origin of "Lich"

[bolen]

Is a Lich a made up D&D monster? The reason I ask is I am reading david drake's Lord of the Isle. He uses Lich as a generic term for skeletons which attack the protagonists and he does not indicate that they are the undead mages of D&D fame.

 

[Darkness]

I think that, while a lich is mostly a fantasy monster, many mythological undead mages were somewhat similar to it.

 

[Mark]

According to http://www.geocities.com/rgfdfaq/sources.html
Lich, lych - A lychgate is an entrance to a churchyard where a body rests before burial--"lych" means person or dead body (From German "Leiche", meaning "dead body, cadaver, corpse"). The D&D lich is very similar to a character from Taran Wanderer, by Lloyd Alexander, a magician with an unnaturally-extended life who can only die if the item in which he has stored his soul is broken (in this case, a bone from his little finger); however, the term "lich" is never used in the book. The origin of both the D&D lich and Alexander's character is probably the Russian folkloric character "Kotshchey the Deathless", an unnaturally long-lived magician (or demon) who was almost impossible to kill. (Kotshchey himself was written up with D&D stats in The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, reprinted in Monster Manual II.)

Hope that helps!

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm almost positive it's not a D&D only term...it's another term for necromancer, I think, though I have no idea as to it's entymology. Perhaps Mr. Gygax could enlighten us? *gives EGG big puppy eyes*

 

[bolen]

Thanks.

 

[randomling]

Linguists's point of view: the word "lich" is Old English, it means "corpse" or "body". As in "lichgate" (as Mark said).

I have no idea where the monster came from, but I would assume it predates D&D (just like the wight does). But I'm picky: I say the MM is wrong, because the OE word for man was wicht, not wight.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Either way...

Remember. It's semantics. There's nothing that gets more muddled in translation than words, and changing c to g isn't exactly an extreme alteration.

 

[randomling]

No, of course not. I'm being facetious -- plenty of words with ch in the Old English spelling now (in modern English) have a gh spelling, I think it was a transition during the Middle English as we started losing the sound that the ch denoted (the sound at the end of Scottish loch or German ich). But wicht didn't survive Old English -- it got replaced by man.

I'm just saying things for the sake of saying them, don't mind me...

 

[Agback]

G'day

My guess is that D&D's liches are inspired at least in part by a story by Robert E Howard. I don't remember the title of the story, but I do remember one of Howard's stories of Hyboria that was about a necromancer's body spontaneously reanimating. In that story Howard used the archaic English word 'lich' for the reanimated corpse. Now 'lich' means (or then meant) 'corpse, cadaver, dead human body', and Howard meant to emphasise its deadness, not its animation. But when Gygax was looking for a word to specifically denote a *reanimated* necromancer, the Howard story might have come to mind. Having almost completely fallen out of use, 'lich' was suitable to have a specialised meaning thrust upon it.

By the way, although 'lich' might be cognate with German 'Leiche', it is derived from Anglo-Saxon, not from German.

And this is etymology (or philology), not semantics. Etymology ought not to be confused with entomology, which is the study of insects.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Melan]

Thulsa Doom from REH's Kull stories could be a proto-lich as well. (Not to be confused with the Thulsa Doom of the Conan movie)