King in The Mountain - The Sleeping Hero in Popular Culture

The Sleeping Hero in Popular Culture

• A version of the sleeping hero legend is included in several entries in the Nintendo game franchise 'The Legend of Zelda', most explicitly in the Gamecube game The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and the most iconic of the series The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.
• American comic book icon Captain America fell into suspended animation at the end of World War II, only to be awakened in the modern era.
• American comic book super hero Captain Marvel from Fawcett Comics, after having been cancelled in 1953, was given a story where he (and most of his friends and his arch foes) was trapped in suspended animation for 20 years to explain his revival in 1973 by DC Comics.
• In the Final Crisis: Superman Beyond comic series, a mysterious statue, resembling Superman, is left behind by the original Monitor, to activate only when the DC Multiverse is endangered.
• British author Susan Cooper makes use of the return of King Arthur and the awakening of sleeping heroes as plot elements in The Dark Is Rising Sequence.
• At the end of the video game Halo 3 the protagonist, the Master Chief, is placed into suspended animation with the words "Wake me, when you need me".
• In music, a single by Kate Bush released on 24 October 2005 is named "King of the Mountain". This song connects popular beliefs about Elvis Presley's death, with references to Citizen Kane also, to the "King in the Mountain" motif.
• In The Books of Magic, Timothy Hunter sees the mystical King in the mountain and talks to a minstrel who is guarding his grave.
• In Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, heroes from ages past reside in the world of dreams until they are called forth to fight the Dark One.
• In the Transformers Marvel Comics series, the Last Autobot, a final repository of some of the power of the Transformers' god Primus, waits at the center of Cybertron.
• The plot of the book The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner revolves around a Cheshire variant of the legend.
• The main character in the 2006 Science Fiction Series The Lost Fleet by John G. Hemry (writing as Jack Campbell) is a mythical hero to his people. He is rediscovered on the eve of a large calamity and must return the remnants of his nations military from being trapped deep behind enemy lines. The author was inspired by the King Arthur Myth.
• In That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis, which was the third book in a trilogy preceded by Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, the main character in the series (a philologist named Elwin Ransom) summons Merlin.
• J. R. R. Tolkien uses the king in the mountain in various places in his legendarium: the form of the Dead Men of Dunharrow, the armies and king of Númenor who are trapped by the Valar when Númenor is destroyed, and in the Second Prophecy of Mandos which states that the dead heroes Túrin and Beren would return to help to defeat Morgoth at the end of times.
• In the table-top roleplaying game GURPS Technomancer, Joseph Stalin acted in similar role for the Soviet Union; in this alternative history setting, he didn't die in 1953, but rather was put in a magical sleep under the Moscow Kremlin. In 1996, after the fall of the USSR, he awoke and led a rebellion against the Russian Federation.
• Cthulhu is a famous literary example of the Sleeping Anti-Hero/Villain variant. In The Call of Cthulhu and several other Cthulhu Mythos stories he is said to "wait dreaming" in a sunken city until "the stars are right" when he will wake up and destroy human civilization.