Thursday, January 26, 2023

Nothing New Under the Sun

This week's installment of Pulp Fantasy Library discussed Robert E. Howard's story of Kull, "The Cat and the Skull." To the extent that the story is known at all, it's because it features the first appearance of the undead sorcerer. The revelation of his involvement in the events of the tale is quite memorable.

The face of the man was a bare white skull, in whose eye sockets flamed livid fire!

"Thulsa Doom!"

"Aye, I guessed as much!" exclaimed Ka-nu.

"Aye, Thulsa Doom, fools!" the voice echoed cavernously and hollowly. "The greatest of all wizards and your eternal foe, Kull of Atlantis! You have won this tilt but, beware, there shall be others."

Years ago, when I first read this story, I was convinced that it had to have been the origin of D&D's lich. While I knew the lich from the AD&D Monster Manual, with its unforgettable illustration by Dave Trampier, the lich was introduced into the game through Supplement I to OD&D, Greyhawk. There, liches are described as "skeletal monsters of magical original, each Lich being a very powerful Magic-User or Magic-User/Cleric in life, and now alive only by means of great spells and will." The longer description in the Monster Manual adds that a lich possesses not just a skeletal form but "eyesockets mere black holes with glowing points of light." That sound a lot like REH's description of Thulsa Doom to me.

The early 1970s was a remarkable time for aficionados of Robert E. Howard's writing. Not only was Lancer releasing its paperback editions of Howard's sword-and-sorcery yarns, but Marvel Comics was producing comic adaptations of many of them as well. In addition to the much more well known and celebrated Conan the Barbarian (and, later, Savage Sword of Conan), Marvel adapted Howard's characters and stories in other

magazines, such as Monsters on the Prowl. Issue #16 of that magazine (April 1972) featured an original Kull story called "The Forbidden Swamp," in which Thulsa Doom is introduced to comics readers. As drawn by the brother and sister team of John and Marie Severin, Thulsa Doom shares a lot with D&D's lich, don't you think?

For years afterward, I held on to my theory that it was Thulsa Doom who had inspired Gary Gygax in his creation of the lich. Not only was there much similarity between their descriptions, but Thulsa Doom's earliest published appearance, whether in Lancer's King Kull anthology or Marvel's comics, occurred just before the publication of OD&D. There was thus a certain plausibility to the one having been inspired by the other.

As it turned out, my theory was wrong – or at least not the whole story. Many years later, in one of his many online question and answer threads, I recall that Gygax admitted he swiped the lich from "The Sword of the Sorcerer," a Kothar story by Gardner F. Fox. In that tale, Kothar encounters an undead sorcerer named Afgorkon, who is repeatedly referred to by the word "lich," something that cannot be said of Thulsa Doom so far as I can tell. That's not to say that Thulsa Doom might not have exercised some influence over the creation of D&D's lich, only that he wasn't, at least as far as Gygax claimed, the primary one. It's not as if the idea of a skeletal, undead sorcerer is a wholly unique idea anyway.

That's something I keep in mind whenever I look almost any element of Dungeons & Dragons. Very little of it is genuinely unique to the game. I'd wager that almost all of its monsters, spells, and magic items derive from a pre-existing story, comic, movie, or TV show. Indeed, it probably wouldn't take much work to demonstrate this, since Gygax and others were often quite open about the earlier creators and works that inspired them. I don't mean this to be a criticism – far from it! Rather, I bring this up simply as a reminder that what makes D&D special is not any of its individual elements, very few of which are original, but rather the strange alchemy of their admixture. 

13 comments:

  1. I remember having those plastic monster toys that inspired the Bugbear, Rust Monster, etc. as a kid and not realizing that the toys came first. And then later I learned about things like the Coeurl/Displacer Beast, the troll from Three Hearts and Three Lions, and other connections. As you say, not a criticism of the origin of these things, but it certainly makes a lot of the "product identity" seem meaningless as far as licensing goes.

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    1. And of course I meant Owlbear instead of Bugbear. Getting my *bears mixed up.

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  2. Don't forget the Russian folk tale of Koschkiy (sp?) The Deathless. The idea of a phylactery that needs to be destroyed to finally kill the lich likely came from that.

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  3. I was so excited to have my dad buy me Tomb of Horrors from Bloomingdale's that I tore the thing open and ruined it for myself. I still love the Captain Kirk and Magnum P.I. cover. Later I was player-side in Descent into the Depths, and our DM played the lich very intelligently, with the creature hounding us for several days in a wicked and shadowy fashion rather than mere roaring magic and violence. It is the creativity of the game that has always been the anchor for me. When played with imagination and cunning, I prefer liches to dragons.

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  4. The word 'lich' comes from the old english word for corpse 'lic'...the reason I know this is many old churches here in the UK have lych gates or lich gates which are roofed gated entrances to churchyards.

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    1. Absolutely - and many of them have raised stone platforms in them where coffins were placed before they were carried into the church. They were shelters for pallbearers, I believe.

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  5. Gardner Fox was almost unbelievably prolific in both comic and traditional publishing. I dare say it would be hard to find any TTRPG published before 2000 that you couldn't find elements inspired by some of his work. The guy made Asimov look like a piker when it came to lifetime output.

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  6. I mention the lich, along with Lolth and the clay golem, in my post on Jewish (and, in the case of the lich and its "phylactery," not-so-Jewish) monsters in D&D from a few months back on my Jews & fantasy literature blog. (With, of course, a link to Grognardia.) https://investigationsandfantasies.com/2022/10/11/lolth-golem-lich-classic-dungeons-dragons-and-the-jews/

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  7. I too had those plastic toys.

    As for me, I recognized even at 13 that the Monster Manual was a melting pot of mythological creatures, creatures from fantasy fiction, etc etc. I thought that just fine. I saw making a D&D campaign as using these "building blocks" - concepts of monsters and magic from myth and folklore, fantasy fiction, and, for me (if not Gygax), comics, movies, cartoons .... everything was fair game.

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  8. I was introduced to D&D in the summer of '77, shortly after Star Wars came out (yup, my nerdy little 12-year-old brain never had a chance)...

    Anyway, I kept bugging our DM for a lightsaber and kept pitching ideas for its stats and how much damage and game effects... finally, like the trickster genie that he was, he gave my fighter character a "light sabre" — a sabre that cast a 10' radius of light.

    File under careful what you wish for.

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  9. Lin Carter's Kellory the Warlock has no liches, but the stories dating back to 1970 (collected in book form in 1984) have some of the better descriptions of room-by-room dungeon-type exploration written in very Gygaxian prose, not to mention one of the few pre-80s examples outside of Jack Vance, Ursula le Guin, and a few Clark Ashton Smith stories of an adventuring wizard hero who relies on magic to defeat most of his foes. As Gary was indeed a Lin Carter reader, I would not be surprised if it exerted some subliminal influence.

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