A Brief History of Sword and Sorcery

As best as I understand it, anyway.

This is the second post of many concerning Sword and Sorcery. If you want to read the first entry. find it HERE.

Do you see that tiny room in the picture above. That is the bedroom/writing room of Robert E Howard. That is where Sword and Sorcery fiction was born. Robert E Howard is widely credited as the father of Heroic Fantasy/ also called Sword and Sorcery. There were many influences, and some would tell me to start earlier, but I would rather start here because this is the clearest and most obvious starting point.

I am not a scholar or historian. I do read, and I do like to research. Many may read this and challenge my assertions. That is fine, I am a forever student and I am more than willing to be corrected. This is also not a comprehensive history of Robert E Howard, nor is it intended to be. With that being said, lets begin.

Howard was a pulp writer, one of the best who ever lived. One of his great loves was good adventure fiction. Stories about forgotten ruins, buried treasure, warring tribes and exploring unknown lands were basically all Howard ever wanted to write. He longed to get his stories into Adventure Magazine, something he never achieved in his life.

This eye for adventure was readily apparent in Howards works. He was fast, furious, and devoted. He had an imagination that seemed to jump off the page and make war in your living room. Stephen King said of Howard “In his best work, Howard's writing seems so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks.”

That is high praise indeed, and accurate. It’s therefore curious that Howard struggled to find a market for his adventure fiction. It is even more curious that Howard really did not think of himself as a fantasy writer. Instead, being a lover of all things history, Howard wanted to write historical adventures just like one of his favorite writers, Harold Lamb.

This is where the rubber met the road for Howard. Innovation is often born from necessity, and Howard found a way forward by taking his average adventure fiction tale and mixing in elements of horror. This brought his character Solomon Kane to life; a wandering puritan who felt a high calling to rid the world of evil. This evil manifested itself as black magic, monsters, sorcery and witchcraft, and just like that, two pieces of the puzzle came together.

Solomon Kane proved successful, but Howard grew bored (as he often did). That’s when he took his love of history a step further. I like to think he asked himself a few questions.

“What is an era of history I am fascinated with, but seems lost to time?”

The answer was found in the lost city of Atlantis.

“What if I could tell that story? What happened to Atlantis and how did it factor into human history? What sorts of tribes, kingdoms, and people groups would have emerged? What would they have believed?”

The answer was found by creating a character named Kull, an exile from Atlantis and a king of a kingdom called Valusia. Kull proved to be a somber character and his first story, The Shadow Kingdom, became known as the first official Sword and Sorcery story. Howard would write several more Kull stories which also proved very successful, but this time he took his love of adventure, added the horror elements, and then placed it in a fictionalized history. Just like that, Howard was writing fantasy, and very sellable fantasy at that.

Howard’s stories featured philosophical ideas, shadowy and ancient magic, mysteries, and fast paced adventure. This set the template, but there was one more thing that needed to happen before Sword and Sorcery took the world by storm.

Kull was a fine character, but something was missing. I can’t put my finger on it, and I doubt that Howard could either, but Kull feels like a prototype.

Then, after visiting a few border towns in Texas, Howard developed his masterpiece, and the most pure expression of this new type of fantasy; Conan the Barbarian. Listen to Howards own words.

I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen or rather, off my typewriter almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. - — Letter from Robert E Howard to Clark Ashton Smith, December 14th, 1933

Notice that Howard says that he didn’t feel like he was creating, but only relating events. In Howards mind, as in every creatives mind, his character was alive. He did not feel that he had to work hard to tell these stories, and that’s true inspiration.

Conan was a massive hit, and to this very day Conan remains popular. This is without question the gold standard of Sword and Sorcery, and his popularity was so apparent that even the author of The Lord of the Rings took notice. J.R.R. Tolkien was even quoted as saying he “Quite liked Conan”. Notable, since Tolkein reportedly hated Dune and Narnia.

Conan’s stories really showcase Howard’s love of adventure. Although his stories were told out of order, in his life Conan was a thief, a mercenary, a soldier, a pirate and buccaneer, and eventually a king. His stories featured indescribable horrors, unsightly monsters, and black magic. His villains were rather typical of the pulps; warlords, cult leaders, political opportunists, wealthy ne'er-do-wells and lecherous kidnappers. Typical of the pulps, but with a gritty sword and sorcery twist!

The wizards usually used magic to horrific effect and terrorized entire nations. The cult leaders sought tribute for their sinister gods. The generals were willing to commit genocide. The treasure hunting pirates moonlighted as slave traders. It was pulp for the ancient world.

Howard also set the tone for Sword and Sorcery by exploring the decay of civilization, and contrasted this against the harsh views of barbarism and asked the question; who here is the real savage? The civilized man who lets a rapist walk free from court after a fair trial, or the barbarian that emasculates the rapist when he is caught in the act? Good question, and hard to answer.

After Howard’s tragic death came many who wanted to write fantasy in his style. They came in the decades after Howards death and each contributed something of value to the new genre.

Fritz Leiber

Leiber created Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Thieving swordsmen who spend their time in the city of Lankhmar, pestering the thieves guild or stealing treasures from the colorful occupants. They occasionally leave the city to go abroad and seek adventure, but cannot resist returning to Lankhmar once more to steal treasure and enjoy a drink at the Silver Eel Tavern. As a side note, Leiber is the first person to use the term Sword and Sorcery in order to differentiate this kind of fantasy from The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings.

C.L. Moore

A female Sword and Sorcery writer, which is unique for the genre. Moore created Jirel of Jory, a female Sword and Sorcery hero who proved her competence in leadership, swordsmanship, and rulership. Yeah, and that happened in the 1930s! Jirel’s first story features her hunting down an artifact in order to get revenge on a supernatural figure known as “The Black God”.

Jack Vance

Vance’s Dying Earth series feature a far flung future that is so decayed that we seemed to go backwards in time. What once were elaborate modern cities has now become ancient ruins, and in the midst of it is a Sword and Sorcery tale like you have never heard.

Michael Moorcock

Moorcock wrote the Elric saga, which features Elric of Melnibone, an albino emperor who keeps himself alive with various potions. Elric carries a sword known as Stormbringer, which has a mind of its own and devours the life force of Elric’s enemies. Elric himself is one of many expressions of Moorcock’s eternal champion, who travels the multiverse and appears as different characters in order to restore balance to chaos.

Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp

I put these two together, because even though they contributed independently to the genre, they seem to be most famous for a scandalous collection of Conan reprints and pastiches, which seem to be the beginning of the end (or the first death before the second birth) of Sword and Sorcery. As sour as their reputations may be to the fanbase, they still contributed a lot and deserve honor for popularizing Conan in the 1970’s, even if they did tamper with Howard’s work.

Charles R Saunders

Saunders, an African American man, wrote a black Sword and Sorcery hero known as Imaro. Imaro lived in a fantasy version of Africa and, to my knowledge, went on numerous adventures that captivate the imagination. I have not read Imaro, however, as Saunders work is very difficult to find. The fact that an African American contributed to the genre is incredible, given that much of Sword and Sorcery fiction is tainted with hateful attitudes towards minorities.

And that’s unfortunately true. Howard was a Texan in the 1930s. As such, it should be expected that his work holds sentiments that seem out of touch by today’s standards. It has been argued that Howard was not really racist, only that he wrote characters that occupied an ancient world where skin color was one way that people groups divided up and went to war with one another. Of course, it is also possible that Howard did wrestle with those attitudes. He is long since dead, and we will never know.

And if that’s all you can see when you read these stories, then you are missing the point. I can’t ignore it, neither should you, but we can embrace the essence of the genre.

Adventure! The heart of every good Sword and Sorcery story is adventure. There is magic, monsters, philosophy, character, setting, and all the wonderful tools writers employ to tell their stories, but without a sense of adventure you do not have Sword and Sorcery.

So that’s a brief, truncated, insufficient explanation of where the genre came from. Still, with Sword and Sorcery being a new term for many people, some may wonder how something so prominent and influential went away? Why are so many just now hearing about this? What happened to Sword and Sorcery?

My next post will attempt to answer that. It will only be an attempt, because I am not a scholar or a historian, but I am a forever student who loves to learn and I will happily share with you what I have learned. Keep your eyes peeled for my next post.