The Sword of Shannara

• 1. The Four Lands Aftermath

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  Two thousand years before the story begins, a nuclear holocaust known as the Great Wars ended mankind's hegemony on Earth. These wars rearranged the planet's geography and wiped out 90% of the human population. Only traces of technological artifacts have been found; most advanced technology has been lost, but magic has been rediscovered. During this time, Mankind mutated into several distinct races: humans, dwarves, gnomes and trolls, all named after creatures from age-old myths. Also, elves begin to emerge after having been in seclusion and hiding for centuries. Man retreats southward while the other races settle elsewhere: the dwarves in the east, the gnomes in the hills of the northeast, the trolls in the north and the elves in the west. Due to this distribution, the territories, which roughly correspond to the Northwestern United States, are called the Four Lands.

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• 2. Shea Ohmsford Quest

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  Five centuries later, Allanon, the last remaining Druid, arrives at the Ohmsford family inn in the Southland town of Shady Vale. He warns Shea, a half-elf adopted by the Ohmsfords, that the Warlock King has returned to the Skull Kingdom in the Northland and is coming for Shea. As the last descendant of Jerle Shannara, Shea is the only one who can wield the Sword of Shannara against the Warlock Lord. Allanon departs, leaving Shea three Blue Elfstones for protection. A few weeks later, the Callahorn prince Balinor Buckhannah arrives and tells Shea that the Warlock Lord's servants are pursuing him. Shea and his adopted brother Flick flee with a Skull Bearer on their trail. They take refuge in the nearby city of Leah where they find Shea's friend Menion, the son of the city's lord. Menion decides to accompany the two, and they travel to Culhaven to meet with Allanon and Balinor.

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• 3. Seven Year Struggle

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  Brooks began writing The Sword of Shannara in 1967 when he was twenty-three years old. He started writing the novel to challenge himself and as a way of staying sane while he attended law school at Washington and Lee University. Brooks had been a writer since high school, but he had never found his genre: I tried my hand at science fiction, westerns, war stories, you name it. All those efforts ... weren't very good. When he was starting college, he was given a copy of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to read for the first time. From then on, Brooks knew that he had found a genre he could write in. Writing Sword took seven years, as Brooks worked on it only sporadically while also completing his law school courses and rewrote it many times.

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• 4. Del Rey Launch Success

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  Ballantine Books accepted The Sword of Shannara in November 1974. Brooks' editor was Lester del Rey, who used the book to launch Ballantine's new Del Rey Books imprint/subsidiary. Del Rey chose it because he felt that it was the first long epic fantasy adventure which had any chance of meeting the demands of Tolkien readers for similar pleasures. In 1977, The Sword of Shannara was simultaneously released as a trade paperback by Ballantine Books and hardback by Random House. The Brothers Hildebrandt, who had previously done illustration work for the work of Tolkien, were asked to make the cover. Greg Hildebrandt remembers the Del Reys as being obsessed with the project. It was their baby. The novel was a commercial success, becoming the first fantasy fiction novel to appear on The New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

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• 5. Derivative Criticism Debate

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  In 1978, American fantasy editor Lin Carter denounced The Sword of Shannara as the single most cold-blooded, complete rip-off of another book that I have ever read. He further wrote that Terry Brooks wasn't trying to imitate Tolkien's prose, just steal his story line and complete cast of characters, and he did it with such clumsiness and so heavy-handedly, that he virtually rubbed your nose in it. Roger C. Schlobin was kinder in his assessment, though he still thought that The Sword of Shannara was a disappointment because of its similarities to The Lord of the Rings. Brian Attebery accused The Sword of Shannara of being undigested Tolkien which was especially blatant in its point-for-point correspondence with The Lord of the Rings. In an educational article on writing, author Orson Scott Card cited The Sword of Shannara as a cautionary example of overly derivative writing, finding the work artistically displeasing for this reason.

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• 6. Commercial Genre Revolution

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  The Sword of Shannara sold about 125,000 copies in its first year in print, and this success provided a major boost to the fantasy genre. Louise J. Winters writes that until Shannara, no fantasy writer except J. R. R. Tolkien had made such an impression on the general public. Critic David Pringle said that Brooks demonstrated in 1977 that the commercial success of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings had not been a fluke, and that fantasy really did have the potential to become a mass-market genre. Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever and The Sword of Shannara ushered in the era of the big commercial fantasy and helped make epic fantasy the leading fantasy subgenre. The Sword of Shannara and its sequels helped inspire later versions of Dungeons & Dragons.

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