Portal:Discworld/Character of the day/3

Character of the day

Mustrum Ridcully was introduced in Moving Pictures as the latest Archchancellor of the Unseen University. He is also known as Ridcully the Brown, possibly as a parody of J. R. R. Tolkien's Radagast the Brown. His personality seems deliberately designed to be as opposite to Radagast's as possible.

At the time he became Archchancellor, he had not been seen at the University for forty years, having become a Seventh Level Wizard (there are, naturally, eight levels of wizardry on the Discworld) at the exceptionally young age of twenty-seven, before leaving the university to look after his family's land. The wizards, knowing he lived in the country, assumed he would be a "roams the forests with every beast his brother" type and easy to deal with. In fact, Ridcully turned out to be more like a typically bluff country squire, fond of huntin', shootin' and fishin'. He owns several hunting crossbows and is much given to using the corridors of Unseen University as a shooting range.

He is not stupid, and in fact has a mind like a freight train, but finds it very difficult to deal with unexpected information, and generally ignores it until it goes away or becomes someone else's problem. He holds the view that if someone is still trying to explain something to him after about 2 minutes, it must be worth listening to, and if they give up earlier, it was not worth bothering him with in the first place. Usually, the person doing the explaining is Ponder Stibbons.