This was prompted by a question from Zak about the linking of Wizards to towers in the imaginative mind.
I did think about chopping this up to present it to you in some kind of chronological order, running either backwards from Tolkien (who I think distilled the idea into its current form) or forwards from Ziggurats and Zorastonian Towers of Silence, but it would have meant chopping and editing so much that it risked presenting the work done more as mine than as the peoples involved (and would have been a bitch to do), and the conversational format has a ragged logic and interest of its own.
So, prepare yourselves for a journey back through early 20th century fiction, into the middle ages and its magicians, alchemists, astronomers and invisible collages, and further back to artificial mountains on which you meet the gods.
Original conversation is heeeeerrree.
(When links lead straight to images I tried to replace them with the images themselves. Formatting is borked by the transfer from G+ to blogger but blogger borks everything anyway.)
(Oh and, of course, if anyone in this conversation wants their words or information removed then let me know and I will do so.)
OK, Wizards In Towers. It makes all the sense in the world but where does it come from?
Tolkien ether invents the trope or re-invents it so powerfully that it sticks for everything after that.
Before that, the earliest version I could find is The Iron Tower of Carcë in The Worm Ouroboros.
Does anyone have any earlier mentions from literature or mythology?
Tolkien ether invents the trope or re-invents it so powerfully that it sticks for everything after that.
Before that, the earliest version I could find is The Iron Tower of Carcë in The Worm Ouroboros.
Does anyone have any earlier mentions from literature or mythology?
- Like, there are a lot of fucking towers in LotR. You already know there are but then you start counting them and you're like "dang, that's a lot of towers".
14h - 3Feminist answer. Towers originally held magical women in fairy tales, Tolkien re-purposed them to hold powerful magical men, not as prisoners, but as rulers. Did Tolkien STEAL the tower for the PATRIARCHY? Does that statement even make sense since they used to be women-prisons?
14h 
Linked to towers / enchanted castles in Mallory and other knightly tales, surely?
14h- Like I remember Don Quixote going on about enchanted castles (and I think towers) and enchanters and magicians a lot so he was probably making fun of some extent texts.
14h 
Yeah obviously but where in history does the trope of things . happening in "towers" come from? Was it relatively common that rogue elements would take over small fortifications from liege lords and behave poorly/spookily or is thatjust like the lords themselves would have towers and be douchebags in them?
14h
historically did anyone actually make towers that weren't connect to a castle or a small fort?
14h- yes
14h 
They were often the centerpieces of things like Motte & Bailey forts, or had a small curtain wall attached to serve as a small keep, but otherwise, not really. The standalone tower is a fantasy-invented thing. The watchtower, sure, but I'm not thinking any self-respecting wizard would want to sit on a platform at the top of a ladder all day. The crosswinds would be hell on the filing system.
14h- Historically many small forts were lone towers.
14h 
Perhaps related to the term "Ivory Tower"? According to Brewer's Dictionary it was first coined by Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), meaning a place of refuge from the world and its strivings and posturings. Perhaps the wizard has become conflated with the academic in this sense.
14h
14h
- +Zach Marx Weber I can't remember any scene in Mallory where there is a wizard or sorcerer or magic do-er in a tower. They are often in 'places' or in their own castle, like Morgana will be chilling in her castle to do whatever, but the tower-ness is never specified or used in the story. (I think.)
14h - Have not read Quixote.
14h 
I always thought wizards in towers was from days when astronomy was scary stuff, being high up so they could watch the heavens and gain knowledge thereby.
14h- I think everyone has the impression that it's an old idea but I think it might actually be quite modern.
14h 
During my summers in France, I learned that sometimes it was common for knights to live in a tower. Some castles would have a few knight's towers in their courtyard (possibly free standing inside the walls, I think) for the knights attached to that castle. I think they could also be free standing on their own land, entirely separate from castles.
There's not a lot of history on wizards, unfortunately.
14h- Google "Tower House" for some historical examples. Seems like it's particular to the Border Country between England and Scotland.
14h - +Patrick Stuart you might be right, not sure. Did some quick re-checking and I don't think there are any magicians living specifically in towers in Don Quixote, though I'm not 100% sure. There are a lot of mentions of enchanters, and of enchanted castles, but I think the actual trope itself might never appear.
14h 
Building on the (edit:
ancient) medieval association of the Magi with the Towers of Silence?
14h- +Rob Brennan where are they associated?
14h - +Rob Brennan Wait, found it. It's a tenuous connection but its definitely the earliest I've seen by quite a long way.
14h 
There's also Rapunzel (which is just one permutation of the Maiden in the Tower folktale) and the Tower of the Elephant.
Edit: Oh and the Tower card in tarot which seems to be vaguely related to the devil and some infernal stuff and is possibly related to the tower of babel, which is a typical "am gone too far" story of humans spiting in the face of god with their art and hubris which is a pretty wizard thing to do.
14h- I think Tower of the Elephant might be the first fully embodied version of the trope. It's 1933 and The Worm Ouroboros is 1922 but I'm not sure exactly what happens in that, I think the guy goes to the tower to learn the magic.
Rapunzel and the similar stories have been covered up-thread. Close, but magic girl prisoner is not wizard.
14h 
OK.
1 tomb towers and minarets (which were prob watchtowers before they became call to prayer platforms) all across the Islamic world and inner Asia before that - see the gunbad-i-qabus, for instance - have a big tradition of being seen as haunted/antediluvian or having good blessings from their builders, so that's tower as locus of spooky power (seriously gunbad-i-qabus - contained a glass sarcophagus suspended in the air, according to legend);
2 watchtowers everywhere (alpine passes, pagodas in China) are like last markers of culture in the barbarous void - they're the elemental form of the fort as lookout/beacon. Also often congregation points for teaching, legal decisions
in distant Chinese provinces and Islamic World. A tall tower is an advertisement of culture, this is maybe why minarets caught on;
3 Porcelain Tower of Nanjing - scholars and knowledge in a shiny white tower;
4 possible echo with lighthouse and library of Alexandria - the ability to make free-standing, tall towers is a statement of technological expertise;
5 observatories for sure, although these were often dug into the earth they often also had tall elements. See Jantar Mantars ("hocus pocus" buildings) in India;
6 possible deliberate playing up to the Tower of Babel myth among Europeans, which might be related to the ziggurat or esagila in Babylon.
Certainly by the 16th century the wizard tower was a well-known figure in Europe and Tycho Brahe deliberately riffed off it when he was building Uraniborg.
12h- Was the Tower of Babel a "tower" in the original language or is that a King Jamesianism?
14h - I think it's a tower because it collapses and that's probably the origin for the Tarot card, which I think predates James by at least a century (would have to check).
14h 
I was thinking of Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, which is apparently based on a Scottish ballad by way of Shakespeare:
en.m.wikipedia.org
14h- +Richard G "Certainly by the 16th century the wizard tower was a well-known figure in Europe" any sources?
14h - wouldn't you know it, it's missing from the 15th century Visconti-Sforza deck - we think it was probably included in 15th c decks but the earliest are all incomplete.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_(Tarot_card)
OTOH Brueghel painted it as a (admittedly very broad) tower in the 1560s.
14h 
You might be overthinking it a bit. There are towers EVERYWHERE in the English countryside and I think the same is true across Europe. I was literally last night watching a TV documentary about how Montaigne went to live in a tower to write philosophy. If you've got a wizard the chances are fairly good he's going to be in a tower because they're just all over the shop. Anybody with wealth or status lives in one.
14h- +Peter Kisner So that's another trapped woman and, yeah, a magic elf, which is pretty good, but still isn't a wizard.
14h - Well the greek translation of Tower of Babel is I'm pretty sure "tower" but that postdates Greek people and their presumably endless supply of hilly seaside watchtowers and lighthouses, I'm curious about what a Tower meant to people in the desert who may or may not have run into people in towers unattached to fortifications
14h 
+Zak Sabbath looks like the word translated 'tower' is taken that way in each other occurrence
14h- +David McGrogan But "Evil Dukes" etc are usually in castles . It's very specifically wizards are associated with "towers" more often than castles or manses
14h - Look people, all I'm asking for is a motherfucking wizard in a god-damn tower. Not a ghost or an elf guy or a monster or a general feeling of dread. And not a fort or a castle. A mother. Fucking. Wizard. Plus tower. The two things = together.
14h - +Ian Reilly AH! "Migdala" is a common term for tower in islamic architaecture
14h -
14h - +David McGrogan "If you've got a wizard the chances are fairly good he's going to be in a tower because they're just all over the shop."
Then why can't I find one mentioned in fiction, or legend, or folklore, before 1922?
13h - +Patrick Stuart are there other wizards mentioned before then? where are they generally located?
13h - +Patrick Stuart Are there actually that many wizards around pre-1922? It seems to me it was mostly witches before Tolkien.
13h - Wizards are all over the place in Christian folklore in the middle ages.
As a book I got from +Patrick Stuart "Grimoires: a History" points out +David McGrogan
13h - I will settle for a sorcerer, enchanter, witch or anyone whose job is that they do magic.
13h - +Zak Sabbath Do any of them live in towers? What does the book say?
13h - This link says use of the word boomed around the 90's but its still there before https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Wizard%2C&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CWizard%3B%2Cc0
13h - +David McGrogan They're always looking for towers ("treasure-seeking" ie, being very D&D) --and accused of living in Toledo
13h - +Patrick Stuart off of that link i found a couple, hopefully these work
from 1917:
https://books.google.com/books?id=ZBBKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA109&dq=%22wizard%22+%22tower%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiN9eGVyO3RAhWq1IMKHcdcA4oQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=%22wizard%22%20%22tower%22&f=false
from 1870:
https://books.google.com/books?id=ry3yAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA514&dq=%22wizard%22+%22tower%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiN9eGVyO3RAhWq1IMKHcdcA4oQ6AEIHzAB#v=onepage&q=%22wizard%22%20%22tower%22&f=false
13h - (Twitter on Old Hebrew "Tower" as in Babel, etc) "My brother in law is currently studying the Old Testament for his phd and says it translates better to ziggurat"
13h - +Patrick Stuart maybe make that 17th c, I believe Brahe deliberately made himself a wizard tower (more like isolated manor house) as part of his brand, but now I'm not sure what my source is for that. IIRC Galileo's experiments were famously in belltowers and that was mentioned at his trial. I'm having a hard time finding a definite original they might have been referring to, though. The term "tower" is used to mean "fort" quite often in English sources in that period, so it might be a linguistic trap. "Burned the topless towers of Ilium" (Marlowe) etc.
...IIRC Archimago lives in a tower in Spenser's Faerie Queene but I'd have to double check.
...and now I think about it the Watchtowers that the Golden Dawn attributes to John Dee might very easilybe19th century inventions legitimized by spurious antiquity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchtower_(magic)
short answer - I don't have a ref to hand and would have to spend time hunting. Hm.
13h - The original wizard, Simon Magus:
"
Another apocryphal document, the Acts of Peter and Paul gives a slightly different version of the above incident, which was shown in the context of a debate in front of the Emperor Nero. In this version, Paul the Apostle is present along with Peter, Simon levitates from a high wooden tower made upon his request, and dies "divided into four parts" due to the fall. Peter and Paul were then put in prison by Nero while ordering Simon's body be kept carefully for three days (thinking he would rise again).[25]
"
13h - some more detail on the Passio a 1st-2nd century text where Simon Magus tells somebody to build a tower:
https://books.google.com/books?id=eX3oFohttG8C&pg=PA295&lpg=PA295&dq=%22simon+magus%22%22tower%22&source=bl&ots=7XIXv_NTHc&sig=c1I3ZxPdK9RK6G1g1nsnJZSEyDg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiuh8e8zO3RAhWijVQKHRA8ARwQ6AEIKTAC#v=onepage&q=%22simon%20magus%22%22tower%22&f=false
13h 
I know of a whole lot of towers as early fortifications, and also brochs, and also hermits and monks living in towers outing the sticks, and surely Copts have hesychasts in towers (there's even a subterranean tower in Ethiopia iirc) and fuck knows what kind of weird rites they used to do in nuraghi and sure as hell Merlin in Sword in the Rock lives in a tower but it's not his tower. Also, Rapunzel.
No I have no idea where the trope comes from but I'm searching now.
13h
Chris P.+10
13h- TV tropes has some good hints but now I'll page through Calvino's Italian Fairytales. Also, possibly Arabian Nights maybe?
13h
13h-
13h - Check Alchemist in tower. Lots of alchemists were later conflated into wizards in popular imagination. Guys like Francis Bacon.
13h - Also, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, wizard kings on top of ziggurats, thousands of years ago, Mesopotamia.
13h - +Paolo Greco yeah Kostof talks about Babylonian murals meant to scare visitors to the ziggurat and add to the mystique of the priest at the top. Why else would you make an artificial mountain?
12h - +Zak Sabbath The Tower of Babel being a ziggurat jogs a memory, maybe from the single old testament class I ever took. I think there was an idea at the time that "high places" (mountain or hill tops generally) were a likely place to encounter the divine. Like you might climb a mountain for that reason or build a shrine on top.
And If I remember right, there was some thought that ziggurats were intended as a sort of man-made version of this sacred mountain concept.
If I am remembering this right, then it might contribute to the reasoning behind thinking the "Tower of Bable" was such an act of hubris: Normally you'd have to expend effort and go out of your way to reach for the divine, somewhat an act of humility. But building an artificial sacred spot, you tame that power and bring it near where you live, reaching the divine on your own terms.
Seems kind of a wizardy thing to do.
12h - It is THE wizard thing to do, especially if you are a Babylonian wizard and you dated to enslave the elect people you shall also expect retribution, a nemesis to match your hybris. Like in the tarot card.
9h 
I also think the root of the trope must be the Babylonian/Chaldean astronomer/priest who is on top of a ziggurat or observatory. Herodotus calls the Etemenanki ('the house of the frontier between heaven and earth') a tower ('pyrgos') even though it's square in overall profile. Zoraoaster, considered 'Chaldean' by the greeks is considered the father of astrology and of magic (they read '-aster' as 'aster', 'star')
9h
9h
Would Baba Yaga count? While it may be a stretch, her house was up on chicken legs so "magic is up"?
9h- what Gorice does in the tower in The Worm Ouroboros is cast elaborate spells
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ring/two/two10.htm
9h -
9h - Chris P.+1+cole long +Peter Kisner Re: Tower of Babil/Wizard's Tower Check wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel under "Islamic Traditions" It mentions a "Babil" and two angels "Harut and Marut" that teach the Babylonians magic and told them it was a test of their faith not to use this sinful power.
8h 
+Richard G Brahe built an observatory called Uraniborg on an island in the Baltic. Not a freestanding tower but a fort with towers in it.
8h- depiction of Taqi ad-Din's observatory in the 16th century, which takes the form of a (low) round tower, al-Tusi's observatory in the 13th c would have been similar, tower is round for taking azimuth http://www.muslimheritage.com/uploads/Azimuthal_semicircle_taqialdin.jpg
8h - God damn you guys are good at this
8h 
en.m.wikipedia.org
It's not so much a reply to "when did it start?" as to how prevalent and old it is to build towers. As a symbol of dominance of a powerful male, it makes sense that wizards, being powerful male individuals, would live in towers.
7h- +Jens Finkhäuser See the "Evil Duke" problem above.
7h - +Jens Finkhäuser there's this bit in Parsival (13th c.) where it goes into great detail about this great round pillar around which there's a spiral staircase that gawain has to climb in the sorcerer clinschor's castle, and clinschor is explicitly a eunuch. but it is a tower attached to a whole palace and not a lone tower, if i remember right
7h - +Zak Sabbath is the "Evil Duke" problem that it's an Evil Duke as opposed to A Wizard or is the problem that the tower is not free standing?
7h - +cole long The entire question is about the words people use . The word "wizard" is strongly associated with the word "tower" whereas various other kinds of powerful assholes (Dukes, Countcs, Barons, Lords, Knights, etc) are more often (for obvious historical reasons) associated with the word "castle" and stuff like that and relatively rarely associated with "towers" (as the N gram here proves).
"Towers" end up having princesses shut up in them and wizards atop them.
Jens' theory only makes sense if any powerful male figure is equally associated with a Tower, which isn't true.
For example:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=wizard%27s+tower%2CDuke%27s+tower%2C+Baron%27s+tower&year_start=1500&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cwizard%20%27s%20tower%3B%2Cc0
7h - In the case of Parsival, the evil duke is a wizard (i don't know the german word he uses, the penguin version calls him a necromancer and he casts spells) who shuts up maidens in a tower so it's a two-fer. the tower is part of a castle, but it makes a big deal of the toweringness of the tower.
6h - perhaps the key subquestion is when/through what mechanism the wizard's tower is reduced to the unattached tower in the middle of nowhere (vs. the astronomer in his observatory or the tower of babel in the city). i'm not sure when it happens but the evil duke/wizard's castle is in the wilderness anyway and having a single tower would look lonelier/more isolating. old roman towers presumably an influence e.g. this in wales
http://www.webbaviation.co.uk/gallery/d/61231-3/Mynydd-y-GarregTower-ic33850.jpg
6h - +Zak Sabbath it's not my theory, I'm just repeating it.
7h - Well it's got a problem is the point.
6h - when/where do we begin to associate wizards with imprisoning princesses/maidens?
6h - i'm thinking about Parsival again because there's the dense cluster of Wizard + High phallic tower + Imprisoned Maidens + Eunuch
6h 
The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencrutz has the Tower of Olympus with "a very ancient man, the warden of the Tower, with certain guards clothed in white, of whom we were friendly received, and so conducted to the Tower." and "The Tower of it self was just as if seven round towers had been built one by another, yet the middlemost was somewhat the higher, and within they all entered one into another, and had seven storeys one above another.". So we have that in the future manifesto of the college of invisible wizards craze which struck Europe in the 17th century.
4h- I would like to blog this, if no-one objects. So that it isn't lost in G+
2h - fine w me
2h - +Dunkey Halton +Zak Sabbath regarding Uraniborg and other observatories, the assumption I've had here is that tower gets separated semantically from fortress some time after 1650,* just as wizard in the sense of an obviously fictional sorcerer gets separated from scholar or scientist in the same period. In fact the word tower still ambiguously refers to lonely pillars in the desert and attached turrets on bigger buildings - even for Disney sorcerers. So I've been looking for famous figures who command apparently otherworldly/esoteric powers from forts under their control.
I suspect that the specific image of a bearded dude with lightning hands at the top of a free-standing, tall, cylindrical stone structure comes from 18th or more likely 19th century book illustration - there I have no idea where he might originate but I'd probably start with Goya and work through Dore. He sounds Romantic to me.
*curious aside: this would be after they've lost their military function because of cannons - so maybe they become distinctive because they're quaint/archaic?
2h - +Richard G the pointy hat beardy robed cleric is a common enough image, appearing in Medieval Christian art depicting old testament Jewish religious figures and (by common extension) wizards. The Met has one in NYC.
Here's Simon Magus with a sort of tower:
1h 
- and again:
- Just a final comment on semantics. This guy from the chansons de geste was a wizard who built a "castle of iron".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantes_(sorcerer)
But while castle usually refer to more complicated buildings, the basic definition is "fortified residence". Castle could refer to a sprawling building with many wings and towers, it could also be something like Conisbrough castle:
1h 
- Which I'd personally struggle to distinguish from a (fortified) tower (ignoring the wall). And since a lot of medieval literary tradition draws on french sources, the french word for castle, chateau is more accurately translated as manor house/residence.
On the other hand I'd also struggle to call a ziggurat (which have been brought up several times in relation to magi/astrologers/tower of babel) a tower, if you go to the wiki article for "Tower", it says under History that: "_Some of the earliest towers were ziggurats, which existed in Sumerian architecture since the 4th millennium BC._" So I guess there's a lot of elasticity to these architectural terms.
Also, I just noticed on wikipedia that the english "tower" comes via french and latin from the greek "tyrrhrenian" (like the sea), which made me remember the Nuraghi of Sardinia. I don't think anyone mentioned them here before:
Which are megalithic ancient towers that still inspire all kinds of fantastical explanations for their existence.
And no problem with the blogging. - Oh and in relation to Atlantes' iron castle. Saruman's Isengard is probably a fantasy cognate of german/germanic Eisen+gard, "iron enclosure/dwelling".
42m
- 1h
- Simon Magus is interesting because he builds a tower in order to fly from it, which suggests gliding to me - more Icarus than Pythagoras.
There's no suggestion that he lived or worked there habitually, is there? I agree, for the image that's not important. I'm just wondering if there's a suggestion in the story that something else might've been going on.
1h - +Richard G I don't think that's the question Patrick is asking, though. I think he wants a wizard in something that we would now recognise as a tower, as opposed to something that a 16th-century guy would recognise as a tower. So the Tower of London is not a tower for the purpose of this question, but the Galata Tower or St. Mark's Campanile would be.
5m - +Dunkey Halton It's still valuable information and following the roots of the idea has a fascination of its own.
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