"Wizzard": Why Rincewind's Misspelled Hat Matters
Rincewind can't do magic, failed every exam, and spells his own job title wrong. So why does his battered WIZZARD hat matter so much to him, and to the Discworld?
"Wizzard": Why Rincewind's Misspelled Hat Matters
Rincewind can't do magic. He knows he can't do magic. Everyone who has ever met him knows he can't do magic. And yet he goes through life wearing a battered pointy hat with one word stitched across it in large, wobbly letters: WIZZARD.
Two Zs. On the one word he most needs people to believe.
It's one of the oldest jokes in Discworld, and it's easy to read it as just that: a sight gag about a hopeless man who can't even spell his job. But Terry Pratchett kept coming back to that hat for more than twenty years, and he kept giving it more weight each time. By the later books, the hat is how the Librarian recognises a message from the far side of the world, how a revolution picks its figurehead, and the one thing Rincewind will not give up no matter what else he runs away from.
So why does a man who abandons everything else cling so hard to a hat? Let's look at what the misspelling actually tells us.
A Hat Nobody Gave Him
Start with the obvious question: who wrote "Wizzard" on it?
The answer, as far as the books let on, is Rincewind himself. Proper wizards at Unseen University don't need their profession written on their headgear. Their hats are covered in stars and sigils and occult embroidery, but nobody labels them, because nobody needs telling. When you're a wizard, everyone can see it from the way you walk.
Rincewind's hat is different. The early books describe it as stained and battered, with the lettering once picked out in sequins that have long since dropped off, leaving the word visible as a patch of brighter, less faded cloth. It's not a uniform. It's a sign. And the misspelling is the giveaway: this is a man who made his own credentials, by hand, because no institution was ever going to hand them to him.
And they never were. His academic record at Unseen University is the stuff of legend. His best exam score was 2%, awarded for spelling his name right. He once managed negative marks in Basic Firestarting, a result the faculty have never fully explained. He was thrown out, drifted back as an assistant in the Library, and has been hovering on the fringes of the profession ever since.
The hat is the one bit of wizardry he could do himself. Even the spelling mistake is a kind of honesty. A forger would have got it right.
Identity Is Not the Same as Ability
Here's the thing that makes the hat more than a joke: Rincewind isn't wrong about himself.
Pratchett spells this out at the start of Sourcery, where Rincewind is irritated by the very idea that being good at magic is a requirement for being a wizard:
"He knew he was a wizard, deep in his head. Being good at magic didn't have anything to do with it. That was just an extra, it didn't actually define somebody."
Read that again, because it's an odd and quietly radical position. Most of us assume a job title is earned by competence. You're a carpenter because you make tables. You're a doctor because you passed the exams. Rincewind flips that around. For him, being a wizard is something he is, and the magic is optional.
"The hat isn't a claim about what Rincewind can do. It's a claim about who he is."
It sounds like the excuse of a failure, until you remember why he fails. As we covered in the Octavo incident, Rincewind had one of the Eight Great Spells lodged in his head as a student, and it frightened every other spell away. Pratchett gave him a wizard's spirit and then took away the means to express it. He didn't choose to be useless at magic. The universe arranged it.
So when Rincewind insists that he's a wizard regardless, he isn't deluded. He's describing a calling that was real before it was sabotaged, and he's the only person left in a position to vouch for it.
That's also why the misspelling doesn't bother him. A title you've earned through exams needs to be correct, because it's checked by someone else. A title that's simply true of you can be written however you like.
A Wizard Without a Hat
If identity is the inside of the hat, the outside matters too. On the Discworld, the pointy hat is how the world tells a wizard from everyone else.
The Last Continent puts it with typical bluntness:
"A wizard without a hat was just a sad man with a suspicious taste in clothes."
That line explains a lot about Rincewind's behaviour. Take away the hat and what's left is a thin, scruffy, cowardly man in a faded red dress, with a beard that never quite committed. Put the hat back on and he's a wizard: a member of a recognised profession, someone with a place in the order of things, someone who (at least in theory) people ought to be slightly wary of.
For a man who owns almost nothing, that matters enormously. Rincewind's possessions over the series amount to some robes, a pair of boots, the occasional half-brick in a sock, and (when it can be bothered to follow him) the Luggage. He'll drop most of it without a second thought when something with teeth turns up. The hat is the exception, because the hat is the part of him that tells the world he's somebody.
The same book also finds a neat way to sum up his whole existence, describing him as:
"a man who might well have had 'Victim' written all over him but also had 'Wizzard' written on his hat."
That's Rincewind in one sentence. Fate has labelled him as a victim, in invisible ink, all over his life. The only label he gets to choose is the one he sewed himself.
The Spelling That Crossed an Ocean
The hat's finest hour comes in Interesting Times, and it's where the misspelling stops being a private joke and becomes part of Discworld history.
Lord Vetinari receives a message from the Agatean Empire on the Counterweight Continent, its first contact in years. The message demands that Ankh-Morpork send the Great Wizzard. With two Zs.
Archchancellor Ridcully is sure he's seen that spelling somewhere before but can't think where. It's the Librarian who remembers: "wizzard" was written on Rincewind's old hat.
Think about what that means. The spelling mistake has become a signature. Somewhere on the other side of the world, people have heard of a wizard so specific that they reproduce his typo. And that's because of Twoflower, the Disc's first tourist, who went home after his adventures with Rincewind and wrote a book about them: What I Did On My Holidays. In the Agatean Empire, where nobody had been allowed to imagine life outside the Empire's walls, that book inspired a revolution. The rebels of the Red Army are waiting for the Great Wizzard to come and lead them.
Meanwhile Lord Hong, the Empire's most dangerous politician, has his own reasons for summoning the Great Wizzard. He is counting on the man being a fool, someone whose arrival will lead the rebels straight to their doom.
So the hat lands Rincewind in trouble from both directions at once. And notice how he's made to go. Ridcully threatens to have him executed for pretending to be a wizard without ever passing his exams, unless he agrees to perform some great service for magic. The hat has been his whole claim to the profession, and now the profession calls that claim in. He can be a wizard and go to the Counterweight Continent, or stop being one.
He goes. And it's telling that, back when the wizards first dragged him home to Ankh-Morpork, before any of this was decided, one of the first things he did was stagger to the University to get his hat back from the Librarian.
Two Hats in Sourcery
There's a lovely contrast buried in Sourcery, and it shows how Pratchett thinks about hats and power.
That book features the Archchancellor's Hat, the most important piece of headgear in the wizarding world. It's old, it's powerful and it's very much alive, with opinions about who should wear it and a habit of pushing people towards its own ends. It's everything Rincewind's hat isn't: a hat that confers authority rather than claiming it.
"One hat makes a wizard important. The other one only insists that he exists."
And it ends up being carried across the Disc by the least qualified wizard alive. The magic world's ultimate symbol of rank winds up in the arms of a man whose own hat is spelled wrong.
The joke works because the two hats represent two completely different ideas of what a wizard is. The Archchancellor's Hat says wizardry is about power, rank and the authority of the institution. Rincewind's hat says it's about who you are when nobody's giving you anything. By the end of the book, when wizardly power has nearly torn the world apart, it's not hard to see which idea Pratchett trusts more. (For how Rincewind behaves when it really counts in Sourcery, see his only act of deliberate heroism.)
The University Eventually Agrees
Here's the final irony. Rincewind spent decades insisting he was a wizard while Unseen University insisted he wasn't. In the end, the University gave in.
By the later books, Rincewind has been given a post at Unseen University: Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, on top of a pile of other titles nobody else wanted. In Unseen Academicals he's still there, technically a member of the faculty, buried under at least eighteen other positions.
It's not exactly a reward. The faculty mostly want him somewhere they can find him when the world needs saving and a reliably disposable wizard is required. But it's an official acknowledgement, however grudging, of the claim he's been making on his hat all along. The institution that gave him 2% has, in its own way, conceded the point.
He didn't get there by learning magic. He got there by refusing to stop being a wizard until everyone else gave up arguing.
Why the Hat Matters
Strip away the comedy and the WIZZARD hat says something surprisingly moving about identity.
Most fantasy treats being a wizard as a matter of talent: you have the gift or you don't, and the story is about discovering or mastering it. Pratchett took the opposite case. What about the person who has the calling but not the gift? Who is a wizard in every way except the one that counts?
Rincewind's answer is to keep wearing the hat. Not because it makes him powerful (it doesn't), and not because anyone respects it (they mostly don't), but because taking it off would mean agreeing with everyone who says he isn't what he knows he is. The misspelling just makes it more his. Nobody else could have made that hat, and nobody else would want to.
Pratchett had a soft spot for characters who are defined by stubbornness rather than ability, and Rincewind may be the purest example. He's the patron saint of everyone who has ever kept calling themselves a writer, or a musician, or an artist, through years of rejections and day jobs. You can be something even if you're terrible at it. Sometimes, especially if you're terrible at it, the claiming is the whole point.
Where to Go Next
If you want to see the hat at its most significant, read Interesting Times. If you want the origin of why Rincewind can't live up to it, go back to The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. And if you've ever wondered how a wizard who can't do magic survives everything the Disc throws at him, the answer is mostly running, and we've written a whole guide to his philosophy of strategic retreat.
Just remember to keep a hand on your hat. You never know when you'll need it.
