|
back to the Hedgehog Song |
.. back to my filk index
../.. back to my filk links page
/ back to my home page
last modified 2003-06-04
Inspired by a few lines in Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters [N.Y.: Penguin, 1990. Copyright 1988 by Terry and Lynn Pratchett. A ROC Book]. The song is sung fragmentarily and passim by Nanny (Gytha) Ogg bolded in the text, with page references. The music is copyright 1994-1995 by Mark A. Mandel.
Page 44: Nanny Ogg, on the other hand, was enthusiastically downing her third drink and, Granny thought sourly, was well along that patch which would probably end up with her usual dancing on the table, showing her petticoats and singing "The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered at All".
Page 48: "-- with the giraffe, If you stand on a stool. But the hedgehog --" [Slight license taken with the article.]
Page 51: Nanny Ogg, sitting alone in her kitchen with her huge tomcat curled up on her lap, poured herself a nightcap and through the haze tried to remember the words of verse seventeen of the Hedgehog song. There was something about goats, she recalled, but the details eluded her.
Pp. 86-87: Granny navigated through the press of bodies by the sound of a cracked voice explaining to the world at large that, compared to an unbelievable variety of other animals, the hedgehog was quite fortunate.
Nanny Ogg was sitting in a chair by the fire with a quart mug in one hand, and was conducting the reprise with a cigar.
Page 186: And thus it was that Granny, her hat and iron-grey hair dripping with moisture, her boots shedding lumps of ice, heard the distant and muffled sound of a voice enthusiastically explaining to the invisible sky that the hedgehog had less to worry over than just about any other mammal.
Page 315: ... where the cross-resonances and waves of conflicting echoes focused on a small, elderly woman who was waving an empty bottle.
"-- with a snail if you slow to a crawl, but the hedgehog --"
"It tastes better at the bottom of the bottle, doesn't it," Magrat said, trying to drown out the chorus.
"That's right," said Granny, draining her cup.
"Is there any more?"
"I think Gytha finished it, by the sound of it."
Assuming that the basic stanza is a quatrain ending in "The hedgehog can never be buggered at all", the
"snail" quotation from p. 315 indicates a rhyme scheme of aabB, while page 48
("giraffe") indicates abaB.
I have used abaB throughout, with the exception of
verse 1 (xbxB) and the
snail verse.
-- The stanzas marked with an asterisk make a good
short version with all the parts mentioned in text.
For my money, the last two lines of dialogue quoted from p. 315 can apply to the song as well as the booze, so I've decided that the snail verse should end the song. Its aberrant rhyme scheme can then be just one of several cues to the drunken crowd that in a few moments they're going to have to sing something else. The other cues, in this version, are
Although Noah is not mentioned by that name in any of the Discworld texts, there is a similar character in one of the legends of the founding of Ankh-Morpork, identified in Carpe Jugulum as Bishop Horn. [T. Pratchett, pers. comm.] Many similar myths are acknowledged [ibid.], and this may be one of them. Or the song, in its migration from the Discworld to ours, may have undergone a transformation familiar in the folk process, in which a story about one character is reassigned to another character who is better known in the borrowing milieu. See Beau-Gousse & F'hony, Jour. Myth. Factit. & Wrong-headed Disc. 276:1882-1723.
"The Cat Who Walked By Himself" is one of Kipling's Just So Stories: "And he went back through the Wet Wild Woods waving his wild tail, and walking by his wild lone."
The first line of the verse about the yak is taken from "The Yak", by Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), which begins thus:
As a friend to the children, commend me the Yak;No, it doesn't scan to the same tune; lines 2 and 4 are a foot short.
You will find it exactly the thing;
It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back,
Or lead it about with a string.
Totally irrelevant to all of which is the following, from p. 101 (copyright as for citations):
"What ho, b'zugda-hiara*," he said cheerfully.*A killing insult of Dwarfish, but here used as a term of endearment. It means "lawn ornament".
This document, in the original version, was dictated with DragonDictate for Windows.
Hedgehog image © 1997 by Grolier Interactive Inc.
Score generated with Finale® Allegro(TM) for Macintosh by Coda Music Technology.
|
|
back to the Hedgehog Song |
last modified 2003-06-04