User:Halfelven Ranger/Lich rewrite draft

This page is about the undead magic-user. For other uses, see Halfelven Ranger/Lich rewrite draft (disambiguation).

An illustration of a lich from the game The Battle for Wesnoth.

Lich (/ˈlɪtʃ/) is an archaic English word for body, retaining that meaning only in the term "lich gate" or "lych gate", the roofed gate to a churchyard, formerly used during funerals as a temporary shelter for the dead body.

Since its use in 1976 by Gary Gygax in the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons to mean a very powerful undead magic-user, its use with this newer meaning has become widespread in pen and paper role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King), Magic the gathering, nethack, defense of the ancients, ultima online, video games, fiction and comics.

Old English origins of the word "lich"

Text.

The word appears in Ælfric's Life of St. Edmund, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The Dream of the Rood, and frequently in Beowulf.

The modern spelling "lich" is first attested in the fifteenth century.

Uses of the word "lich" in American fiction

Ambrose Bierce

An earlier mention of the lich can be found in 'The Death of Halpin Frayser,' a short story by Ambrose Bierce. Halpin Frayser is found dead with a poem written in the style of Lord Byron. Through investigation and flashbacks, the reader finds that Frayser becomes possessed by Lord Byron, a distant ancestor, who senses that a lich named Catharine Larue has risen from her grave to kill Frayser. Lord Byron takes possession in order to finish one last poem before Frayser's death. At the end of the story, the men investigating the murder conclude that Catharine Larue was Frayser's heartbroken mother, who had died some time before the murder. Bierce describes liches thus,

"For by death is wrought greater change than hath been shown. Whereas in general the spirit that removed cometh back upon occasion, and is sometimes seen of those in flesh (appearing in the form of the body it bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable body without the spirit hath walked. And it is attested of those encountering who have lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no natural affection, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate. Also, it is known that some spirits which in life were benign become by death evil altogether."

Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft

The lich developed from monsters found in earlier classic sword and sorcery fiction, which is filled with powerful sorcerers who use their magic to triumph over death. Many of Clark Ashton Smith's short stories feature powerful wizards whose magic enables them to return from the dead. Several stories by Robert E. Howard, such as the novella Skull-Face and the short story Scarlet Tears, feature undying sorcerers who retain a semblance of life through mystical means, their bodies reduced to shriveled husks with which they manage to maintain inhuman mobility and active thought—Thulsa Doom, for example.

Gardner Fox

The Sword of the Sorcerer: "Even as he stared, the lich sat up." Obviously used in the sense corpse, body.therefore archaism/synonym.

"The withered brown body on the slab...was moving. ... The corpse turned its head so that it could look at Kothar out of its empty eye-sockets. ... Even as he stared, the lich sat up. ... The cadaver swung what was left of its legs over the side of the stone ... The lich was doing this ... in some hellish manner he did not understand."

Dungeons & Dragons

Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of Dungeons & Dragons, has stated that he based the description of a lich included in the game on the short story The Sword of the Sorcerer by Gardner Fox. The term "lich", used as an archaic word for corpse (or body), is commonly used in these stories. H.P. Lovecraft also used the word in The Thing on the Doorstep (published 1937) where the narrator refers to the corpse of his friend which was possessed by a sorceror.

In the Dungeons & Dragons game (and other works of fantasy fiction that draw upon Dungeons & Dragons for inspiration), a lich is often a spellcaster or someone assisted by a spellcaster who seeks to defy death by magical means. They are necromancers who are unsatisfied with the level of power that they currently have, wish for longer lives, and seek to unburden themselves from the necessities of bodily functions (such as eating and sleeping) so that they might dedicate every moment of their existence to the attainment of knowledge and power. There has also been descriptions of highly powerful spellcasters that force the conversion on mighty creatures to wreak havoc and chaos. Liches convert themselves into corpses, undead creatures by means of black magic and necromancy, storing their souls in magical receptacles called phylacteries, leaving their bodies to die and wither. With their souls bound to material focuses, they can never truly die. If its body is destroyed, a lich can simply regenerate or find a new one. According to the Dungeons & Dragons mythos, the only way truly to destroy a lich is first to destroy its phylactery, thereby removing its anchor to the material world, and then to destroy its physical form.

See also

• Lich (Dungeons & Dragons)
• World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King