Biggest Fool Of Them All: Tackling Discworld's Timeline

 This year has been a good year for reading: the project I started back at the beginning in 2023 (and quickly abandoned) to read my own private "Appendix N" list has been successful so far - at least 50 books, by my count, in 3 months.   (Appendix N being the suggested reading list of inspirations for Dungeons & Dragons by Gary Gygax in the original Dungeon Master's Guide).

The series I am working on now wasn't even around when the 1st Edition DMG was first published - Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, whose first volume was published in 1982.

Discworld went from a very vague setting that Pratchett joked was 'unmappable' to, after 35 main novels and various other assorted works, so detailed that the main city of the world had every single street named.

 The timeline is similarly muddled,  and by the end there were a number of different calendars, some numbered, some using names for the years and centuries.  Inconsistencies abound.  The task seems near impossible... but that hasn't discouraged others before me to try and as my other posts may attest, doesn't discourage me either.  So, let's begin, shall we?

Remarkably, there's a clear-cut place to begin: the City Watch novels.  Specifically, Feet of Clay which is said to be the year prior to the 300th anniversary of the Ankh-Morpork Civil War - which was in 1688 AM (calendar dated from the founding of Unseen University).  Men At Arms was the year before, and Guards! Guards! the year before that - so, three books with definitive dates.

We then have the second set of City Watch novels, which are tied together by the birth of Sam Vimes' son.  The Fifth Elephant has his wife Sybil saying she's pregnant, in the fall.  Night Watch, when Sam Jr. is born, is late May of the next year.  Thud! is in Grune of the year after that, when Sam Jr. is said to be 14 months old.  Snuff is when Sam Jr. has just turned 6, and the final book in the series, Raising Steam, is set 8 years after The Fifth Elephant.

What's next?  Well, we have the equivalents of the 20th and 21st centuries - the Century of the Fruitbat (Moving Pictures through The Fifth Elephant and The Truth) and the Century of the Anchovy (Going Postal, although this is a special case).  This means the last books are just around the turn of the century - but we can narrow it down further.

Night Watch is unique because it gives us a rare look at the time prior to the main Discworld series - 30 years prior to the setting, to be exact.  There's a lot of problems associated with it, mostly revolving around Vetinari as the Patrician.  Namely:

1 - Vetinari is definitely not the Patrician - in fact, the story is set when Lord Winder is replaced by Lord Snapcase as the Patrician.

2 - A Patrician appears as early as the 1st novel, but is only called Vetinari starting with Sourcerer.  Some speculate that earlier books were a different Patrician, but official sources - and the most official of all, Terry Pratchett himself - has stated that Vetinari is the only Patrician in the novels (apart from the 30 year flashback)

3 - There is a significant gap between early books and later - actually there is one in a novel itself!  Wyrd Sisters has the witches move Lancre forward 15 years in time, and the 3rd book, Equal Rites, is set before that.  Additionally, Mort is set almost 17 years prior to Soul Music.

4- This wouldn't be a big problem, except that in Mort, the Patrician is celebrating his tenth anniversary as ruler.

I'll get to some of those points later, but I will note something else - in The Truth, we have an oddly specific date for Vetinari - that he graduated from Assassins School in 1968.  While that has given some clues as to when Night Watch might be set, I think it is more exact than that.  Pratchett would often reference subjects related to the next novel being worked on in a given story.  Given Night Watch was just down the road, I suspect that little detail relates to that.  Additionally, the Glorious Revolution in Night Watch has the massacre on May 25th - which is an obvious reference to the real-world protests and riots in Paris that had a number of deaths on May 25th, in 1968.

While there are some issues - and there will be, as there is no way to make everything fit perfectly taking everything at face value - the main one here is that it puts Going Postal in 1999 - and that is set in the next century, making it 2000 at the earliest.

Or does it?  In fact, the only reference to the Century of the Anchovy is at the end, in a chapter labelled "Some Time Later".  It is not, in fact, indicative of when the bulk of the novel is set.  Considering that the next Von Lipwig novel, Making Money, is definitively set one year later and also in the Century of the Anchovy, this works out perfectly.  

So: we have this preliminary timeline (dated from the founding of Unseen University):

1968 - Night Watch [past section]

1985 - Guards! Guards!

1986 - Men At Arms

1987 - Feet of Clay

1997 - The Fifth Elephant

1998 - Night Watch, Thief of Time [climax of novel is the even that Night Watch involves]

1999 - Going Postal, Thud!

2000 - Making Money

2004 - Snuff

2005 - Raising Steam

So, 11 of the books placed so far.  More to come!