When we talk about the foundations of Dungeons & Dragons, the names that come up most often are the obvious ones: Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Jack Vance, among others. But alongside Conan and hobbits stands another set of icons, the roguish duo of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, born from the imagination of Fritz Leiber.
In Appendix N, Leiber's entry is "Leiber, Fritz. 'Fafhrd & Gray Mouser' series; et al." So that leaves me a lot of room to explore his works.
Leiber’s tales of Lankhmar gave us thieves’ guilds, a decadent city, and sword-and-sorcery camaraderie that would become staples of the game. And a couple of tales where witchcraft plays an important role.
The Snow Women (1970)
Before he became a hero of Lankhmar, Fafhrd was a youth of the cold North, raised among the Snow Women. This community of women was led by Mor, Fafhrd’s mother, who dominates both him and the other men of their tribe through will, manipulation, and a kind of communal witchcraft.
The Snow Women are not cackling hags with bubbling cauldrons; their magic is subtler. It lies in the power of custom, ritual, and fear. Their witchcraft is not just spellwork but social control, and it casts a frost over every relationship in the story. For young Fafhrd, escaping their grip is as much an act of rebellion against sorcery as it is against his mother’s authority.
This tale shows witchcraft not as something learned in a grimoire, but as an inheritance and an atmospher a cold wind that shapes destinies. In many ways they remind me of tales of Finnish witchcraft. I have a hard time reading about these women and not think of Louhi, the Crone (and Maiden too) of Pohjola. This leads us to Iggwilv, the "spiritual daughter" of Louhi and Mor.
Later, in the story In the Witch’s Tent (collected in "Swords Against Wizardry"), Leiber presents us with another kind of witch. Here, Fafhrd and the Mouser find themselves consulting a prophetess. The scene is thick with atmosphere: the tent filled with smoke, the seeress exhaling her visions like opium haze, the sense that knowledge comes at a cost.
This witch is less about domination and more about liminality. She occupies that familiar role of the oracle, standing at the threshold between worlds. But in true Leiber fashion, she is not a benign guide. Her words are dangerous, her presence uncanny, and the tent itself feels like a trap. The scene could be dropped whole into any RPG session as the archetypal fortune-teller who reveals just enough truth to get the characters into trouble.
Conjure Wife (1943)
If Leiber’s Fafhrd and Mouser stories gave us witches in the context of sword-and-sorcery, it was his first novel, Conjure Wife, that put witchcraft at the center of the narrative.
Or as I have said in the past, “Between Bewitched and Rosemary’s Baby lies Leiber’s Tansy.”
Norman Saylor, a rational-minded professor, discovers that his wife, Tansy, has been secretly practicing protective magic. When he convinces her to stop, he learns the hard way that witchcraft is not merely superstition, and that rival witches have been circling all along.
As I wrote in my earlier review:
Conjure Wife has been held up as sort of a prototype of the modern American Witch tale. Seemingly normal wives in a small East Coast town married to normal, rational men of science and academia turn out to be powerful witches engaged in a silent secret war of magic.
... They were intelligent (more so than their husbands), clever and some down right evil and all were powerful. By the end of the book, you are left feeling that the men in this tale are really no more than children, a bit dim ones at that.
This is what makes Conjure Wife powerful: the way it sets witchcraft not in ancient forests or ruined temples, but in the kitchens and parlors of mid-century America. The witches here are faculty wives, the battleground is tenure politics, and the weapons are hexes whispered between cocktail parties. It is both psychological horror and social commentary, and it remains one of the most influential witchcraft novels of the 20th century.
It has also been made into three different movies, Weird Woman (1944), Burn, Witch, Burn aka "Night of the Eagle" (1962), and Witches' Brew (1980).
Our Lady of Darkness (1977)
Decades later, Leiber returned to occult horror with Our Lady of Darkness, a novel steeped in the landscapes of San Francisco and the esoteric science of “megapolisomancy,” a fictional occult science that focuses on harnessing the supernatural forces present in large cities. There is even a connection to Clark Aston Smith.
This isn’t a witch story in the conventional sense, but it resonates with the same archetypal power. Its date allows me to make a claim for it as "sliding into home" just barely.
At its heart, Our Lady of Darkness is about the anima, that Jungian figure of the feminine that exists within the male psyche. She is muse and terror, desire and destruction, and in Leiber’s hands, she becomes a literal haunting presence. The Lady of the title is both a psychological construct and a supernatural force, a liminal witch of the soul.
This is a theme I’ve explored myself in the character of Larina Nix. Larina, too, is not just a witch but an embodiment of anima at once familiar, archetypal, and unsettling. She represents how the witch figure can exist in both myth and the inner landscape of the imagination.
While Our Lady of Drakness may not have influenced D&D at all, there are a lot of things here you can find in the RPG Kult. Sadly, this book is nowhere near as good as Leiber's other works, especially Conjure Wife.
Closing Thoughts
When it comes to witches, Leiber made one significant contribution: Conjure Wife. The Snow Women and the prophetess of In the Witch’s Tent add atmosphere to Fafhrd’s world, but they are more color than core. Our Lady of Darkness circles the same archetypal ground from a Jungian angle, but it isn’t witchcraft in the usual sense.
Yet even if these stories didn’t leave much of a mark on D&D, they left a mark on me. Conjure Wife remains one of the best examples of modern witchcraft horror, and its faculty wives locked in a secret magical war still resonate. The others, Mor’s cold grip, the seeress in her smoky tent, and the anima-haunted towers of San Francisco, add layers to Leiber’s legacy and to my own sense of how witches live in story: sometimes social, sometimes symbolic, sometimes spectral, but always there.
