I’ve become so desperate for some sword & sorcery, that I’ve been playing the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. I was pleased to find this homage to the classic tale of stealing the eye of the temple statue. In Skyrim, the thief is Mercer of the Thieve’s Guild, stealing the eye of the Falmer.
This theme has shown up frequently in heroic fantasy. The best known these days is from the AD&D Player’s Handbook, a classic illustration by David Trampier (1954-2014).
When I searched Wikipedia, I found that someone thought the idea of stealing an eye from an idol’s eye in a temple came from Robert E. Howard’s “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933) about his hero Conan, and while that’s a great tale, Conan does not pull the gem from a statue in that story. Instead, the first example I can find, comes from The Thief of Baghdad (1924).
In that movie, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. climbs up the statue and pries the eye from the statue. The sets in that movie were fantastic, as was the acrobatics. Fairbanks was an Olympic gymnast and the most famous of the early action stars. Besides the Thief of Baghdad, he also played the Black Pirate, Zorro, Robin Hood, and D’Artagnan.
From what I can tell, the story of an idol with jeweled eyes came from “The Tale of Princess Nur al-Nihar & the Lovely Jinniyah” from the collection A Thousand and One Nights (Powys Mathers’ translation, the 1964 edition). A king had three sons, Ali, Hasan, and Husain. All adored their orphan cousin, Nur al-Nihar, with whom they had been raised. She agrees to wed the brother who brings her the greatest rarity. The eldest, Ali, finds an idol with eyes that move:
“Among other curious wonders of that land, he saw a temple filled with brass idols, having a dome fifty cubits high which bore three levels of pictures in coloured carving. The whole temple was ornamented with shallow-cut designs of cunning chisels, and stood in a mighty rose garden. But its principal wonder was a solid gold statue among those brass idols (may they be damned and broken!). This figure stood at a man’s height and had eyes of moving rubies, which rolled incessantly to follow the movements of any who stood before it.”
Ali does not bother with the idol, unlike the Prince of the Indies in the movie, but instead goes on to find the fantastic flying carpet.
The Thief of Baghdad was remade in 1940, and the idol was even bigger, and in color as well. People playing rpgs in the 1970s certainly grew up with at least one of these movies, and possibly both.
But remember, the story from The Thousand and One Nights didn’t have the hero (or rogue) plucking the eye from the idol either. So, does anyone know of an earlier version than 1924?
lostdelights 