Lich

Origins

Unlike the Vampire or the Ghoul, the lich has no folklore of its own. Its name is simply an old English word for a body: Old English līc, "corpse", which survives in "lychgate", the roofed churchyard gate where coffins once rested, and in German Leiche. Ambrose Bierce and H. P. Lovecraft used the word in its archaic sense, and so did Clark Ashton Smith in "The Empire of the Necromancers" (1932), one of his Weird Tales stories of sorcerers raising the dead.

The idea — a sorcerer who outlives his own flesh — came from the same pulp shelves. Robert E. Howard's Skull-Face (1929) and Smith's many necromancers kept shriveled, ageless bodies moving by will and magic alone, and Fritz Leiber's early story "Thieves' House" supplied a jeweled skull that later shaped the demilich. But the direct source, according to Gary Gygax, was a single story: Gardner Fox's "The Sword of the Sorcerer" (1969).

Into the dungeon

The lich as a named monster was born in Supplement I: Greyhawk (1975), the first expansion to Dungeons & Dragons, by Gygax and Rob Kuntz. It was described in a sentence or two: a skeletal creature, formerly a magic-user or magic-user/cleric, that kept its spellcasting and could send weaker characters fleeing in fear. In 1976 Eldritch Wizardry added the Hand and Eye of Vecna, relics of a lich destroyed long ago; Brian Blume, who invented them, took the name as an anagram of Jack Vance, whose Dying Earth had given D&D its spell system.

The first-edition Monster Manual (1977) of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons said the lich kept its existence "by certain conjurations, enchantments, and a phylactery" — and explained nothing more. The word, borrowed from the small boxes of scripture worn in Jewish prayer, took on its gaming meaning over the next decade: Len Lakofka's article "Blueprint for a Lich" in Dragon #26 (1979) described a ritual that stored the soul in a jar, and by the second edition the phylactery was explicitly the vessel of the lich's life force. Destroy the body and the lich returns; find and destroy the phylactery first, and the adventure can end.

That structure — a villain who cannot die until a hidden object is found — made the lich a natural campaign boss. Gygax's Tomb of Horrors (1978) ended with Acererak, a demilich reduced to a jeweled skull. Vecna rose from legend to demigod in the 1990 adventure Vecna Lives!, and Ravenloft's Demiplane of Dread gave the lich Azalin a whole domain. Computer games followed the tabletop: liches are optional high-level bosses in Baldur's Gate II, recruitable undead in Heroes of Might and Magic, and in Blizzard's Warcraft saga the fallen prince Arthas becomes the Lich King, the villain of the 2008 World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King.

Variations

D&D itself has spun off a small taxonomy. The demilich, first seen with Acererak, is a lich so ancient that only its skull and soul-gems remain. The dracolich is an undead Dragon; the baelnorn is a good-aligned elven lich guarding its people's ruins in the Forgotten Realms; the archlich is another good-aligned variant. Outside D&D the lich spread wherever D&D's vocabulary did — into Pathfinder, Warhammer, the cartoon Adventure Time and countless roguelikes. Readers have also noticed the family resemblance in Harry Potter, whose Voldemort splits his soul into hidden horcruxes; the books never use the word "lich", but the logic of the phylactery is unmistakable.