Lich

At the low end of many an old English churchyard there is a small roofed gate, and under its beams a coffin once waited out of the rain while somebody went to fetch the minister. That gate is a lych-gate, and the first half of the word is the thing on the bier. For most of a thousand years *līc* was the flat Old English noun for a body, cousin to the German *Leiche* and the Dutch *lijk*, probably older still as a word for shape or form, from the same root that gave English *like*. Nothing about it was sinister. A lich was what the rain fell on.

The word dropped out of ordinary English and survived in the architecture and geography of burial: the lych-gate, the lichway, the corpse road over the moor. Then the pulp writers found it lying there and picked it up because it sounded older than “body”. Ambrose Bierce used it in 1891 in “The Death of Halpin Frayser”, meaning a corpse and nothing more. Robert E. Howard reached for it in *Skull-Face* in 1929, a novella built around an undying sorcerer shrunk to a walking husk. Clark Ashton Smith used it throughout “The Empire of the Necromancers”, which ran in *Weird Tales* in September 1932 and covers any dead body with the term, walking or still. H. P. Lovecraft borrowed it in “The Thing on the Doorstep” for the corpse of a friend with somebody else driving.

Smith’s story is where the parts begin gathering in one place. Two magicians out of the isle of Naat walk into the emptied kingdom of Cincor and raise its dead as servants, soldiers and concubines, and the risen Emperor Illeiro slowly organises the corpses into a revolt against the men who woke them. The sorcerers in that tale are alive and the liches are their furniture, but the shape is already there: a wizard, a body that will not stay decently finished, and a bargain the body was never asked about.

The fusion happened in 1969, in a paperback. Gardner F. Fox’s “The Sword of the Sorcerer” hands the barbarian Kothar a blade called Frostfire, and the giver is Afgorkon, a living-dead wizard who has spent a long time in his tomb waiting for the right hand to come along for it. Six years later, in March 1975, Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz published *Supplement I: Greyhawk*, the first expansion to *Dungeons & Dragons*, and on page 35 they turned a piece of church architecture into a monster. Liches, they wrote, are “skeletal monsters” of magical origin, each one a very powerful magic-user or magic-user and cleric in life, now sustained by great spells and by will alone. Gygax said afterwards, without fuss, that he had taken the description from Fox.

That is very nearly all the description there ever was. Two words of anatomy, a note about the career it used to have, and everything else left open. The cold sockets, the rings still on the finger bones, the crown gone green, the robes going to powder at the hem: none of that is in the 1975 booklet. It was supplied later by artists, and it stuck so hard that most people now assume it came from folklore. The most recognisable undead wizard in fantasy is fifty years old and has a copyright page.

The mechanism is what separates a lich from every other walking corpse. It does not merely refuse to die, it arranges in advance not to, by taking the soul out of the body and sealing it into an object kept somewhere the heroes are not. Destroy the body and the lich reassembles around the object. Later editions gave the vessel an appetite, so that it has to be fed souls to keep working, which converts immortality into a standing bill.

The name of that object is the oddest thing about the whole creature. “Phylactery” is the usual English translation of tefillin, the small boxes of scripture that observant Jews bind on for morning prayer, and later rulebooks pushed the resemblance further by describing the lich’s version as a sealed metal box holding strips of inscribed parchment. Paizo stopped using the word in *Pathfinder* in October 2021 and now calls the thing a soul cage.

The trick itself is far older than any of this. A soul kept outside the body, hidden in an egg, a needle, a bird or a box, is one of the standard engines of European wonder tale and has its own catalogued tale type. Its most famous holder is Koschei the Deathless, whose death waits inside a needle inside an egg inside a duck inside a hare inside an iron chest beneath an oak. Nothing puts Russian folktales in Gygax’s hands. The motif simply got there several centuries first, and the lich is what it looks like once you give it a library.

In 1978 Gygax published *Tomb of Horrors*, and at the end of that famously lethal crawl there is a quiet room with a jewelled skull sitting on a dais, the gems catching whatever light the intruders brought in with them. Prise the stones out and the skull wakes. This is Acererak, and he is a demilich, a lich that has let its body go to dust and kept only the head. The jewelled skull came from Fritz Leiber’s early story “Thieves’ House”. The tomb has been killing characters for close to fifty years, and Acererak was still working in 2011, guarding a key in *Ready Player One*.

From there the lich spread out of tabletop and into everything. Sandro runs through the *Might and Magic* games, the *Baldur’s Gate* series keeps several as optional and deeply unwise boss fights, *Warcraft III* and *Wrath of the Lich King* built an entire frozen continent around Arthas Menethil, Karthus sings in *League of Legends*, and *Adventure Time* gave its own version no name at all beyond The Lich. Xykon, the skeletal villain of *The Order of the Stick*, is a lich who is also very funny, which is a harder trick than it looks.

What a lich actually has is time and an undamaged mind. It keeps every spell it knew and adds the ones a human span was too short for. It needs no food, no sleep, no warmth and no company, and the lesser dead answer to it, which means it can wait out a siege, a dynasty or a language and come back to the argument when everyone who cared has stopped.

What it has instead of a weakness is an address. Everything the lich is now lives in a small object, and small objects can be found, carried and broken. Destroy the body and the lich is inconvenienced. Destroy the vessel and the body becomes the only thing holding it here, which makes the next sword stroke final. The quieter failure is worse, because it needs no hero at all: a lich that stops maintaining its anchor decays into the demilich, a skull on a plinth with most of its power gone, still conscious, still there, with centuries left and nothing it can do with them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a lich?

A lich is an undead sorcerer who has escaped death by moving their soul into a hidden object, keeping their intelligence and magical ability in a corpse-body. It is the most powerful of the classic undead in modern fantasy because, unlike a zombie or a skeleton, it is fully awake and still casting. The transformation is always chosen rather than inflicted.

Is the lich an ancient myth or a modern invention?

The lich is a modern invention. The word is genuinely Old English, *līc*, meaning corpse, and it survives in the term lych-gate, but the creature was defined by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz in *Supplement I: Greyhawk* in March 1975. Gygax said he based the description on the living-dead wizard Afgorkon in Gardner F. Fox’s 1969 story “The Sword of the Sorcerer”.

What is a lich’s phylactery?

A phylactery is the object a lich hides its soul inside, so that destroying the lich’s body does not kill it. The word is the ordinary English translation of tefillin, the scripture boxes worn in Jewish morning prayer, and because of that Paizo replaced it in *Pathfinder* in October 2021 with the term soul cage.

What is a demilich?

A demilich is what a lich decays into when it stops maintaining its soul vessel: the body crumbles and only the skull remains, usually set with gems. The first was Acererak, the final threat in Gary Gygax’s 1978 adventure *Tomb of Horrors*. The jewelled-skull image was borrowed from Fritz Leiber’s story “Thieves’ House”.

How do you kill a lich?

Destroying a lich’s body is not enough, because it reforms around the hidden object holding its soul. The object has to be found and destroyed first, after which the body is the lich’s only remaining anchor and can be killed like anything else. This is the same logic as the folktale motif of the external soul, best known from Koschei the Deathless.

Related Entries

Undead, Wizard, Skeleton, Zombie, Wraith, Wight, Ghost, Half-elf, Thessalhydra, Koschei, Draugr, Haugbúi, Mummy, Vetala, Jiangshi