Death (Discworld)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Characters from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series |
|
 |
|
| Character details | |
| Full name: | Death |
| Description: | The personification of death but with a more elaborate personality |
| Associations: | Azrael Mort Albert Susan Sto Helit Death of Rats |
| Location: | Death's Domain and everywhere else |
| Story appearances | |
| First seen: | The Colour of Magic |
| Also in: | Every Discworld novel except The Wee Free Men |
| Other details | |
| Notes: | alias Bill Door (Reaper Man), Beau Nidle (Soul Music), and Mr Scrub (Soul Music) |
Death is a fictional character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Discworld's Death is a parody of several other personifications of death. Like most Grim Reapers, he is a black-robed skeleton carrying a scythe and, for royalty, a sword (It's the rules, he once told Mort). Unlike many of them, he has a personality beyond this.
Death is one of the most popular Discworld characters and makes an appearance in every Discworld book except The Wee Free Men. His steed is a great pale horse called Binky who is very much still alive. His hollow, peculiar voice is represented in the books by unquoted small caps; it is peculiar because since he is a tall skeleton, he has no vocal cords to speak with, and thus, speaks through other means. In The Colour of Magic (the first Discworld novel), and in Faust Eric, all direct written references to Death are proper nouns, thus, for example, "he" is written as "He". This is usually reserved for the Discworld gods and is not featured in any of the other novels.
Death is not invisible. Most people just refuse to acknowledge him for who he is, unless he insists. Under normal circumstances, only those of a magical disposition (e.g. witches and wizards), children and cats can see him, or allow themselves to see him. Death can of course ignore things like walls or magic spells that stand between him and his object: this is because he's much "realer" than they are. A castle might stand for centuries, but Death has existed for billions of years: to him, the walls of the castle are less substantial than a cobweb. However, he can only go where people can die, as shown in Hogfather.
It is also mentioned in The Colour of Magic that wizards and significant figures (e.g. kings) have the "privilege" of being collected by Death himself upon their death, rather than one of the lesser entities. Most other deaths are collected by another functionary, but with the exception of Mort and Susan (both acting as "authorized" replacements for Death), there has only been one "collection" described in the books by anyone other than Death, attempted of Rincewind the Wizzard by the anthropomophic personification of Scrofula. However, Death himself must collect some souls in order to keep the momentum of death going, worked out by a system described as the 'nodes'. These nodes seem handily to be most of the characters who die in the course of the novels, as Death almost invariably turns up whenever any character dies, sometimes (especially when taking bad characters' lives) replaced by the Death of Rats, mentioned below in this article. As well as wizards and kings, he has shown up for numerous ordinary people, at least two dogs, a swan, and once for an incredibly small sea creature, possibly a tube worm. He was present at the beginning of Time in one novel. He has also appeared even in situations where characters might potentially die. These events are usually of importance within the story, so Death's appearance may simply be considered a plot device. Death mentions in Guards! Guards! that he does personally collect the souls of ordinary people Sometimes. On special occasions.
Contents |
[edit] Personality
Death is efficient but not cruel, and sees his job as a necessary public service. His task is not to kill, but to collect.
He is fond of cats (who can see him at all times) and curry (although he doesn't need to eat), which he tells Mort is like eating hot ice-cubes. He lives (although he doesn't need to live anywhere) in an extradimensional realm called Death's Domain. Within the domain, his home (although he doesn't need a home) looks like a normal upper middle class Victorian house with a garden, is well-tended, but is predominantly black and decorated with a skull and crossbone motif. It is called Mon Repos, and is much, much bigger on the inside, because Death has not quite mastered the art of scale. Similarly, because he does not quite understand real distance compared to perspective, the surrounding terrain is actually relatively close, but blurred to appear farther away. The grounds contain a large golden wheat field after the events of Reaper Man. There is also a swing, created by Death for Susan, which mainly serves to further prove Death's lack of understanding of traditional physics. When he discovered that he had tied the two ropes on branches either side of the trunk, he simply removed the offending trunk as opposed to repositioning the ropes. This has not in the least affected the growth of the tree.
Death is fascinated by humanity, hence the above attempts at living beyond the role, and why he once adopted an orphaned child named Ysabell (see below). His interest is coupled with bafflement: it's a favorite point of Prachett's that the habits and beliefs that are grown into instead of being rationally acquired are an essential part of being human. As Death is an outside observer, his imitations are intricate but marked by a fundamental lack of comprehension. When acting as a stand-in for the Hogfather he starts by greeting the children he meets in the course of his duties with Cower, brief mortals from force of habit, until reminded not to do so by Albert.
This fascination with humanity extends to the point of sympathy towards them, and he will often side with humans against greater threats (notably the Auditors). He has on a number of occasions bent the rules to allow a character extra life. Death has also indicated that he will oblige dying humans by playing a game with them for their lives (much like the personification of Death in The Seventh Seal), the games including chess (though he consistently has trouble remembering how the knights move) and something called "Exclusive Possession" (where someone lost despite having "three streets and all the utilities"). In one case, Granny Weatherwax was able to play cards against Death in a successful bid to save a child's life (Granny's hand had four kings, while he only had four 'ones'). In many ways, he is a character who epitomises the bleakness of human existence – in the book Reaper Man, in which he is rendered temporarily mortal, he becomes frustrated and infuriated with the unfair inevitability of death, a theme that continues through later books. In Soul Music he expresses misery at the fact that he is capable of preventing deaths but is forbidden to do so. Terry Pratchett even says in The Art of Discworld that he has received a number of letters from terminally ill fans in which they hope that Death will resemble the Discworld incarnation (he also says that those particular letters usually cause him to spend some time staring at the wall).
Death has developed considerably since his first appearance in The Colour of Magic. In this, he was actually quite a malicious character. At one point he deliberately stops a character's heart. By the time of Mort he had gained the sympathetic and humorous personality that would make him so popular. In more recent novels, he has been used to examine recent developments in theoretical physics as, being a supernatural being, he is able to witness such events firsthand (although being a cat lover, he is not fond of Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment).
Some readers[citation needed] have suggested that Death may have been partially based on The Doctor from Doctor Who. Both are beings who can travel anywhere in time and space, are fascinated with humanity but do not always understand it, live in domiciles that are significantly bigger on the inside than the outside, and have granddaughters named Susan. Pratchett has stated that these parallels are mere coincidence.[citation needed]
[edit] Death's gender
The initial books did not pronounce themselves about the gender of Death, giving an ambiguous "it". However, in Reaper Man, Death is unambiguously identified as a male. When asked to describe Death, in the second Discworld computer game, the protagonist Rincewind hazards a guess, "Well, I suppose he's a man. You have to look at the pelvis, don't you?". In the comic strip adaptation of Mort, Death is seen in mirrors as a black-bearded human wearing a black cloak, and also seen as this when he needs to be seen by the living.
In the Spanish translations of the books, it was not possible to be ambiguous about Death's sex, because Spanish language must provide a grammatical gender to each object (table is female while pencil is male), sometimes even changing the gender of synonyms (computer can be ordenador (male), or computadora (female)). Thus, translator Cristina Macía chose the female gender for Death, as death in Spanish; muerte, is female. It had to be changed when Reaper Man was published, and justified in a footnote.
In the French translation, though the noun for death (la mort) is feminine, the actual gender when conjugating is masculine. The translator, Patrick Couton, justified the fact by a pun in a footnote : "La Mort est mâle, car c'est un mâle nécessaire" (Death is male because it is a necessary evil/male). In French : mâle = male and mal = evil are pronounced almost identically. It may also refer to some translator notice in The Lord of the Rings, where the sun ("le soleil", en français) is referred as female ("la soleil"). The translator notices in Discworld books about death are written in the same fashion.
In the Polish translation by Piotr W. Cholewa Death is masculine, despite the noun (Śmierć) being feminine in Polish. As a result Death is definitely male and is addressed exclusively as He (On).
In the Croatian translation Death was female up to Sourcery where it was changed to a male persona. The changing of his gender is addressed at the beginning of the book via a translator's commentary.
[edit] Relations and associates
Death is both the servant and a part of The Old High One known as Azrael, the Death of Universes and ruler of all deaths.
Ysabell, Death's adopted daughter, first appears in The Light Fantastic, and has a significant role in Mort. In this novel Mort is given the job of Death's apprentice, and he and Ysabell get married. Their child is Susan (below).
Death's granddaughter Susan is first tapped to fill in for him during the events of Soul Music, and is again called in Hogfather. She also plays an important role in Thief of Time. She would give it all up if it weren't for Binky, below.
Death's domain has a "groundskeeper" named Albert. He is not dead, but instead was brought to Death's domain when he performed the Rite of AshkEnte backwards. He entered the land of Death with around three months left before he was due to die. Subsequent trips to the Disc on errands for his master have left him with a mere five seconds.
Death frequently works with War, Pestilence and Famine, the other three Horsemen of the Apocralypse (though, when War, Pestilence and Famine gets their horses stolen in Sourcery, they sarcastically rename themselves The One Horseman and The Three Pedestrians of the Apocralypse). Like him they have become more human than their roles require. Death himself explains this; in Thief of Time, he says that "form defines function". In Thief of Time, Kaos, the Fifth Horseman, was introduced, having previously left before they became famous and now works as a milkman under the name Ronnie Soak.
[edit] Binky
Binky is Death's steed. He is a real horse; Death tried a skeletal steed, but kept having to stop and wire bits back on.[1] Death also had a fiery steed, but that one repeatedly set his barn on fire.
Binky is more intelligent than most horses and is a pure, milky white (it is noted in some novels that Binky is an exception to the usual equestrian rule of all pale-colored horses being officially 'grey'). He can fly (though really he just creates his own ground-level), as well as travel through time and across dimensions, sometimes leaving glowing hoofprints in his wake, but is in all other respects a perfectly ordinary horse. He's well-treated, and loyal to his master and Susan when she's filling in for him. His shoes are made by Jason Ogg, the Lancrastian blacksmith of mythical skill, and he is probably immortal. Binky gains a part of his power by sharing one of Death's qualities: he's so much "realer" than ordinary things (for instance, walls, great distances, or time), that he can simply ignore them. When Susan observes Binky apparently walking on air and asks if he's a real horse, she's told, "There's no horse realer than that one, Miss."
"My Little Binky" (a reference to My Little Pony) was a gift given to Susan Sto Helit, Death's granddaughter, for one of her early birthdays. Her parents returned the gift, fearing that this would make her a less "normal" child.
[edit] The Death of Rats
The Death of Rats is not, strictly speaking, a personification in his own right but rather an aspect of Death allowed an independent existence. His purpose is to usher on the souls of dead rodents, and occasionally rodent-like humans, as well as assisting Death in other ways (he drew Death's attention to interference by the Auditors, demonstrating improbable statistics by using a machine that measured how often a piece of toast dropped butter-side-down). He was one of a disparate multitude of Deaths (down to the Death of Microorganisms) created during Death's absence in Reaper Man. Upon Death's resumption of his duties, he reabsorbed the identities of all the millions of Deaths into himself. The Death of Rats, however, refused to be reabsorbed and, even though Death initially said he would not let the Death of Rats remain separate, Death nevertheless kept him around as company. The Death of Rats resembles a rodentine skeleton on its hind legs, wearing a black robe and carrying a tiny scythe.
The Death of Rats more easily finds ways around the Rules than Death does, and has assisted Susan in Soul Music, Hogfather and Thief of Time. He sometimes travels with a talking raven named Quoth (as in 'Quoth the Raven' from the poem The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. The 'N' word he doesn't like to say is Nevermore, also from the poem) who also acts as his translator (and says he's "in it for the eyeballs"). The Death of Fleas, also managed to escape reabsorption, but has not been seen since Reaper Man.
The Death of Rats' jursidiction also seems to cover certain kinds of 'ratty' humans, such as Mr Clete in Soul Music. In Maskerade the Death of Rats took the soul of the Opera House's ratcatcher, who then got reincarnated as a rodent. The ratcatcher protested that he did not believe in reincarnation, and got the answer "reincarnation believes in you."
The Death of Rats, like Death, speaks in small caps, but has a vocabulary consisting of words such as Squeak, Eek, Ik and Snh, the last used when it laughs, although its speech can be interpreted from context much like the Librarian's.
In the mythology of the Clan (from The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents) the Death of Rats is known as the Bone Rat.
[edit] New Death
The New Death first appears in Reaper Man when he comes to collect the old Death, now known as "Bill Door". The new Death comes from human belief, but he is quite different from the original. Though he has the usual black robe, he is a larger figure than Bill Door and has only smoke underneath his robe, rather than bones. His horse, however, is the classic skeletal steed, as opposed to Binky. In place of a face or skull, the new Death wears a crown (in striking resemblance to the Witch-king of Angmar). He is prideful and cruel, the literal embodiment of humanity's fear of death; when he corners Bill Door, he mocks him and beats him instead of finishing the job.
The new Death is destroyed when Miss Renata Flitworth comes to Bill Door's rescue by giving him some of her life, so that he can briefly escape "death". Bill Door then kills the new Death with the harvest scythe he used on the farm; just a humble garden tool, not the infinitely sharp implement of Death. Bill Door objected very strongly to the crown of the new Death, and his victory is the triumph of the compassionate "reaper man" over the tyrant who has no care for the harvest.
[edit] Death on screen
In the 1996 animated adaptations of Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters, Death was voiced by Christopher Lee. In the recently-aired Sky One adaptation of Hogfather he was voiced by Ian Richardson who managed to inject a small verbal joke from his prior career. The actor who played the physical Death in Hogfather was Marnix Van Den Broek, a 6 foot 7 inch Dutchman.
