Knights Templar and Popular Culture - Notable Examples - Novels and Comics

Novels and Comics

A brief list of some works which have featured the Knights Templar:

• Ivanhoe, an 1820 novel by Sir Walter Scott, has as its villain Sir Brian de Bois-Gilbert, a "Templar Knight."
• The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, an 1855 short story by Herman Melville treats the Templars with great irony.
• Mumbo-Jumbo (1972) has a Templar Knight Hinkle Von Vampton who serves as the main villain in Ishmael Reed's postmodernist satire
• Les Rois Maudits or The Accursed Kings (1973 et seq) by Maurice Druon depicts the death of the last Grand Master of the Order, and plays with the legend of the curse he laid on the pope, Philip the Fair, and Guillaume de Nogaret.
• Foucault's Pendulum, a 1988 novel by Umberto Eco, which features the mythos of the Knights Templar as keepers and defenders of the Holy Grail.
• Swedish author Jan Guillou has written a trilogy about Arn Magnusson (1998 et seq), a fictional Swedish character from the Middle Ages who was forced to become a Knight Templar, went to Jerusalem and after returning to Sweden, was a leading military figure shortly before the time of Birger Jarl.
• Katherine Kurtz has written many books with Templar characters and themes, and edited the Crusade of Fire (2002) anthology
• The Da Vinci Code, bestselling 2003 novel by Dan Brown. This was also adapted into a film version in 2006.
• The Last Templar (2005), by Raymond Khoury is a Da Vinci Code-style thriller.
• The Pegasus Secret (2005) by Gregg Loomis alternates between a modern conspiracy thriller and a biography of a (fictional) Templar aide from the turn of the 14th century.
• The Revenge of the Shadow King (2006), by Derek Benz and J.S. Lewis, relates an alternate history of the Knights Templar, aligning them with an age-old order whose primary role is to defend the world from the powers of darkness. In this book, the Templars still exist and operate today from the shadows of an underground organization.
• The Templar Legacy (2006) by Steve Berry is a story which revolves around the possibility that the Templar Treasure is close to being discovered, and that it may fall into the wrong hands. In this book, the treasure is closely connected to the question of Christ as the Savior, and Christ's Resurrection. The book also brings into question the contents and significance of the treasure.