I first read The Wee
Free Men by Terry Pratchett when I was eleven because the librarian on duty
in the teen room at CPL recommended it. The novel is set on the Discworld,
which flies through space on the back of four giant elephants who in turn stand
on the back of the great turtle A’Tuin. Near the center of the Discworld is the
Chalk, an area loosely based on a rural part of England (Wiltshire if you’re
interested, which is southwest of Oxford).
Tiffany Aching lives on the Chalk. She is nine years old. She
has six older sisters and a two-year-old brother named Wentworth, who she often
gets stuck babysitting. Her family are farmers and raise sheep and have farmed
and raised sheep for as long as anyone can remember.
Tiffany has other plans: “she’d decided only last week that
she wanted to be a witch when she grew up.” Funnily enough, it’s exactly at
that moment that Tiffany has her first interaction with magic – a monster jumps
out of a stream and tries to steal her younger brother.
Tiffany starts investigating the monster and finds out that
there’s a parasitic world led by a fairy queen that’s latched onto the Discworld,
is letting monsters in, and of course threatens to destroy everything. She also
learns that the Chalk is also inhabited by the Wee Free Men, fairies with a
mostly Scottish culture who believe they’re in the afterlife and mainly try to
spend as much time as possible drinking, fighting, and stealing before they
have to be reincarnated. These pictsies (get it? They’re Scottish) and a toad
who used be a lawyer until he brought a suit against a fairy godmother become
Tiffany’s allies.
When Tiffany’s brother Wentworth is kidnapped by the fairy
queen, Tiffany finds the entrance to the parasitic fairyland and invades it
with the pictsies and the toad. She faces down creatures called dromes that trap
people in worlds made out of their dreams (the real kind of dreams not the nice
kind) only to have to face the Queen in the real world. But Tiffany uses the
power of the fossils in the chalk and a storm with the power of her grandmother’s
sheepdogs to force the queen back into her own world and rescue her brother.
One reason that I keep rereading The Wee Free Men is that it’s hilarious, but I wouldn’t love it so
much if Tiffany weren’t an untraditionally determined hero. Tiffany’s special
power isn’t magic, which is considered fairly easy on Discworld, but “first
sight and second thoughts,” or the abilities to see what’s really happening in
a situation and to think critically, especially about first impressions. These
gifts enable Tiffany to have a strong and nuanced sense of right and wrong (especially
for a nine-year-old) and she is determined to do right. As an example, Tiffany
decides to become a witch in the first place because after a baron’s son went
missing, people blamed an old woman who lived by herself, called her a witch,
burned her house down, and let her freeze to death in the winter. Tiffany wants
to challenge her neighbors’ prejudice and ideas of fairytale evil. Tiffany never
refuses the call to action because she thinks someone has to take
responsibility for fixing things.
On a side note, I have a beautifully illustrated edition of The Wee Free Men and I couldn’t justify
writing about the book without sharing some pictures so enjoy these low-quality ones.
Throughout the novel there are tiny pictures of the pictsies
messing with the words of the text because that’s just what they do:
Here’s Tiffany in the dairy (her job on the farm is making
cheese) with the pictsies hiding from her:
And here are some of the nightmares/monsters Tiffany encounters:
Weeping a bit right now. I wrote about Tiffany Aching too, and it's interesting to me the different points we emphasized about her as kids. I love how you point out first sight and second thoughts, as well as her responsibility. She gets stuff done, and it's awesome. I looked a little bit more into how she actually goes about doing things, and how she is very self-sufficient.
ReplyDeleteI discovered Terry Pratchett's writing several years ago and enjoyed it immensely, especially Tiffany Aching's sub-series. What really struck me was how Tiffany's power isn't something fantastical (like, say, the wizards at the Unseen University with fireballs and seven-league boots and an orangutan in the Library), but rather something solid and reliable, grounded in Tiffany's upbringing/culture of the Chalk (especially her grandmother). In comparison, Tiffany's (supernatural) antagonists tend to be things like the faery court, the Wintersmith, or the Hiver -- all of whom are somehow unreal or that don't fit properly into the world.
ReplyDeleteI've read the Tiffany Aching series as well and I loved them. Something that always struck me was how different witches were portrayed in the books compared to most other books. But I think one of the parts of the book that I remember most was the idea that you coulfn't grow a witch on chalk, and yet there Tiffany was.
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