The Towers of Fantasy

The Pulps

The towers of fantasy fiction have always been locations of sorcery, mystery and strife. If the bad guy lives in a tower, whether he or she is a wizard or a robber baron, it means a lot of extra work for the heroes. Climbing high into the air, towers offer a place of safety (if they have strong doors), a place of miracles and science, or simply a better view of the surrounding country. It doesn’t take much to get started. Stephen King read a line from King Lear: “Child Rowland to the dark tower came.” And from that he went on a seven book jag.

Let’s look at some earlier classics that feature towers and magic. I won’t bother with any Freudian analysis here. (Those dudes see penises everywhere!)

Sword & Sorcery loves a good tower. Clark Ashton Smith dotted his strange landscapes with odd structures including Malygris’s tower in Poseidonis. In “The Last Incantation” (Weird Tales, June 1930):

Malygris the magician sat in the topmost room of his tower that was builded on a conical hill above the heart of Susran, capital of Poseidonis. Wrought of a dark stone mined from deep in the earth, perdurable and hard as the fabled adamant, this tower loomed above all others, and flung its shadow far on the roofs and domes of the city, even as the sinister power of Malygris had thrown its darkness on the minds of men.

Smith returns to the tower in “The Death of Malygris” (Weird Tales, April 1934), where greedy lords decide to enter his palace, only to find it’s not so empty. Smith’s tales would be influential on later writers such as Jack Vance who would fill his Dying Earth with wizardly manses.

Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard, the creator of S&S, produced at least two really great superstructures. “Tower of the Elephant” (Weird Tales, March 1933) was his third Conan story. It features:

The shimmering shaft of the tower rose frostily in the stars. In the sunlight it shone so dazzlingly that few could bear its glare, and men said it was built of silver. It was round, a slim perfect cylinder, a hundred and fifty feet in height, and its rim glittered in the starlight with the great jewels which crusted it. The tower stood among the waving exotic trees of a garden raised high above the general level of the city. A high wall enclosed this garden, and outside the wall was a lower level, likewise enclosed by a wall. No lights shone forth; there seemed to be no windows in the tower – at least not above the level of the inner wall. Only the gems high above sparkled frostily in the starlight.

Inside the tower is a ghoulish collection of dangers including lions and guards at the base, a giant spider above, and the ultimate secret, the strange elephantine creature from outer space.

Howard had another creepy tower in “The Garden of Fear”. It is hard to imagine but Farnsworth Wright must have rejected the story because it appeared in Marvel Tales #2, July-August 1934. It was reprinted in Fantastic, May 1961.  This time there is a prehistoric flying man who doesn’t like to be disturbed as he has his way with stolen females. Hunwulf calls it a “hut” but that is because he is a primitive who has never seen a tower before:

So as Hunwulf I could only say that I looked upon a great hut the construction of which was beyond my comprehension. But I, James Allison, know that it was a tower, some seventy feet in height, of a curious green stone, highly polished, and of a substance that created the illusion of semi-translucency. It was cylindrical, and, as near as I could see, without doors or windows. The main body of the building was perhaps sixty feet in height and from its center rose a smaller tower that completed its full stature. This tower, being much inferior in girth to the main body of the structure, was thus surrounded by a sort of gallery, with a crenellated parapet, and was furnished with both doors, curiously arched, and windows, thickly barred as I could see, even from where I stood.

The flying man surrounds his smooth tower with blood-sucking vines. Hunwulf has to remove them by stampeding the local mammoth herd over them. REH created other edifices as well including The Scarlet Citadel, which is mostly interesting because of its basement not its tower, the high rise of the People of the Black Circle, and others.

Science Fantasy

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore were independently great writers but after their marriage they started working together using pseudonyms like Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell. But for “Earth’s Last Citadel” (Argosy, April-July, 1943) they used their real names. This Science Fantasy has soldiers projected to the end of time where a fantastic tower sits.

Alan squinted through the mists. The great fortress had grown almost mountain-huge, now. Moonlight did not reflect from the vast dark surfaces at all, so that the thing remained almost in silhouette, but they could see that it was composed of geometric forms which were yet strangely alien, polyhedrons, pyramids, pentagons, globes, all flung together as if without intelligent design. And yet each decoration was braced as though against tremendous stresses, or against a greater gravitational pull. Only high intelligence could have reared that vast structure towering above the mists of the plain, but it grew clearer at every step that the intelligence had not been human.

Both writers enjoyed the work of A. Merritt and perhaps a little of that writer’s legacy is here.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien appeared in 1954-1955. The second volume was named The Two Towers, referring two important structures, the first Orthanc in Isengard:

“A great ring-wall of stone, like towering cliffs, stood out from the shelter of the mountain-side, from which it ran and then returned again… one who passed in and came at length out of the echoing tunnel, beheld a plain, a great circle, somewhat hollowed like a vast shallow bowl: a mile it measured from rim to rim. Once it had been green and filled with avenues, and groves of fruitful trees, watered by streams that flowed from the mountains to a lake. But no green thing grew there in the latter days of Saruman. The roads were paved with stone-flags dark and hard; and beside their borders instead of trees there marched long lines of pillars, some of marble, some of copper and of iron, joined by heavy chains, to the centre all the roads ran between their chains. There stood a tower of marvelous shape. It was fashioned by the builders of old, who smoothed the Ring of Isengard, and yet it seemed a thing not made by the craft of Men, but riven from the bones of the earth in the ancient torment of the hills. A peak and isle of rock it was, black and gleaming hard: four mighty piers of many-sided stone were welded into one, but near the summit they opened into gaping horns, their pinnacles sharp as the points of spears, keen-edged as knives. Between them was a narrow space, and there upon a floor of polished stone, written with strange signs, a man might stand five hundred feet above the plain.”

This is the home of Saruman the White, originally one of the good guys but a wizard who turns to the power of Sauron. Saruman traps Gandalf at the top of the tower after a wizards’ duel. The tower is taken when it is inundated by a flood after the Ents attack it.

The other tower is Barad-bur in Mordor:

“Then at last his gaze was held: wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black tower of adamant, he saw it: Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron. All hope left him.”

Tolkien spends much less time on describing the tower where The Great Eye sits watching over the Mordor. The spirit of Sauron, the evil one, lies here.  The land all around the tower is wasteland. Nearby is Mount Doom, the volcano where Sauron forged the One Ring.

The Return of Conan

“The Gem in the Tower” (Conan the Swordsman, 1978) by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter had Conan and a band of pirates deciding to enter a wizard’s tower for a legendary gem. The surrounding jungle gets some of the crew but the wizard is waiting for the Cimmerian. They see:

A bow shot’s distance along the deserted beach, a black shape like a pointing finger pierced the starry sky, now paling in the east. As Conan watched, a silver slice of moon, just past its full, manifested itself above the seascape. The moon moved slowly up the sky, turning the tower into an ink-sketched silhouette backed by the silvery light. It was a simple, slender cylinder surrounded at its tapered height by a narrow parapet; and above this prominence sharply rose the spire.There was no sign of light or life within the tower. The tower seemed untenanted and forlorn; but where magic is concerned, looks can ever be deceiving.

A lot of Lin Carter in this one. I have to think it was inspired by “The Garden of Fear” and “Earth’s Last Citadel”.

Enter Dilvish

“Tower of Ice” (Flashing Swords! #5, Dec. 1981) by Roger Zelazny is perhaps the most important of the short stories, a kind of dry-run for the novel, The Changing Land (1981). Dilvish has come to find Jelerak, his arch-nemesis and usually finds underlings. Both stories feature a tower with multiples guards, traps and incantations. The author offers us only glimpses of the whole mountain of ice:

Dilvish adjusted his position again, to better study the high escarpment. At this quarter, its surface had resolved itself into a thing of textures. From the play of shadow, he could make out prominences, crevices. Bare rock jutted in numerous places. Quickly he began tracing possible routes to the top.

Tanith Lee

“The Sombrus Tower” (Weird Tales #2, Spring 1981) by Tanith Lee is a Dunsany-esque tale that has frustrated the beejeesuz out of me for decades. The hero Vesontane goes on a quest for the Sombrus Tower despite warnings. No matter how long he rides, the tower never gets any closer.

“She raised her arm and pointed. The end of her pointing fixed the fifth ray of the star she had made with him, his dead fire and his horse. At her finger’s end, on the edge of the horizon, there was a slim tower, the color of a shadow.”

The story is a masterpiece of word use that chills and fascinates. Lee is quite aware of the iconic nature of the tower.

By no means have I noted all the towers here. I can think of equally valid examples from T. H. White with Merlin’s cosy old tower where Wart learns his lessons, L. Sprague de Camp’s Tower of Zanid and the Goblin Tower, Michael Moorcock’s Vanishing Tower, Tad Williams’ Green Angel Tower, and even George R. R. Martin’s House of the Undying as well as The Citadel. There are countless others and I am sure you have your favorites too.