‘The Secret City-Watchman’s Ball’: thoughts on the name Ankh-Morpork
Why did Terry Pratchett light upon the name Ankh-Morpork for his Discworld capital city? I have a theory. I can’t prove it, but so little can be proven in this, our sublunary world, so I propose to rehearse my theory here.
It’s hard to deny, to begin with, that Ankh-Morpork has much in common with Lankhmar, the main city in Fritz Leiber’s sword-and-sorcery story-universe ‘Nehwon’. Lankhmar has a thieves’ guild, wizards, dubious market-traders (a shop in Leiber’s ‘Bazaar of the Bizarre’ uses magic to disguise the rubbish it sells as good-quality goods), capricious gods, and a great many colourful characters and types, from patrician overlords to barbarian hordes called ‘Mingols’, and what David Langford calls, rather nicely, ‘a general sense of sleazy, colourful inexhaustibility’. Lankhmar also contains a city-within-the-city, ‘Lankhmar Below’, a rat metropolis elaborately reflective of the city above it (Pratchett also had a fondness for rat communities). Plus Leiber’s stories include a personified Death who repeatedly tries to harvest Leiber’s two swordsmen/thief heroes, the diminutive Gray Mouser and the hulking Fafhrd. All this is very Ankh-Morpork-y, or Ankh-Morporcine.
Leiber is funny, too, though not as funny as Pratchett. We might say that the rather arch, mannered stylings of Leiber’s writing are not capable of the reach, the humanity or the sheer hilarity of Pratchett at his best. Indeed, we might say that Leiber is aiming for something rather different, a distanciated wryness, to Pratchett’s marvellous, Wodehousian inclusiveness.
Pratchett himself offered a half-hearted denial that Ankh-Morpork was based on Lankhmar. But that Pratchett read and was influenced by Leiber is impossible to deny. Indeed, the aforementioned denial includes as part of it a concession that the two characters who appear in The Colour of Magic as ‘The Weasel and Bravd’ were indeed the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd under pseudonyms. And in fact, we might read Pratchett’s actual words (‘I didn’t — at least consciously, I suppose I must say — create Ankh-Morpork as a takeoff of Lankhmar’) by putting the emphasis on takeoff: — that, in other words, Ankh-Morpork isn’t merely Leiberian parody. It is its own place, and as the Discworld novels go on, it becomes far richer and more intricate than Lankhmar ever does.
Still: I might speculate about the mental process by which, as a name, ‘Lankhmar’ gets stripped of its notional definite article, “L’ — ”, and shifts its final syllable from mar to more (there is, after all, more to Ankh-Morpork than its influence). Ankh-mor. Doing this uncovers an ankh otherwise buried inside Leiber’s invented name. The ankh has solid SF and Fantasy bona fides, as any fan of the Logan’s Run movie can confirm, and it has the added advantage, for a British comic writer of a certain generation, of evoking that splendid word of demotic contumely, wanker. And Terry Pratchett was certainly a British comic writer of a certain generation.
What about the addition of pork to Leiber’s city-name, though? I can find no hard evidence to confirm this, but I suspect the addition was inspired by a particular sketch from The Secret Policeman’s Ball (1980), the movie made out of the 1970s and 1980s series of for-charity comedy sketch revues. In the sketch in question, various British comedy actors (Rowan Atkinson, Tim Brooke-Taylor and others) play schoolchildren answering questions posed by question-master John Cleese, after the format of ‘Top of the Form’, a once-popular BBC radio and TV quiz-show format. The main gag in the sketch is that the answer to all the questions is ‘pork’. (‘What is the name of the metal-alloy made of copper and zinc?’ ‘Brass?’ ‘No, I’m sorry: it’s Pork’ — ‘What is the capital of Australia?’ ‘Canberra’. ‘No, the capital of Australia is Pork’ … and so on). I think a memory of this sketch drifted into Pratchett’s mind when he was inventing the name for his Lankhmar-y, more-than-[l]Ankhmar, capital city: ‘What is the capital of Discworld?’ ‘Ankhmar … pork!’ ‘Very good, two points’.
