King vs Witch in Wyrd Sisters
While Wyrd Sisters (1988) is famous for introducing Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick alongside a soft reboot of Granny Weatherwax,[1] it’s also a book that leans into themes of masculinity, particularly fatherhood, legacy and the question of what makes a good or bad king.
The most significant male characters in the story are all some form of king: King Verence I (deceased), his Macbeth-style murderer and usurper cousin Duke Felmet, and the two young men who will be revealed at various points in the story to be Verence’s rightful and “rightful” heirs to the kingdom, though it is likely that neither of them are his sons. While several scenes show us the POV of these four male characters, this is the Discworld and POV does not a protagonist make. This is called a witch book for a reason. The four kings might be vital to the plot, but this is not their story.
The reluctant coven of Lancre Witches (Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and even the young and inexperienced Magrat Garlick) stride with power and crackling character through this novel, owning every scene in which they appear. One of the ways in which we are shown their power and their significance to the community is in how men react to them.
In the early scenes, a distinction is made between men (whether tax collectors, guards, or actors) who are locals, and understand how witches are to be treated; and those who were not raised locally, don’t understand the unwritten rules, and find themselves constantly thwarted and/or defeated.
The sergeant in charge was not happy in his work. He was a Ramtops man, and wasn’t at all certain about how you went about arresting a witch. He was pretty certain, though, that the witch wouldn’t like the idea. He didn’t like the idea of a witch not liking the idea.
Most of all, we learn how the insidious, social power of the witches fares against a more traditional form of leadership: the king.
Wyrd Sisters is a book that deals in absolutes with one hand, while questioning them with the other. Tomjon is the rightful heir (but is he?), Verence I was a good king (using what metric?), the Fool is the answer to everyone’s problems (or is he a convenient fiction?).
Shakespeare is hung out to dry as the most culpable villain of them all, a playwright deciding for posterity which were the good kings and which were the hunch-backed murderers…
Pratchett uses his story to subvert two of Shakespeare’s most iconic plays, Macbeth and Hamlet (with a smattering of many other king plays for good measure), by exploring power dynamics and providing far more questions than answers in the best possible way.
Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are keen to explain to the much younger Magrat that the difference between a good king and a bad king is not whether or not they respect witches… but, that’s not not the difference, either. At the beginning of the novel, Granny can’t even imagine why she should care who is king… and one of the most compelling arcs of the story is how Granny learns that she is wrong.
As it turns out, the treatment of witches is exactly how we decide which kings are good or bad… and even which heir should get the job.
GOOD KING VS BAD KING
Wyrd Sisters still feels surprisingly relevant in 2024. At its heart, the novel questions whether or not it is possible for anyone in the position of king to be anything approximating ‘good’ — much like the debate about whether there is such a thing as an ethical billionaire, or whether a hereditary monarchy should exist in this day and age.
As the story opens, Verence I is held up as an example of a Good King, and Duke Felmet as a Bad King. However, Pratchett’s subversive narrative begins to chip away at Verence rather quickly, showing him to represent everything that’s wrong with the monarchy: from exercising his droit de seigneur on a regular basis, to burning down cottages, hunting animals and sometimes people, etc.
Verence is portrayed as a bluff, rather brainless example of a typical historical king, who manages to achieve character development after death. As a ghost, he is stripped of everything he values, and forced to question everything he thought he knew about himself. Pairing him with Nanny Ogg not only provides some of the book’s lightest material (the Eye Spy scene with torture implements is comedy genius), but also allows Verence to be entertainingly roasted, and his ego punctured on the way to a narratively satisfying conclusion – one that is good enough to send his ghost on to the Afterlife, if not technically true.
After Verence’s ghost lures Nanny Ogg to the castle and charges her to rescue his baby son, he would be forgiven for believing that either he or Tomjon is to be the main character in this story… but while the story is technically about them both, it’s not really about them. After getting the story started, Verence mostly hangs around and haunts Nanny’s apron pocket, serving as a reminder of motivation (and occasional comic foil) until he finally gets a chance to re-enter the narrative. During the play-within-a-book of the final act, Verence I is able to possess his son Tomjon’s body during Tomjon’s performance in the role of himself, allowing the fictional “King Verence” to speak his truth about his own death. He also takes the opportunity to add his weight to the pressure on Tomjon to be king… but the last we see of Verence I is his failure to connect to his son when Tomjon rejects the crown. The solution of Verence II (the Fool) as the new king means that Verence I’s ghost is laid to rest offpage, according to Nanny Ogg.
It is Verence’s absence more than his presence that is most important to the story: as everyone’s default idea of a king (good or otherwise) he is the yardstick against which all other potential kings are measured. When Duke Felmet and the Duchess (with the help of the Fool) work to erode Verence’s reputation, they set him up to be remembered as a Bad King because of his association with the witches – when really they could have just listed some of the genuinely terrible things he did in his reign. When truth overwrites fiction during Tomjon’s performance as his father, it is the version of the truth most convenient for the witches, resetting Verence’s reputation to ‘Good’ without asking any awkward questions about how much he deserves that description.
“Yes, but,” said Nanny wretchedly, She was becoming a bit afraid of the gleam in Granny’s eye. “Lots of people have killed each other to become king of Lancre. They’ve done all kinds of murder.”
“Don’t matter! Don’t matter!” said Granny, waving her arms. She started counting on her fingers. “For why,” she said. “One, kings go round killing each other because it’s all part of destiny and such and doesn’t count as murder, and two, they killed for the kingdom. That’s the important bit. But this new man just wants the power. He hates the kingdom.”
Duke Felmet has a streak of cruelty to him that makes it clear there is a difference between a Good King who is casually terrible to most people around him, and a Really Bad King who actively causes harm to the kingdom as a whole. Felmet wants the kingdom for the sake of holding power — he actively hates the land, and has been pushed into this particular takeover by the larger and more dominant figure of his wife the Duchess.
While the Duchess grasps the dangerous potential of the witches early on, Duke Felmet can’t understand their power or why everyone is so careful around them, until he starts listening to the Fool who provides a crucial local perspective.
“In the Guild,” said the Fool, “We learned that words can be more powerful even than magic.”
“Clown!” said the duke. “Words are just words. Brief syllables. Sticks and stones may break my bones–” he paused, savouring the thought – “but words can never hurt me.”
“My lord, there are words that can,” said the Fool. “Liar! Usurper! Murderer!”
Felmet’s disrespect for the witches and his eagerness to destroy their reputations, culminating in his capture of and attempt to torture Nanny Ogg, shows us that he is truly despicable on a grand as well as small scale. While Verence’s goodness is both relative and suspect, his is the lesser evil in comparison to Felmet’s irredeemable badness.
Felmet begins the story as the main antagonist, and it is largely he who defeats the witches at the end of the first act of the story, with words instead of weapons. He announces smugly that they can’t conquer him with magic unless magic itself is to rule - and that he has plenty of time to do all kinds of damage as king before the baby heir can grow up and move against him (inspiring Granny Weatherwax to her most ambitious bit of sideways magical thinking yet).
Felmet’s success here is due to the support and advice of his Fool, who has helped to compensate for his ignorance on local affairs, but it is still a strong moment for a character whose main defining factor is his weakness.
Unlike Macbeth, where the wife who urged the crime in the first place descends into guilt-induced madness and disappears from the narrative before the conclusion, in Wyrd Sisters it’s Felmet who becomes neurotic about the blood on his hands, leaving his wife to misuse and enjoy the power of the monarchy in the second half of the novel. The Duchess usurps the role of main villain, demoting Felmet to the role in which he has always been most comfortable, that of her sidekick. In the shadow of his even more villainous and scene-chewing wife, Felmet gives the Duchess someone to talk to as she plots, and regularly reminds her of the gruesome act that led them to power (something for which he feels guilt and she does not). He becomes smaller as she grows larger over the course of the story.
Conquering the Duchess is quite the challenge for the witches in the final act… and the kingdom itself sees her as the main villain to conquer, while Felmet destroys himself. Fear and paranoia about the witches (fueled by stories he himself has been instrumental in spreading) gets inside his head, providing the seed of his own downfall – and while becoming a ghost was Verence I’s idea of hell, it is the closest Felmet can get to a happy ending.
THE NEXT KING OF LANCRE
Tomjon’s relationship with the witches is grounded, like Felmet’s, in his ignorance. They have the greatest impact on his life as a baby, setting up Tomjon’s foster family situation with Vitoller and the strolling players, and providing a magical gift from each of them (fairy godmother style!) to shape his personality: Nanny Ogg drunkenly suggests he always remember the words which inadvertently turns him into the world’s greatest actor; Magrat hopes he will make friends easily, and Granny Weatherwax seals his ultimate fate by pronouncing he should be whoever he thinks he is.
These gifts, of course, serve to tell us more about the witches than about Tomjon. His isolation from Lancre means he grows up not so much an unwitting pawn in the game, but a random chess piece in the middle of a game of draughts. What heroes want generally pushes a fantasy story into its shape, but what Tomjon wants is the theatre in Ankh-Morpork and his adoptive father’s safe retirement.
Huge feats of magic and elaborate plot machinations have to be performed, therefore, to get Tomjon in the right place to fulfill his destiny. Not only does he have no idea who he is and why he needs to return to the Ramtops, but if he knew why he was being lured home, he would absolutely refuse to come.
Unlike the other male characters of this story, Tomjon is surrounded and supported by good men: a father who cares about him, and a mentor in Hwel the dwarf playwright. He doesn’t need anything the witches have to offer, and certainly has no use for the throne, crown and kingdom awaiting him…
HWEL: “Being king is a great role.”
TOMJON: “But it’s the only one you get to play!”
One could argue that the only person who should be given the responsibilities of a king is someone without ambition to become a king… but in Tomjon’s case that doesn’t work, because everything he wants out of life becomes impossible if he is a king.
When the witches come back into his life, play-acting as the helpful crones pointing him towards Lancre, Tomjon does not take any particular notice of them — it’s crucial that he does not recognise their importance. His immersion in theatre tradition makes him more of a tool for Duke Felmet than for his father’s ghost (until the final performance where his father literally takes him over to stop Tomjon presenting fake news) because Tomjon only knows about fictional witches – those same wicked crone tropes and cliches that have been working in Felmet’s favour.
Most importantly, Tomjon is not a local. As the book demonstrates quite thoroughly, only men of the Ramtops know how to treat witches (and by extension, the kingdom) with the right kind of respect.
“Listen to me, all of you,” [Tomjon] said. “I thank you for your offer, it’s a great honour. But I can’t accept it. I’ve worn more crowns than you can count, and the only kingdom I know how to rule has got curtains in front of it. I’m sorry.”
Dead silence greeted this. They did not appear to have been the right words.
“Another problem,” said Hwel conversationally, “is that you don’t actually have a choice. You are the king, you see. It’s a job you are lined up for when you’re born.”
“I’d be no good at it!”
“That doesn’t matter. A king isn’t something you’re good at, it’s something you are.”
“You can’t leave me here! There’s nothing but forests!”
The Fool, later known as Verence II, has quite the opposite upbringing to Tomjon, especially as regards male role models. Raised in a miserable household by an oppressive grandfather, regularly abandoned by his carefree father, and later suffering under cruel teachers at an even more miserable boarding school, he is a man trapped by his own destiny. Doomed to be forever mediocre in a role where everything he says and does was laid out for him generations before he was born.
(In other words, he already knows how to be a king.)
The Fool’s relationship with both King Verence and Duke Felmet (we never call him King Felmet!) is that of subservient vassal, trapped by his own loyalty.
The man is my lord and master, he thought. I have eaten his salt, or whatever that business was. They told me at Guild school that a Fool should be faithful to his master to the very end, after all others have deserted him. Good or bad doesn’t come into it.
The Fool is a strategic thinker, as shown by how he provides Felmet with weapons to use against the witches: the words that damage their reputation and social power. He knows exactly what is tearing him in two when he finds himself in a supporting role to both the villain (Felmet and to some extent the Duchess) and the heroes (the witches, especially Magrat).
Of all the men who feature in this book about witches, the Fool is the only one attempting to conduct an actual romance with a witch. His earnest respect for Magrat (even when she is at her silliest) borders on downright romantic and makes theirs one of the most genuinely pleasant love stories in the Discworld, unfolding over several volumes. For the purposes of this novel, their awkward courtship is mostly played for laughs, though it also does a great deal to show us that he is at his heart a decent bloke.
It is crucial that the Fool, like Verence I, understands the importance of the witches and how they function, whether he is working with them or against them. He is a local, after all, and that gives him a far clearer perspective on everything and everyone in this story.
Loyalty, generally considered a virtue, is the fatal flaw in the Fool’s makeup, as the driving force behind his choice to be the Duke’s henchman – and very nearly succeeding in destroying the reputation of the witches. Our understanding of this element in his character is part of what makes it so satisfying when he is revealed as the final surprise king candidate to save Tomjon and the kingdom from making a terrible mistake.
We don’t see a great deal of the Fool in his new role as King Verence II in this novel except for the scene at the very end in which he visits Magrat’s home, though his largely successful reign will be explored in several later books. His suitability for the job, however, is clearly signposted.
He wasn’t, he felt, a good king, but he’d had a lifetime of working hard at being something he wasn’t cut out to be, and he was persevering. As far as he could see, none of his predecessors had tried at all.
CONCLUSION
In Wyrd Sisters, whether or not you are a good or bad king always comes down to how you treat the witches. Verence I, for all his faults, respects Granny and her peers and understands the role they play in the kingdom. We don’t just hear about this offpage, but see it in practice with the deferential way he talks to Nanny Ogg.
Felmet rails against the influence of the witches, tries to use their reputations against them, and conflates his fear/hatred of the kingdom itself with his fear/hatred of the witches themselves.
Tomjon doesn’t care enough about the witches to be intimidated or guided by them. Being raised outside the Ramtops means he can never really understand how this community works – even meeting genuine witches does not particularly sway him from the fictional versions, which make more sense to him.
Only Verence II/the Fool, the ‘heir-who-isn’t-if-you-really-think-about-it’ is the right choice to put on the throne because he is a part of Lancre’s culture and history. He knows enough to be terrified of Granny Weatherwax, to be intimidated by Nanny Ogg, and to know that Magrat is worth waiting for.
As kings go, he could be worse.
Tansy Rayner Roberts is a Doctor of Classics, a Doctor Who podcaster, and an author of many science fiction and fantasy books, as well as the essay collection Pratchett’s Women. You can find her at tansyrr.com.
Notes
[1] More like crunchy reboot, amirite?