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in a way readers can easily recognize from fairy tales. But he places his own spin on the situations. Although fairy godmothers still provide pumpkin coaches, Magrat winds up turning everything into pumpkins at first. Black Aliss is the wicked witch shut up in the oven in a
Hansel and Gretel-like way. The frog prince (really a duc —French for “duke” and “horned owl”—go figure), who is hardly a Prince Charming, tries to marry the Cinderella of the story.
    In Thief of Time, Pratchett alludes to Grimm’s Fairy Tales when Jeremy Clockson reads Grim Fairy Tales, which contains such stories as “The Old Lady in the Oven” (gotta be a Hansel and Gretel story) and “The Glass Clock of Bad Schüschein.”
    The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is one large allusion to the Pied Piper of Hamelin story, a story the Grimm brothers included and one that inspired poet Robert Browning. Pratchett also mentions the story of “Puss in Books” from Charles Perrault’s collection and “Dick Livingstone and his wonderful cat”—an allusion to Dick Whittington, a story Andrew Lang collected (which is partially based on the life of Richard Whittington the Lord Mayor of London), and Ken Livingstone the Leader of the Greater London Council until 1986. He became Mayor of London in 2002.
    Every culture has folktales. Pratchett is undoubtedly familiar with the folktales of Norway, judging by his allusion to East of the Sun, West of the Moon in Lords and Ladies . That story comes from the fairy-tale collection of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe published in 1845, another volume of which was published in 1879.
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    The Devil Made Me Do It. As you may or may not know, Faust, the epic by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, featuring a Job-like agreement and a contest of wills between Faust and Mephistopheles, is parodied in Eric . Instead of the pious Doktor Faust, there’s Eric, a fourteen-year-old who wants to meet the most beautiful woman in the world, have mastery over the kingdoms, and live forever—apt goals according to some in our world. Having a huge amount of gold would be nice, too. But instead of summoning someone like Mephistopheles, Eric summons Rincewind.
    In Faust, Mephistopheles tried and failed to gain Faust’s soul through similar temptations—the pleasures of life, the search for
the most beautiful woman in the world (Helen of Troy), a desire for power. As we mentioned earlier, Helen is Elenor in Eric.
    As the scenery of Pandemonium—the place to which Eric journeys—is described, we can’t help also seeing the influence of The Divine Comedy, the fourteenth-century Dante Alighieri classic, and Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic take on the temptation and fall of man, published in 1667. The city Eric comes to, which is surrounded by a lake of lava, has “unparalleled views of the Eight Circles” 19 —like the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno, the first cantica of The Divine Comedy . The name Pandemonium is a reference to Lucifer’s palace of the same name in Paradise Lost.
    In Inferno, you see some elements similar to Greek mythology in the use of the River Acheron and Charon the ferryman. In the journey through the Underworld described in Wintersmith, the taciturn river ferryman is like Charon and the river is like Acheron.
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    A Book to Sink Your Teeth Into. Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic novel Dracula is the great-great-grandfather of many a vampire story, even though it wasn’t actually the first vampire story written. (John William Polidori wrote “The Vampyre,” published in 1819. But even that wasn’t the first, although it started the tradition of the vampire story in literature.) As Pratchett gives shape to the fortified communities of Uberwald, a land “with no real boundaries and lots of forest in between” 20 plus plenty of howling wolves, you see echoes of the