The Sword of Shannara

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sword of Shannara, a 1977 epic fantasy novel by American writer Terry Brooks, took seven years to write. It was published to a readership hungry for more of Tolkien's world, and it split critics almost at once. Some called it a clumsy copy of The Lord of the Rings. Others praised how well it was built, whatever its debts.

  Several questions run through the story that follows. What kind of world rises from the ruins of a nuclear war, with magic standing in for lost science? How did a manuscript turned down by one publisher help start a new imprint at another? Why did readers and critics react so differently to the same pages? And what exactly does the Sword of Shannara do to the dark lord it was forged to stop?

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• 2. A Broken World

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  Two thousand years before the story begins, a nuclear holocaust known as the Great Wars ends humanity's rule over the Earth. The catastrophe rearranges the planet's geography and kills 90% of the human population. Only traces of technology survive, and most advanced knowledge is lost, but magic returns.

  Mankind then splits into distinct races: humans, dwarves, gnomes and trolls, each named for creatures of ancient myth. The elves, who had spent centuries in hiding, begin to emerge as well. Men retreat south, dwarves settle in the east, gnomes in the northeast hills, trolls in the north and elves in the west. These territories roughly match the Northwestern United States, and together they are called the Four Lands.

  A thousand years later, an elf named Galaphile summons everyone who still holds knowledge of the old world to the citadel of Paranor. They name themselves the First Druid Council and try to bring peace and order to every race. One Druid, Brona, soon departs with his followers and a magical tome called the Ildatch, which controls their minds.

  Hundreds of years on, Brona persuades all Men to attack the other races, and the First War of the Races begins. He comes close to victory before the council defeats him and he disappears. Ashamed that one of their own caused the betrayal, the Druids divide the Four Lands among the races and withdraw to Paranor.

  Several centuries after that war, Brona returns as the Warlock Lord, now served by creatures called Skull Bearers. The Second War of the Races, told in the prequel First King of Shannara, opens with the destruction of the Druid Order. A lone Druid named Bremen forges a magical talisman and gives it to the Elven King, Jerle Shannara. Because it takes the form of a blade, it is named the Sword of Shannara.

  The Sword banishes the Warlock Lord but does not kill him, and the combined armies of the Elves and Dwarves defeat his host. Peace carries a heavy price. Tension between the races flares again, and the Druids have vanished.

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• 3. Two Plots, One War

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  At the Ohmsford family inn in the Southland town of Shady Vale, a visitor arrives five centuries after that war. He is Allanon, the last remaining Druid, and he has come for Shea, a half-elf adopted by the Ohmsfords. Allanon warns that the Warlock Lord has returned to the Skull Kingdom in the Northland and is coming for him. Shea is the last descendant of Jerle Shannara, so he alone can wield the Sword against the enemy. Allanon leaves him three Blue Elfstones for protection.

  A few weeks later, Prince Balinor Buckhannah of Callahorn arrives with word that the Warlock Lord's servants are in pursuit. Shea and his adopted brother Flick flee with a Skull Bearer on their trail. In the city of Leah they find Shea's friend Menion, son of the city's lord, who joins them on the road to Culhaven.

  At Culhaven, a council gathers that includes the elven brothers Durin and Dayel Elessedil and the dwarf Hendel. They resolve to recover the Sword from Paranor. On the trek, earthquakes crumble the path and the panicked Shea plummets over a waterfall. His companions reach Paranor without him, fight minions of the Warlock Lord, and discover the Sword has already been taken. Hearing that the enemy has invaded the Southland, they split up. Some go to raise armies, and others search for Shea.

  Gnomes capture Shea, but a one-handed thief named Panamon Creel and his mute troll companion, Keltset Mallicos, rescue him. The three head north toward the Skull Kingdom, chasing the insane gnome deserter Orl Fane, who carries the Sword. Elsewhere, a disguised Flick slips into an enemy camp and frees the captive Elven King, Eventine Elessedil. In Kern, Menion saves a woman named Shirl Ravenlock and falls in love with her. They organize an evacuation before the Northland army arrives.

  The second plot centers on Tyrsis, the capital of Callahorn. Balinor returns to call out the Border Legion and finds it has been disbanded. His brother Palance Buckhannah, who now rules, imprisons him. Palance's advisor Stenmin has driven him mad with poisoned food and turned him into a puppet. With Menion's help, Balinor escapes and confronts both men. Cornered, Stenmin kills Palance as a distraction and flees.

  The reformed Border Legion, now under Balinor's command, marches out and meets the Northland army at the Mermiddon River. It kills many Northlanders before being forced back, then retreats to Tyrsis to prepare its defense.

  During the siege, Hendel and Menion stumble on Stenmin and his supporters in an underground passage. Hendel is killed, and Menion kills Stenmin and seals the passage. After three days, the Border Legion is driven from the Outer Wall when traitors destroy the locks and jam the main gate open. At the Bridge of Sendic, the defenders make a last stand, and then the Northlanders abruptly break and run. The reason lies far to the north, inside Skull Mountain.

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• 4. The Truth Sword

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  Deep in the Warlock Lord's fortress in Skull Mountain, Shea finally seizes the Sword and learns its true power. Anyone it touches is confronted with the truth about their own life.

  The Warlock Lord materializes and tries to destroy Shea. Physical weapons cannot harm him, but the Sword's power reaches him anyway and forces him to face the truth about himself. He had deluded himself into believing he was immortal, which is impossible. Faced with that paradox, he is destroyed.

  Without its master, the Skull Kingdom begins to crumble, and Keltset sacrifices himself to save his companions. In the south, the Northland army retreats. Allanon saves Shea's life and reveals himself as the centuries-old son of Bremen.

  Shea reunites with his companions in Tyrsis as peace returns to the Four Lands. Balinor takes up the rule of Callahorn, and Dayel and Durin go back to the Westland. Menion returns to Leah with Shirl, while Shea and Flick make their way home to Shady Vale.

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• 5. Making the Book

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  In 1967, at the age of twenty-three, Terry Brooks began the novel as a way to stay "sane" while attending law school at Washington and Lee University. He had written since high school but never found his genre. In his words: "I tried my hand at science fiction, westerns, war stories, you name it. All those efforts... weren't very good." At the start of college he was handed The Lord of the Rings for the first time, and he knew he had found a genre he could write in. He worked on the book only sporadically between courses and rewrote it many times.

  Brooks wanted to bring Tolkien's magic and fairy creatures into the worlds of Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas. Other favorites included Dumas' The Three Musketeers, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company and Scott's Ivanhoe. He chose not to use historical settings like theirs. He lacked Tolkien's academic background, so he dropped the poetry, the songs, the digressions on character types and the appendices of language and backstory. In their place, he wanted "the sort of straightforward adventure story that barreled ahead, picking up speed as it went".

  He also made choices about magic and morality. Magic, he decided, "couldn't be dependable or simply good or bad". He blurred the line between good and evil "because life simply doesn't work that way." To make readers identify with Shea, he cast him as "a person simply trying to muddle through".

  Brooks first sent the manuscript to DAW Books. Its editor, Donald A. Wollheim, rejected it and suggested he try Judy-Lynn del Rey at Ballantine Books. Ballantine accepted the book in November 1974. Brooks' editor there was Lester del Rey, who used it to launch Ballantine's new Del Rey Books imprint. He chose it because he felt 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 novel appeared simultaneously as a Ballantine trade paperback and a Random House hardback. The Brothers Hildebrandt, who had already illustrated work connected to Tolkien, were asked to paint the cover. Greg Hildebrandt remembers the Del Reys as "obsessed with the project. It was their baby." The book became the first fantasy novel to appear on The New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

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• 6. Ordinary Heroes

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  "Ordinary men placed in extraordinary circumstances" is the idea that runs through the whole book. Brooks credits Tolkien with bringing it into fantasy. In his words, "my protagonists are cut from the same bolt of cloth as Bilbo and Frodo Baggins." He admired how Tolkien made his central figure neither a god nor a hero, but a simple man trying to do right.

  For Shea, the quest includes finding a belief in himself. Every later Brooks protagonist must make that same search. Brooks has said that, for all its swords and sieges, the novel is more about behavior and personal sacrifice.

  The ruined Earth behind the story drew a pointed question: did Brooks think his "prediction" might come true? He replied, "I don't see myself as a negative person, so I don't think I've ever thought we would destroy ourselves." Still, it worries him that people "flirt with the idea periodically." He used the setting "more in a cautionary vein than as a prophecy". Destroying civilization also let him ask what rebuilding it with magic would mean. As he put it, "A civilization once destroyed by misuse of power is a bit wary the second time out about what new power can do."

  Brooks treats landscape as a character. "Environment is a character in my story and almost always plays a major role in affecting the story's outcome," he says. In an imaginary world, he argues, the reader must be made to feel at home, and bringing the setting alive is how that happens.

  Some of the cast carry borrowed echoes. Allanon has been described as a parallel to Merlin from Arthurian legend. Panamon Creel, whose left hand is now an iron pike, took his inspiration directly from Rupert of Hentzau in Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda. The Skull Bearers are described as "winged black destroyers" who gave up their humanity to serve the Warlock Lord.

  Women are scarce on these pages. Shirl Ravenlock, a descendant of royal blood and the daughter of an elder on the governing council of Kern, is one of only two to appear directly. The other is the Siren. Allanon's dead father, the Shade of Bremen, lives on in a lake called the Hadeshorn, just outside the Hall of Kings.

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• 7. The Tolkien Question

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  In 1978, American fantasy editor Lin Carter called the book "the single most cold-blooded, complete rip-off of another book that I have ever read". He wrote that Brooks was not imitating Tolkien's prose but taking his story line and entire cast, and doing so heavy-handedly.

  Roger C. Schlobin was kinder, though he still found the novel a disappointment because of its resemblance to The Lord of the Rings. Brian Attebery called it "undigested Tolkien", most blatant in its point-for-point correspondence. Author Orson Scott Card used it in an article on writing as a cautionary example of overly derivative work, which he found "artistically displeasing".

  Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey noted the "dogged way in which it follows Tolkien point for point". He matched Sauron with Brona, Gandalf with Allanon, and the hobbits with Shea and Flick. Aragorn became Balinor, Boromir became Menion, and Gimli became Hendel. Durin and Dayel stand for Legolas, Orl Fane for Gollum, and the Skull Bearers for the Nazgûl. Even Tom Bombadil has a counterpart in the King of the Silver River.

  The plots line up too, in Shippey's reading. The formation of the Fellowship, the journeys to Rivendell (Culhaven) and Lothlórien (Storlock), and Gandalf's fall in Moria (Paranor) all have analogues. So does his later reappearance. The arrival of the Rohirrim at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is echoed in the Battle of Tyrsis.

  Shippey explained the book's success by what came before it. In his view, readers had acquired such a taste for heroic fantasy that they would "take any substitute, no matter how diluted."

  Defenders spoke up as well. In a 2001 essay in Interzone, Gene Wolfe wrote that he wished "there were more imitators", since all imitations of so great an original must be inferior. Dune author Frank Herbert argued that "it doesn't matter where you get the idea; what matters is that you tell a rousing story."

  Early reviews were mixed. Choice called the novel "exceptionally well-written, very readable" and predicted most teenagers would accept it. Marshall F. Tymn also admired the prose and pointed to differences, including the post-holocaust setting and an "unexpected ending springing from the nature of the sword." Cathi Dunn MacRae praised its momentum, kept up through cliffhangers and unexpected twists of fortune. The Pittsburgh Press felt it carried the Tolkien spirit yet could stand apart.

  John Batchelor was harsher. He ranked it the weakest of the 1977 surge in fantasy, below Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, Seamus Cullen's Astra and Flondrix, and The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien.

  Brooks himself accepts the debt but not the whole accusation. He says Tolkien was a major influence, though not the only one. Lester del Rey mattered, as did the many books he had read and the mythology and ancient civilizations he studied in school. He adds that he has moved far from Tolkien, and that few readers now tell him he writes like him. "They don't say that any more."

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• 8. A Genre Takes Off

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  The Sword of Shannara sold about 125,000 copies in its first year in print, and that success gave fantasy a major commercial boost. Louise J. Winters wrote that "until Shannara, no fantasy writer except J. R. R. Tolkien had made such an impression on the general public."

  Critic David Pringle argued that Brooks showed in 1977 that the commercial success of The Lord of the Rings "had not been a fluke". Fantasy, he said, could become a mass-market genre. Together with Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books, Brooks' novel ushered in "the era of the big commercial fantasy" and helped make epic fantasy the leading subgenre. The novel and its sequels also helped inspire later versions of Dungeons & Dragons.

  The screen came much later. Mike Newell, director of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was once set to adapt the Shannara books, but he left the project. They were eventually adapted for television by Farah Films, with Brooks, Dan Farah and Stewart Till as executive producers. The series started with Elfstones and left Sword for a later date. The Shannara Chronicles premiered on the American network MTV on the 5th of January 2016.

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