Followers of this blog are familiar with my deep Dungeons & Dragons nerdity. I certainly felt the nerd in me rising over the last couple of weeks during my first ever trip to Spain: it’s hard not to be reminded of D&D when there is an ancient castle on every hill and a painting of knights in every church.

But one of the greatest D&D connections on this trip was unexpected to me. We managed to spend two glorious, sweltering days in Seville, “the frying pan of Spain,” and I was brought face to face with the literary roots of the thieves’ guild.

Many people, even non-D&D players, are aware of how many ideas from D&D were lifted whole cloth from Lord of the Rings: elves, dwarves, orcs, halflings, rangers. But the idea of the thieves’ guild–which is so central to D&D’s concept of the rogue–has no antecedent in Tolkien’s work. So far as I know (and please correct me, fantasy nerds, if you have a better story) the original thieves’ guild in fantasy comes from the work of Fritz Leiber, one of the titans of swords and sorcery fantasy. (By the way, I far prefer Leiber’s gritty, noir-ish vibe of swords and sorcery fantasy to the Wagnerian bombast of high fantasy–but that’s a subject for another post). Leiber’s odd-couple duo of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser often had to tangle with the thieves’ guild of Lankhmar, and so many of the details of that story made their way into D&D (and into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, and The Elder Scrolls, and Assassin’s Creed, and a thousand other fantasy franchises). By the way, Dark Horse is publishing a new omnibus of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in early 2024–I’m very excited to get my hands on it!

But where did Leiber’s concept of the thieves’ guild come from? I don’t know, and it may be impossible to know, but it’s almost certain that Leiber pulled the idea from earlier literature rather than from any historical criminal organization (which were generally gangs rather than guilds in the D&D sense).

The earliest literary treatment of the thieves’ guild that I am familiar with is Cervantes’ delightful story “Rinconete and Cortadillo,” which follows two likeable young rogues to the city of–you guessed it–Seville, where they get recruited into a hilarious (and oddly pious) thieves’ guild. Seville was, in Cervantes’ day, a kind of boom town and very much a city on the make, swollen with silver that the Spanish crown had plundered from the Americas. For about a hundred years or so, it was probably the wealthiest city in Europe (as well as a pretty gritty place).

When we visited, it was just charming and hot. But everywhere we looked, there were plaques memorializing events that appeared in Cervantes’ life and in “Rinconete and Cortadillo,” from Cervantes’ years in debtor’s prison (ironically, there’s a bank on the site now) to the spot on the cathedral steps where Cortadillo steals the sacristan’s handkerchief. We had our hotel room in the Casco Antiguo, right in the neighborhood where Rinconete and Cortadillo had their territory in the story. The whole experience lined up Cervantes with Leiber with Dungeons & Dragons in my soul like a wonderful convergence of nerdly planets.