Thus begins Robert E. Howard’s justifiably celebrated story “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933), a quintessential example both of Howard’s stories of Conan the Cimmerian, and of the sword-and-sorcery genre itself. I first read it in preparatory school in the classic Frank Frazetta-covered Lancer paperback without really registering what I was reading — my appreciation for Howard’s oeuvre was kindled later by John Milius’ cinematic masterpiece Conan the Barbarian, only to flare into unquenchable flames years after, when on the urging of an inebriated frenemy I finally read an earlier classic Howard story, “The Shadow Kingdom”, and was forever hooked. Since then I have drunk so deeply from Howard’s well that I can at last begin to aspire to what our favourite old curmudgeon Gary Gygax — more or less the single-handed inventor of fantasy role-playing — once grumbled, “Everything Robert E. Howard wrote has been perused by these weary eyes.” (Yes, I’ve even begun to cast sidelong glances at Howard’s boxing stories!)

One day on my Howardian journey I stumbled across an intriguing claim made by editor Stephen Jones in the first Conan anthology in the Fantasy Masterworks series, that Howard’s vibrant and evocative description of the thieves’ quarters in Zamora was “borrowed … from one of his favourite movies, the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

I don’t know the basis for Jones’ claim — googling makes me none the wiser, except to note that there are some ruffled feathers out there at the thought that Howard could possibly have been influenced by something ultimately of French origin (despite Howard’s well-documented appreciation for the French poet Pierre Louÿs, and despite his having set his excellent Dark Agnes stories — and others — in post-medieval France). Regardless — and whatever the ultimate truth of Jones’ assertion — it was clearly high time for me to dive headfirst into Walter J. Cobb’s 1964 translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), to give the novel its author’s preferred title.

I’ve always liked the Italian fantasist Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic as “a book that has never finished saying what it has to say”, though my own has long been that a true classic is a work almost all of us have heard of, but which almost none of us has read. And what an immersive and surprising experience reading Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris proved to be! Like most unread yet culturally familiar classics it was nothing like what I expected. Instead of the crap peddled by the likes of Disney, the reader patient enough to endure chapter after chapter of arcane descriptions of late medieval architecture — the ultimate protagonist of the book is not the hunchbacked bellringer but the city of Paris itself, with the cathedral of Notre-Dame as its focal point — will be rewarded by countless references to alchemy, hermeticism, magic, witchcraft and sorcery — no dragons perhaps, but layer upon layer of dungeons. As Hugo himself is quick to explain:

But perhaps most striking of all are Hugo’s detailed and fascinating descriptions of the late medieval Parisian underworld. Set in Paris at the end of the Middle Ages, the novel begins during the carnivalesque Feast of Fools in early 1482, during which Quasimodo the bellringer — the hunchback of Notre-Dame — and only one of many significant characters in the story — is elected Pope of Fools, narrowly beating Clopin Trouillefou, the king of Argot, i.e. of those who use thieves’ cant; for, similarly to the beginning of “The Tower of the Elephant”, it was during the revels of the Feast of Fools that the thieves of France held carnival by night:

But is not this list strikingly reminiscent of Gary Gygax’s later popularisation of the thief as fantasy archetype, and the ranks of rogues, footpads, cutpurses, robbers, burglars, filchers, sharpers, magsmen, thieves and master-thieves listed in his role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons? Perhaps even more compellingly, Hugo’s conceptualisation and detailed descriptions of the Parisian underworld throughout the length of his novel often foreshadow another pillar of sword-and-sorcery — Fritz Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and their adventures in Lankhmar, arguably a prime contender for the coveted title of city of thieves.

Later in Notre-Dame de Paris, Gringoire, a frustrated author and poet, and another of the novel’s more significant characters, loses his way after almost being set on fire by a gang of street children, and accidentally stumbles into ‘that terrible Court of Miracles, which no honest man had ever penetrated …  the city of thieves… of Paris.’ In a remarkable seventeen-page sequence, Gringoire is surrounded by the thieves of the Court of Miracles and brought before Trouillefou their king, who decrees that unless Gringoire joins their cause for life, he will be hanged — as the old ballad says, “you can enter any time you like, but you can never leave.” To save his life, Gringoire unwillingly agrees, but to be considered eligible for membership he must first pick the pockets of “a stuffed dummy … a sort of scarecrow … completely covered with little bells”. As Trouillefou explains: “Briefly, this is what you have to do: stand on tiptoe … and you’ll be able to reach the dummy’s pocket; put your hand into it and take out the purse that’s in it. If you do that without jingling the bells, ’tis well, you will be a Truand [a professional thief]. … You’re to put your hand into the dummy’s pocket and take out the purse. If but one bell tinkles, you will be hanged.” To me at least this sequence brings to mind the descriptions of the rigorous and unforgiving training inflicted on aspiring thieves as described in another quintessential tale of sword-and-sorcery, Fritz Leiber’s “Ill Met in Lankhmar” (1970):

Lacking the required skill and experience, Gringoire of course fails. Trouillefou nevertheless takes pity on him and offers him one final chance to escape his deadly predicament — if any woman of the city of thieves is willing to marry him, his life will be spared. Even given this one last straw to clutch at, it seems that Gringoire’s end is inevitable, until La Esmeralda, a beautiful young gypsy girl, is moved by his plight and condescends to marry him for the minimum required period of four years — though only symbolically, as Gringoire discovers to his chagrin when he is disabused of the notion that he has any conjugal rights when Esmeralda, anticipating later Howardian heroines like Dark Agnes, Red Sonya and Valeria, turns on him with a “poniard in her hand, before Gringoire had time even to observe whence this weapon came. She looked angry and proud, her lips were swollen, her nostrils distended, her cheeks fiery red, and her eyes flashing.”

Now Notre-Dame de Paris is very long — five hundred pages long — and I could easily go on belaboring my point to the bitter end, though to what purpose? You are either already intrigued enough to have a stab at the novel yourself, or remain coldly immune to my entreaties. But I began this article by quoting Howard’s description of a thieves’ den in Zamora, so I will end it with just one of Hugo’s descriptions of a thieves’ tavern in late medieval Paris:

To the glory and the witch-fire!

Bibliography

Gary Gygax, Advanced D & D™ Players Handbook, TSR Games, 1980 [1978].

Gary Gygax, ‘A couple of fantastic flops’, in Dragon #63, July 1982.

Robert E. Howard, ‘The Tower of the Elephant’, in Conan, Lancer, 1967.

Robert E. Howard, ‘The Tower of the Elephant’, in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, Ballantine Books, 2003.

Robert E. Howard, ‘The Shadow Kingdom’, in Kull: Exile of Atlantis, Ballantine Books, 2006.

Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, trans. Walter J. Cobb, Penguin Popular Classics, 1996 [1964].

Stephen Jones, ‘Robert E. Howard and Conan: The Early Years’, in Robert E. Howard, The Conan Chronicles Volume 1: The People of the Black Circle, Fantasy Masterworks, Millennium, 2000.

Fritz Leiber, ‘Ill Met in Lankhmar’, in Swords and Deviltry, ACE Fantasy, 1982 [1970].

Kola Krauze is an actor living in Sweden. He has acted in Outlander, The Bridge and 24: Live Another Day, but is most proud of his performance in The Outsider, inspired by the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name. In his spare time he works out in front of a huge poster of Conan the Barbarian while listening to ancient Egyptian death metal. Much of what Robert E. Howard wrote has been perused by his weary eyes.