Sword and sorcery

• 1. Introduction

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  Sword and sorcery began with a single line from Isaac Asimov, who once declared in his own Science Fiction Magazine that "The contemporary Sword-and-Sorcery tale owes its existence to the imagination of Robert Howard and his invention of the Conan stories." That was a bold claim about a genre many critics treated as pulp junk. But Asimov was onto something real. This is the story of a literary tradition that stretches from the Norse sagas to twentieth-century paperback bestsellers. It is a story about what happens when a warrior stands alone against forces older and darker than civilization. And it raises a question that still divides readers today: is sword and sorcery escapist trash, or something far more serious hiding behind the axe and the sorcerer's spell?

• 2. Naming the Thing

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  Fritz Leiber gave the genre its name, but the moment almost did not happen. In the 6th of April 1961 issue of the fantasy fanzine Ancalagon, Leiber responded to a letter from British author Michael Moorcock, who had written to the fanzine Amra demanding a name for the kind of fantasy-adventure story Robert E. Howard had pioneered. Moorcock had initially proposed the term "epic fantasy". Leiber pushed back, suggesting "sword-and-sorcery as a good popular catchphrase for the field". He elaborated in the July 1961 issue of Amra, writing that the name "accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story." The website Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction has since found an even earlier use of the phrase, in a 1953 headline reviewing a novel by L. Sprague de Camp. De Camp himself coined the rival term "heroic fantasy" to avoid what he saw as the garish overtones of Leiber's phrase. That alternative name stuck around, though it came to describe a broader range of fantasy that included the very high fantasy sword and sorcery was supposed to differ from.

• 3. What Sets It Apart

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  Fantasy editor Lin Carter laid out the genre's boundaries in his introduction to the 1973 anthology Flashing Swords! 1, defining a sword and sorcery story as "an action tale, derived from the traditions of the pulp magazine adventure story, set in a land, age or world of the author's invention - a milieu in which magic actually works and the gods are real." The key distinction from high fantasy is the scale of the conflict. Where high fantasy threatens the world, sword and sorcery threatens a person. The protagonist is usually an antihero, often a barbarian, who fights supernatural evil not to save civilization but to survive it. Magic in this genre comes at a substantial cost - what scholars call a hard magic system - and is typically wielded by villains rather than heroes. A hero's tools are cunning and physical strength. Fantasy historian Brian Murphy captures the mercenary spirit of this: sword and sorcery heroes pursue "personal and/or mercenary aims," not the salvation of kingdoms. Writers like Howard, Moorcock, and Samuel R. Delany used that personal scale to address serious themes: anti-fascism, anti-slavery, liberty, sex trafficking, and criticism of organized religion.

• 4. Deep Roots

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  Lin Carter, writing in his introduction to L. Sprague de Camp's reference Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, traced the heritage of the genre back to the labors of Hercules, Homer's Odyssey, the Norse sagas, and Arthurian legend. Closer in time, the swashbuckling tales of Alexandre Dumas, pere - The Three Musketeers was published in 1844 - and Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche in 1921 fed directly into the pulp writers Howard admired. Sir H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines from 1885 and She: A History of Adventure from 1887 brought fantastic elements into adventure fiction. Haggard even created a character named Umslopogaas, an axe-wielding Zulu warrior who encountered supernatural phenomena, a figure some writers see as a precursor to the sword and sorcery hero. Haggard's 1891 historical novel Eric Brighteyes, based on the Icelandic Sagas, prompted writer David Pringle to call it a near-modern sword and sorcery novel. From early fantasy fiction, Lord Dunsany's short stories - including "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" in 1910 - gave C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, and Karl Edward Wagner their imaginative templates. The weird fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, and H. P. Lovecraft supplied the haunted edifices and sinister occultists that became genre staples. Rachel Bingham has noted that Fritz Leiber's city of Lankhmar bears a striking resemblance to the sixteenth-century Seville depicted in Miguel de Cervantes' tale "Rinconete y Cortadillo."

• 5. Robert Howard and the Pulps

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  The 1929 Weird Tales story "The Shadow Kingdom" by Robert E. Howard is widely regarded as the first true sword and sorcery tale, pitting Kull of Atlantis against supernatural evil in an imaginary world. Howard published only three Kull stories in Weird Tales. He then revised an unsold Kull story, "By This Axe I Rule!", into "The Phoenix on the Sword", and introduced a new character: Conan the Barbarian. When "The Phoenix on the Sword" appeared in 1932, it found an eager readership, and Howard went on to publish 17 Conan stories in the magazine. Howard's success drew others into the genre. Clark Ashton Smith wrote his tales of the Hyperborean cycle and Zothique for Weird Tales in the 1930s. C. L. Moore, inspired by Howard, Smith, and Lovecraft, created the Jirel of Joiry stories for the same magazine, introducing the genre's first sword and sorcery heroine. Moore's future husband Henry Kuttner created Elak of Atlantis for Weird Tales in 1938. After a change of ownership in 1940, Weird Tales stopped publishing sword and sorcery. Fritz Leiber and Norvell W. Page kept writing for the pulp magazine Unknown Worlds. Leiber's stories followed a duo called Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in the world of Nehwon - a name that is "No-When" spelled backwards. Page's tales centered on Prester John, a Howard-inspired gladiator adventurer whose exploits were set in Central Asia in the first century CE.

• 6. The Paperback Boom

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  American paperback publisher Lancer Books changed everything in the 1960s when it began reissuing Robert E. Howard's Conan stories with cover illustrations by Frank Frazetta. The editions became surprise bestsellers, selling millions of copies to a largely young readership. Other publishers moved quickly to release their own barbarian heroes. Lin Carter's Thongor of Lemuria, Gardner F. Fox's Kothar the Barbarian, and John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian were the most popular of the imitators. Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone stories stood apart, designed as a deliberate counterpoint to the barbarian archetype. Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories also got a new following, leading Leiber to write new installments with the characters through the 1970s and 1980s. The initial barbarian-focused boom crashed in the early 1970s, before a mid-decade resurgence brought in writers including Andre Norton, David Drake, Tanith Lee, Charles R. Saunders, Michael Shea, and Karl Edward Wagner. From 1973 to 1981, Lin Carter edited five anthologies of short work by members of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, collectively known as Flashing Swords!, a series that helped establish Carter as one of the genre's most important popularizers. The 1982 feature film Conan the Barbarian then launched a wave of fantasy cinema that included The Beastmaster, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Hercules in 1983, Conan the Destroyer in 1984, and Red Sonja in 1985, the latter also starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 7. Women in the Genre

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  Robert E. Howard wrote to his friends defending the achievements and capabilities of women, and his fiction bore that out. Among his strong female characters were Dark Agnes de Chastillon, first appearing in "Sword Woman" around 1932-34; the early modern pirate Helen Tavrel in "The Isle of Pirates' Doom" from 1928; Belit in "Queen of the Black Coast" from 1934; and Valeria of the Red Brotherhood in "Red Nails" from 1936. Howard also created Red Sonya of Rogatino, who was introduced as a co-star in a non-fantasy historical story titled "The Shadow of the Vulture". Red Sonya later inspired the fantasy heroine Red Sonja, who appeared in the Conan the Barbarian comic book series written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith. Red Sonja eventually became the subject of novels by David C. Smith and Richard L. Tierney, as well as a 1985 film adaptation directed by Richard Fleischer. Catherine Moore was another foundational author of the genre's earliest years, alongside Leigh Brackett, Nathalie Henneberg, and Andre Norton. Tanith Lee's 1975 novel The Birthgrave examined women's roles within standard sword and sorcery narratives. C. J. Cherryh's Morgaine cycle of novels, which began in 1976, followed a female lead through traditional heroic fantasy terrain. Jessica Amanda Salmonson edited the World Fantasy Award-winning Amazons anthology in 1979 and Amazons II in 1982, drawing on real and folkloric female warriors from outside Europe. Marion Zimmer Bradley launched her Sword and Sorceress anthology series in 1984, featuring skillful swordswomen and powerful sorceresses working from a variety of motives.

• 8. A Genre Renewed

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  After the literary and cinema boom of the early to mid-1980s, sword and sorcery again receded, with epic fantasy claiming the mainstream fantasy audience. A second resurgence came at the end of the twentieth century, sometimes called the "new" or "literary" sword and sorcery. This wave drew from epic fantasy and other genres to widen the genre's scope. Stories began featuring world-spanning conflicts, but told from the viewpoint of characters shaped by the older tradition, with the sense of personal adventure intact. Writers associated with this shift include Steven Erikson, Joe Abercrombie, and Scott Lynch. Magazines such as Black Gate and the ezines Flashing Swords and Beneath Ceaseless Skies publish short fiction in this style. The genre also spread geographically. According to literary critic Higashi Masao, Japanese works Guin Saga and Sorcerous Stabber Orphen were initially conceived by their authors as belonging to the European sword and sorcery subgenre, though both works developed major elements that distinguished them from typical genre novels. In the 1990s, sword and sorcery boomed in popularity in Great Britain and other parts of the world, demonstrating that the tradition Fritz Leiber named in a 1961 fanzine remains very much in motion.