’t have the info to put my finger on why until I heard this podcast recently. (note - It seems we’re in good company, even the entry to the Encyclopaedia Britannica had the wrong info.) I recently discovered that the research behind Terry Pratchett’s midwife-witches was flawed. He’d got the idea from the writer Lovecraft who he was parodying. Lovecraft had picked up on the ideas of a writer and a biologist, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English. It seems that not being historians they made a natural mix up by not having read the original documents, only later opinions. They were absolute...
Read more