Love reading the old original, i mean old old original, D&D books.
Book I, Men and Magic,
Book II Monsters and Treasure.
The intro of
Men and Magic lead me to some of Gygax and co.'s influences, beyond the suspected Tolkien and Conan... including Fafhrd and Gray Mouser. And XXXXX. Well let's just quote it:
"These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those
who don’t care for Burroughs’ Martian adventures where John Carter is groping
through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard’s Conan saga, who do
not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS &
DRAGONS to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find
that these rules are the answer to their prayers."
And those lead me to some of their influences. And that lead me to:
From Lord Dunsany's
The Book of Wonder (Irish guy wrote them around 1912 and it influenced Tolkien apparently).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Wonder
http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/art/illustration/sime/6.html
https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/tbow/tbow11.htm
The Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany, [1912], at sacred-texts.com
THE HOARD OF THE GIBBELINS
The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man.
Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a
bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they
have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires;
they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And
the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to
their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have
even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some
city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again.
Their tower stands on the other side of that river known to Homer—
ho rhoos okeanoio,
as he called it—which surrounds the world. And where the river is
narrow and fordable the tower was built by the Gibbelins' gluttonous
sires, for they liked to see burglars rowing easily to their steps. Some
nourishment that common soil has not the huge trees drained there with
their colossal roots from both banks of the river.
There the Gibbelins lived and discreditably fed. Alderic, Knight of
the Order of the City and the Assault, hereditary Guardian of the King's
Peace of Mind, a man not unremembered among makers of myth, pondered so
long upon the Gibbelins' hoard that by now he deemed it his. Alas that I
should say of so perilous a venture, undertaken at dead of night by a
valourous man, that its motive was sheer avarice! Yet upon avarice only
the Gibbelins relied to keep their larders full, and once in every
hundred years sent spies into the cities of men to see how avarice did,
and always the spies returned again to the tower saying that all was
well.
It may be thought that, as the years went on and men came by fearful
ends on that tower's wall, fewer and fewer would come to the Gibbelins'
table: but the Gibbelins found otherwise.
Not in the folly and frivolity of his youth did Alderic come to the
tower, but he studied carefully for several years the manner in which
burglars met their doom when they went in search of the treasure that he
considered his.
In every case they had entered by the door.
He consulted those who gave advice on this quest; he noted every
detail and cheerfully paid their fees, and determined to do nothing that
they advised, for what were their clients now? No more than examples of
the savoury art, and mere half-forgotten memories of a meal; and many,
perhaps, no longer even that.
These were the requisites for the quest that these men used to
advise: a horse, a boat, mail armour, and at least three men-at-arms.
Some said, "Blow the horn at the tower door"; others said, "Do not touch
it."
Alderic thus decided: he would take no horse down to the river's
edge, he would not row along it in a boat, and he would go alone and by
way of the Forest Unpassable.
How pass, you may say, the unpassable? This was his plan: there was a
dragon he knew of who if peasants' prayers are heeded deserved to die,
not alone because of the number of maidens he cruelly slew, but because
he was bad for the crops; he ravaged the very land and was the bane of a
dukedom.
Now Alderic determined to go up against him. So he took horse and
spear and pricked till he met the dragon, and the dragon came out
against him breathing bitter smoke. And to him Alderic shouted, "Hath
foul dragon ever slain true knight?" And well the dragon knew that this
had never been, and he hung his head and was silent, for he was glutted
with blood. "Then," said the knight, "if thou would'st ever taste
maiden's blood again thou shalt be my trusty steed, and if not, by this
spear there shall befall thee all that the troubadours tell of the dooms
of thy breed."
And the dragon did not open his ravening mouth, nor rush upon the
knight, breathing out fire; for well he knew the fate of those that did
these things, but he consented to the terms imposed, and swore to the
knight to become his trusty steed.
It was on a saddle upon this dragon's back that Alderic afterwards
sailed above the unpassable forest, even above the tops of those
measureless trees, children of wonder. But first he pondered that subtle
plan of his which was more profound than merely to avoid all that had
been done before; and he commanded a blacksmith, and the blacksmith made
him a pickaxe.
Now there was great rejoicing at the rumour of Alderic's quest, for
all folk knew that he was a cautious man, and they deemed that he would
succeed and enrich the world, and they rubbed their hands in the cities
at the thought of largesse; and there was joy among all men in Alderic's
country, except perchance among the lenders of money, who feared they
would soon be paid. And there was rejoicing also because men hoped that
when the Gibbelins were robbed of their hoard, they would shatter their
high-built bridge and break the golden chains that bound them to the
world, and drift back, they and their tower, to the moon, from which
they had come and to which they rightly belonged. There was little love
for the Gibbelins, though all men envied their hoard.
So they all cheered, that day when he mounted his dragon, as though
he was already a conqueror, and what pleased them more than the good
that they hoped he would do to the world was that he scattered gold as
he rode away; for he would not need it, he said, if he found the
Gibbelins' hoard, and he would not need it more if he smoked on the
Gibbelins' table.
When they heard that he had rejected the advice of those that gave
it, some said that the knight was mad, and others said he was greater
than those what gave the advice, but none appreciated the worth of his
plan.
He reasoned thus: for centuries men had been well advised and had
gone by the cleverest way, while the Gibbelins came to expect them to
come by boat and to look for them at the door whenever their larder was
empty, even as a man looketh for a snipe in a marsh; but how, said
Alderic, if a snipe should sit in the top of a tree, and would men find
him there? Assuredly never! So Alderic decided to swim the river and not
to go by the door, but to pick his way into the tower through the
stone. Moreover, it was in his mind to work below the level of the
ocean, the river (as Homer knew) that girdles the world, so that as soon
as he made a hole in the wall the water should pour in, confounding the
Gibbelins, and flooding the cellars, rumoured to be twenty feet in
depth, and therein he would dive for emeralds as a diver dives for
pearls.
And on the day that I tell of he galloped away from his home
scattering largesse of gold, as I have said, and passed through many
kingdoms, the dragon snapping at maidens as he went, but being unable to
eat them because of the bit in his mouth, and earning no gentler reward
than a spurthrust where he was softest. And so they came to the swart
arboreal precipice of the unpassable forest. The dragon rose at it with a
rattle of wings. Many a farmer near the edge of the worlds saw him up
there where yet the twilight lingered, a faint, black, wavering line;
and mistaking him for a row of geese going inland from the ocean, went
into their houses cheerily rubbing their hands and saying that winter
was coming, and that we should soon have snow. Soon even there the
twilight faded away, and when they descended at the edge of the world it
was night and the moon was shining. Ocean, the ancient river, narrow
and shallow there, flowed by and made no murmur. Whether the Gibbelins
banqueted or whether they watched by the door, they also made no murmur.
And Alderic dismounted and took his armour off, and saying one prayer
to his lady, swam with his pickaxe. He did not part from his sword, for
fear that he meet with a Gibbelin. Landed the other side, he began to
work at once, and all went well with him. Nothing put out its head from
any window, and all were lighted so that nothing within could see him in
the dark. The blows of his pickaxe were dulled in the deep walls. All
night he worked, no sound came to molest him, and at dawn the last rock
swerved and tumbled inwards, and the river poured in after. Then Alderic
took a stone, and went to the bottom step, and hurled the stone at the
door; he heard the echoes roll into the tower, then he ran back and
dived through the hole in the wall.
He was in the emerald-cellar. There was no light in the lofty vault
above him, but, diving through twenty feet of water, he felt the floor
all rough with emeralds, and open coffers full of them. By a faint ray
of the moon he saw that the water was green with them, and easily
filling a satchel, he rose again to the surface; and there were the
Gibbelins waist-deep in the water, with torches in their hands! And,
without saying a word,
or even smiling, they neatly hanged him on the outer wall—and the tale is one of those that have not a happy ending.
