Skeleton Warrior
Skeleton Warrior · Undead Soldier — A warrior risen from death and granted unlife
The Skeleton Warrior (English Skeleton Warrior, Latin Sceletus Bellator) is the warrior-type undead composed of the bones of the dead, summoned or resurrected by magic, curse, or black sorcery, who fights with sword, spear, shield, and armour, possessed of pure skeletal frame without flesh or soul — the decisive canonical iconographic undead figure of modern Western fantasy. The English skeleton derives from the Greek skeleton ('dried corpse'), through the Latin sceleton, settling in English in the sixteenth century, and is depicted as an instrumental being without original personality or will, faithfully obeying only the commands of the Necromancer. The mythical archetype is the Spartoi (Sparta, 'the Sown Ones') of Cadmus in ancient Greek mythology — armed warriors who grew from the ground when Cadmus, by the instruction of the goddess Athena, sowed the teeth of a dragon he had killed. The decisive modern canon is the famous scene in the 19 July 1963 British release of the film Jason and the Argonauts directed by Don Chaffey (1917-1990) — the four-and-a-half-minute scene of seven skeleton warriors in stop-motion animation by the British cinema special-effects master Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013) duelling with the Greek hero Jason — the decisive canon of modern skeleton-warrior iconography. The Skeleton monster of the 1974 tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) by Gary Gygax (1938-2008), in the 1977 Monster Manual, established the canon of the modern fantasy RPG.
