Tiffany Aching: The Young Witch

A while back I wrote about how Ursula K LeGuin asked the question “what was the young great wizard like?” But as far as I know, up until Terry Pratchett no one had asked “what was the young great witch like?” There are young women who become great witches, but that tends to happen after the book is over (as in Diana Wynne Jones’ The Spellcoats, and in adult novels like The Mists of Avalon childhood is merely a prelude).

Terry Pratchett’s witch novels are held together by the glue that is Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Og. They are two old ladies you know already, who in the world of Discworld are witches. We know what Nanny Og was like when she was young (she had an unknown number of husbands starting quite quick), but what was Granny Weatherwax like?

She was like Tiffany Aching. Tiffany Aching has “first sight and second thoughts,” a clever way of saying that she actually pays attention to what she sees, then acts instead of just reacting. Sometimes. Other times, she just does what seems natural and gets in enormous trouble for it.

When I say that Terry Pratchett asked the complementary question “what was the young great witch like,” he didn’t just put a great wizard in a dress or something ridiculous. Tiffany’s journey is very different than a young man’s journey would be. She is, for example, far more connected to people than the transient young man who becomes a wizard–to her past, to her family, to her land. But she too is sometimes blinded with arrogance, certain she can do anything (and forced to pay the price). She too must leave home and come back changed.

Yet, Tiffany’s greatness is of a different sort. In “The Shepherd’s Crown,” someone (I won’t say who) asked Granny Weatherwax why, when she could have done anything, when she could have ruled kingdoms and uprooted mountains, she had instead lived in a tiny village, in a cottage. Granny Weatherwax never even learned to spell. She answered that she didn’t want to do any of that. She just wanted her cottage, her place to rule and keep together.

That’s what ultimately set the witches of Terry Pratchett’s world apart from the great wizards of fantasy. Wizards seek to shake the world itself, to be the men who wrought change across time itself. Witches see the world inside every person, and they shift and shake those thousands of worlds instead of the big one. And both are needed, in the world of fiction and in our own world.

 

On Tiffany Aching and Autobiographical Writing

 

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I once read an interview with Terry Pratchett where he was asked if he put real people into his characters. “I certainly hope so,” he answered. He wanted his characters to breathe, to feel so alive you wouldn’t be surprised to run into them doing their shopping. In fact, he wanted them to be people you actually have run into doing their shopping. That’s how real they needed to be.

Tiffany Aching is, I suspect, as close as Sir Pratchett ever came to writing a truly autobiographical character. Tiffany read the dictionary through at a young age, just like Sir Pratchett says he did. She grew up poor on the Chalk, just like Sir Pratchett.

Something I’ve noticed while reading through fantasy award lists and classics is that there are still not enough girls. It’s still dominated by boys on their adventures. Diana Wynne Jones said that children’s books tend to be centered around a neutral character–and in our literary culture, a boy can more easily be neutral than a girl. So, boys continue to be more common then girls.

That’s why a really good girl protagonist in a big children’s and young adult series is a gift. I don’t mean the dystopian warrior girls who are all practically interchangeable these days–those books are good, but they’re not GREAT. And the Tiffany Aching books are GREAT, and they’re about a girl whose reaction to a monster in the lake when she was 9 was to use her brother as bait and hit the thing with a frying pan.

The world needed Tiffany. Thousands, if not millions of girls will love Tiffany. And I can muster nothing but gratitude for Sir Pratchett’s gift of her to us.