Great Bronze Spoon of Cladh, The

From Discworld & Terry Pratchett Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

This fabled eating utensil from antiquity weighed over a ton. Until The Compleat Discworld Atlas,uncertain as to whereabouts on the Disc the location of Cladh may be found, but the name suggests somewhere with a Celtic ring or resonance to it. Perhaps such an impractical object was meant as a devotional offering to Cephut or other God of Cutlery. The Compleat Discworld Atlas places the town firmly in Llamedos, despite the name being more Gaelic than Welsh in sound. Perhaps Llamedos occupies a continuum where Llamedosian shades into its related languages (just as Quirmian is related to the strange Olé! llanguage spoken where they do That Thing With The Bulls. Cladh is not mentioned in the text but appears on the Disc map contained in The Compleat Discworld Atlas, as a secondary town in Llamedos.


Annotation

This is the first known Discworld placename that appears to have a distinctly "Gaelic" shape to it. The terminal "dh" is a practically silent consonant in Irish Gaelic (un-known in Welsh) and the name is pronounced "Cla(h)". In Scots Gaelic, it would probably be closer to "Clath".

In Wales and Ireland, there is an old tradition, shamelessly played up for the tourists, of a young man carving an ornate spoon from wood for his intended, and offering it to her in lieu of marriage proposal. Perhaps the great bronze spoon was a particularly ardent marriage proposal? Something similar in Ireland is called the "claddagh"