“And now, as I still continued to step cautiously onward, there came thronging upon my recollection a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo. Of the dungeons there had been strange things narrated – fables I had always deemed them – but yet strange, and too ghastly to repeat, save in a whisper. Was I left to perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness; or what fate, perhaps even more fearful, awaited me?”
Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum.
If you’re playing a lot of games, there’s no escaping the dusty depths of dungeons. They are everywhere; their twists and turns and nooks and crannies filled with monsters, traps and loot form the spine of countless games.
But what is a dungeon? The concept has become so worn down by time and usage that it’s become hard to tell. In games, ‘dungeon’ means little more than a maze-like, often non-sensical arrangement of rooms whose prime purpose is simply their successful traversal; in other words, little more than a generic name for a combination of basic building blocks. And yet, ‘dungeon’ hasn’t shaken off some associations that keep clinging to it like desiccated skin to a skeleton. The archetypal dungeon, we know, is grey and dark and musty, often sprawling in the bowels of the earth like some tumour, and adorned with morbid decor, the prime example of which is that perennial classic, the skeleton (preferably still chained to a wall with rusty chains). Dungeons can manifest themselves as mines, tunnels, sewers, caves, ruins, crypts, catacombs… and of course prisons. These are often ill-defined spaces of decay and restriction that serve no obvious purpose beyond pure aesthetic on the one hand and pure functionality on the other.
They’re also associated with the Middle Ages, or medieval fantasy. The Old French word ‘donjon’ originally referred to a castle’s keep, the most secured and fortified of its parts; which also made it ideally suited for use as a prison. Hence, the modern meaning of the word ‘dungeon’. Medieval dungeons get a bad rap and live on in our modern minds as a grisly potpourri of torture chambers and oubliettes, inquisitors and iron maidens. In the post-medieval era, dungeons become the textbook example for the supposedly barbarous and uncivilised Middle Ages, an age when – so the story went – powerful lords could act on their cruellest whims with complete impunity. But the 19th century also brought with it a new fascination with the Middle Ages, its charms and its terrors. The irrationality and luridness of Gothic fiction and the morbid sensibilities of (Dark) Romanticism completely embraced the popular fantasy of the terrible medieval dungeon that’s still so familiar today.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, the condemned narrator already knows that a proper dungeon must include some devious, deadly trap: “The plunge into this pit I had avoided by the merest of accidents, I knew that surprise, or entrapment into torment, formed an important portion of all the grotesquerie of these dungeon deaths.” One history book published in 1897 and written by Tighe Hopkins, The Dungeons of Old Paris, Being the Story and Romance of the Most Celebrated Prisons of the Monarchy and the Revolution, takes palpable pleasure in fantasies of cruelty even as it condemns the inhumanity of the dungeon: