Desdichado
Hero
Well... **ahem** shoulda read the whole thread before replying. Looks like the Clark Ashton Smith angle has already been pretty thoroughly covered. 

Melan said:Actually, the first appearance of a fantasy "lich" predates Leiber: Thulsa Doom in Howard's Kull stories was suspiciously like one (the following quote is translated back from the Hungarian):
"The man's face was a bare, wax-white deaths head, pale blue flames glowering in his eye sockets.
'Thulsa Doom' - cried Ka-nu."
T. Foster said:I'm fairly certain the D&D lich comes directly from the Gardner Fox story "The Sword of the Sorcerer," part of the collection Kothar - Barbarian Swordsman (Belmont Books, 1969).
Garnfellow said:DING DING! I think you have nailed it.
It seems clear that most of the weird fiction authors were reading the works of their contemporaries and picking up and reusing some archaic and obscure words. I suspect a thorough survey of the pulps would find plenty more uses of "lich" than the already impressive number of examples cited in this thread.
But Fox's use seems to be the one that comes very close to lich in the D&D sense. A great find!
The phylactery isn't mentioned in the part of the story I was quoting from yesterday (the character's first appearance) but I didn't re-read the entire story, and the character reappears in a couple later stories as well, so it might be in there somewhere (I don't recall it specifically, though). However, note that the phylactery also isn't mentioned anywhere in the original OD&D Supplement I monster description (quoted by Geoffrey on p. 1 of this thread) -- it's first mentioned in the AD&D MM1 write-up, by which time Gygax may well have been deliberately trying to incorporate additional elements outside of Fox so as to broaden the monster into a more generic/universal "undead sorcerer" type.AFGNCAAP said:Did Fox's have the phylactery aspect of the lich as well, or is that from another source (Koschei, for example)?
Tales of the Cthulhu mythos also has a reprint.TheAuldGrump said:It was reprinted in an anthology from Whispers as well.
I'm pretty sure its the other way round actually. Lich is olde English for body, so the Lichgate became over time the name for the entrance to the graveyard through which the body was carried.DragonLancer said:I assume that Lich comes from Lichgate, which is the entrance to a churchyard.