Cloak of Invisibility - Cloaks of Invisibility in Fiction

Cloaks of Invisibility in Fiction

Cloaks of invisibility are relatively rare in folklore; although they do occur in some fairy tales, such as The Twelve Dancing Princesses, a more common trope is the cap of invisibility. The cap of invisibility has appeared in Greek myth: Hades was ascribed possession of a cap or helmet that made the wearer invisible. In some versions of the Perseus myth, Perseus borrows this cap from the goddess Athena and uses it to sneak up on the sleeping Medusa when he kills her. A similar helmet, the Tarnhelm, is found in Norse mythology. In the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, one of the important texts of Welsh mythology, Caswallawn (the historical Cassivellaunus) murders Caradog ap Bran and other chieftains left in charge of Britain while wearing a cloak of invisibility.

Edgar Rice Burroughs uses the idea of an invisibility cloak in his 1931 novel A Fighting Man of Mars. The movie, Erik the Viking humorously depicts the title character using a cloak of invisibility, which he does not realize apparently works only on elderly men. In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo's elven cloak camouflaged him so that the enemy could see "nothing more than a boulder where the Hobbits were"; this magical item was used in the Dungeons & Dragons game. In the Walt Disney movie Now You See Him, Now You Don't Dexter Riley explains to principal Higgins of Medfield College the principles of invisibility cloaking through a liquid that can bend light.

Camouflaging cloaks form a central plot element in Samuel R. Delany's 1975 novel Dhalgren and the Harry Potter series of novels by J.K. Rowling. Harry uses the cloak to sneak into forbidden areas of the school. In "A Very Potter Musical" it is stated that invisibility cloaks can be used to kick wiener dogs, pretend to be a ghost and scare people, avoid facing your own reflection in the mirror, and fake your own death. More recently, cloaking devices have been used in videogames, for example Battlefield Heroes, Team Fortress 2 and the Halo series, where they aid stealth-based characters. Also, Crossfire has a game mode (appropriately called Ghost Mode) with the Black List Terrorists cloaked, and using stealth to detonate specific targets. The cloaking devices appearing in Star Wars, Star Trek and Stargate, present a similar notion in a science fiction form, but are generally used to hide larger scale objects, such as space ships. In science fiction cloaking, there is generally presented an assumed quasi-scientific, in-universe basis for the concept of achieving invisibility. Conversely, invisibility and cloaking is commonly presented in the science fantasy genre as a magical phenomenon, rather than in forms that rely on pure science.