From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Representations of the Middle Ages are frequently attested in various media of modern culture, from literature, drama and film to comics, reenactment and videogames. The following is meant to provide an overview of the various articles relevant for this topic on Wikipedia.
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| Assassins
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- Vladimir Bartol's novel Alamut, published in 1938, deals with Hassan-i Sabbāh and the Assassins, and is named after the fortress of Alamut. Bartol's view of the Assassins is highly negative, seeing Sabbāh as unscrupulous and manipulative, and his followers as fanatics. Bartol was influenced by the recent assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and the rise of totalitarianism in Europe.
- Friedrich Nietzsche alludes to the Assassins in the third book of On the Genealogy of Morality as "that invincible Order of Assassins."
- In the novel The Walking Drum by Louis L'Amour, Mathurin Kerbouchard has to rescue his father from the Alamut
- The Exile series of role-playing video games, first released by Telenet Japan in 1988, revolves around a time-traveling Syrian Assassin who assassinates various religious/historical figures and world leaders.
- The Assassins appear in the Dan Brown novel Angels & Demons.
- The main characters in Peter Berling's The Children of the Grail live in Alamut until its destruction.
- The Assassins and the Old Man on the Mountain appear in several novels by William S. Burroughs.
- A latter-day version of the Assassins and the Old Man of the Mountain figure into the labyrinthine plot of A.W. Hill's alternate reality novel Nowhere-Land, which also features the chimerical CIA agent known as Philby Greenstreet.
- In the video game Assassin's Creed, many elements of which are based on the novel Alamut by Vladimir Bartol, the player controls an Assassin named Altaïr. Masyaf is featured as your "home", from which you start each mission. The Old Man of the Mountain (Al Mualim) is featured as the main character Altaïr's mentor and master.
- Prayers for the Assassin by Robert Ferrigno includes a former fedayeen principal character.
- The game "Broken Sword" shows the main character following the trail of an Assassin preventing the reforging of a sword by the Templars.
- In the fantasy roleplaying game "Gothic 3", the Hashishin (completely based on Assassins) is a playable faction, located in the southern area of the World in the desert known as Varant.
- In the Robin of Sherwood episode, The Greatest Enemy, the Saracen band member, Nasir, gets a visit from two mysterious Saracens. When questioned about them later, Nasir confesses to the others that they were Assassins and that he used to be one of them.
- The Hawkwind album Quark, Strangeness and Charm contains a track called "Hassan I Shibbah" which refers to the Assassins and their leader.
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Vikings and Norse culture
