What Happened to Sword and Sorcery?

Why did fantasy reject adventure in favor of quests?

Check out my previous post, a brief history of Sword and Sorcery, HERE.

Sword and Sorcery, or Heroic Fantasy, or whatever you choose to call it, was once wildly popular. I fell that this is self evident, and my proof for this is the fact that Conan the Barbarian is still part of the cultural consciousness a century after his creation. So if this brand of fantasy was so popular, why don’t more people know about it?

That’s the question I will attempt to answer here. Now understand, there have been entire books written on the subject and I don’t plan to offer you a scholarly case. I only want to point to a handful of cultural moments that I believe led to the shift away from Sword and Sorcery.

Let’s start in the 70’s, when Sword and Sorcery was experiencing a boom in popularity. The pulps had long since disappeared and the novel had become king of the literary world. As a result, the writings of Robert E Howard and his contemporaries were hard to find. That is until Lin Carter and L. Sprague De Camp compiled, edited, rewrote and added to Howard’s Conan stories and published fix up novels. Even though these stories were subpar compared to the originals, they brought Conan to a new generation and revitalized the genre.

Everything seemed to be going well for our favorite form of fantasy. Conan was turned into a comic book character, and other characters like Elric, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were enjoying their own comebacks as well. New characters emerged as well, most notably Kane by Karl Edward Wagner.

But trouble was brewing, and below I will point to four things that I believe paved the way to Sword and Sorceries decline. I am sure there are so many other factors, but let’s just discuss these four.

The Lord of the Rings & Dungeons and Dragons

I am not here to suggest that there is anything wrong with the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, or with DnD. I love both of those things and my life is better for both of them. Instead, I group them together because they have proven to have a symbiotic relationship. Let me explain.

Sword and Sorcery is a very American expression of fantasy fiction. By contrast, The Lord of the Rings is very British. Those contrasting sensibilities were attractive in the 60’s and 70’s, when groups like The Beatles also boomed in popularity. The British Invasion, as it has come to be known, influenced book sales as well. Thank God it did, or else we might not be enjoying Middle Earth the way we do.

The Lord of the Rings offered a different flavor than Sword and Sorcery did. Its style was slower, more detailed, more… for lack of a better term, immersive. When you finished The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, you could then dig into the lore and even learn the languages! The fast pace of the pulps were the perfect escape from the depression and world war two, but during the Cuban missile crisis, it was this more epic form of fantasy that caught on.

And that leads me to DnD. Go back and study the earliest days of DnD and you will find that Sword and Sorcery dominated the game. All the recommended reading lists had Conan, Elric, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and other Sword and Sorcery heroes. But right there in the middle of all those gritty heroes was Frodo Baggins and Aragorn. The more elegant and poetic Tolkien mixed with the gritty and energetic Howard and just like that, a more homogenized version of fantasy was formed.

DnD remains incredibly popular, but this mixing of elements has given way to a new breed of fantasy. One that pursues quests instead of adventure. One with more and more outlandish and cartoony races and creatures (not that anything is wrong with that). To this day, DnD and the Lord of the Rings seem to have a death grip on the fantasy genre, and Sword and Sorcery seemed to fade into the background.

Cultural Shifts

The 70’s brought a lot of changes. A LOT of changes.

After the war in Vietnam, where the violence of war was no longer shared around a campfire but displayed on a television, people seemed more turned off than ever with the notion of violence. Of course, violence is used to great effect in Sword and Sorcery stories. Think about it, how can you have a sword wielding hero that doesn’t use his sword to defeat the shapeshifting sorcerer? By the time the 80’s came around, America (at the very least) stopped having issues with violence, but the rest of the world didn’t. Sword and Sorcery suffered some pushback because of this.

What’s more, women were undergoing a change in the 70’s. Many did not appreciate the depiction of women in Sword and Sorcery stories as weak, naked, and afraid. I can’t say I blame them for feeling that way, and many still do today. In the 70’s, women wanted to see themselves represented better, and when they saw a naked woman clinging to a blood drenched Conan’s thigh on the covers of his books, I am sure this didn’t help matters. In a time when Princess Leia could be beautiful, sexy, and commanding, to the point of blasting stormtroopers with a laser gun, the depiction of women in Sword and Sorcery definitely had something to do with Sword and Sorcery’s decline.

That is not to say that it’s entirely accurate that Sword and Sorcery had poor depictions of women. Robert E Howard himself wrote numerous strong women. Red Sonja, Sword Woman, Belit, Valaria, and Devi Yasmina all demonstrated wit, competence, power, leadership and would lop you head off if you crossed them. Some of them even led armies into battle. Of course, Howard also contributed to the trope of the naked, helpless woman who only existed to make Conan happy. I guess you take the good with the bad? Nevertheless, people did not see Devi Yasmina on a Conan cover, they saw a naked woman with exaggerated proportions. This simply did not help matters.

Book Marketing

It used to be that novels were slim. By the 70’s and 80’s, they became thick. This was done in order to fill up bookshelves. The logic was, the thicker the spine the more it sticks out on the shelf. Therefore, it must be a better book and that means sales. It worked wonderfully, padding out novels like that, but it made Sword and Sorcery feel small by comparison.

There is a concept in marketing called “Perceived value”. I learned about this as a marketing major, and the idea is that if you set up shop in a glamourous part of town, people will perceive your shop as glamorous, even if its nothing special. If you set it up in a bad part of town, people will perceive it as seedy and filthy, even it its actually clean and attractive. That’s what happened to Sword and Sorcery. Sitting next to the gigantic volumes of Lord of the Rings, the short stories, novellas, and small novels looked puny and low quality (even with that gorgeous Frank Frazetta cover art).

It doesn’t seem like much, but as we are learning in our current economic situation, people in the 70’s wanted more bang for their buck. Why pay for a Conan novel when I could pay for Lord of the Rings? I will get way more out of the big book. This is less true in our digital era, but perceived value continues to play a role in marketing and always will.

Of course, that’s nonsense. If you enjoy the book then it’s worth its price tag, but good marketing goes a long way. Sword and Sorcery couldn’t keep up on the shelves, but it won big in the movie theater.

Trashy Perception

Conan the Barbarian starring Arnold Schwarzenegger premiered in 1982 to rave success. Conan was back, and with him Sword and Sorcery was back. It no longer occupied bookstores, but movie theaters and comic books. And to be honest, some of these things are really great.

The first Conan movie was excellent, and Mike Mignola of Hellboy fame illustrated an entire series of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser comics. I keep these comics in a collection and they are excellent, and a very good adaptation of Leiber’s stories.

However, this new form of media had diminishing returns. The second Conan movie held a notable drop in quality. While there were some decent Sword and Sorcery movies in the 80’s many of them proved to be low quality, poorly acted, and frankly, trashy. The 80’s saw a large conservative push, and the use (or overuse) of nudity in many of these movies was perceived as a shallow attempt to sell a poor product to a male dominated market.

In addition to this, DnD grew so much in popularity, and the incorporation of the Lord of the Rings began to wash out a lot of Sword and Sorceries influence with fantasy fans. Couple this with lousy Conan pastiche novels and even lousier clones (clonans if you will), and Sword and Sorcery began to fall out of the public consciousness. Besides, new fantasy authors like Robert Jordan were launching their own 2000 plus page epics by the end of the decade. The short story, novella, and short novel, of which Sword and Sorcery thrives, disappeared almost entirely from bookstores.

By the 90’s Sword and Sorcery was, as far as I can tell, synonymous with musclebound barbarians in fur diapers, whose adventures consisted entirely of sex and decapitation. That is not a fair assessment of Sword and Sorcery by any stretch, but it is how many perceived it and still perceive it to this day.

However, Sword and Sorcery is making a comeback in a really big way. It’s coming back with all the excitement, adventure, attitude and energy as ever. It also seems apparent that women are being treated better, being clothed and wearing proper armor instead of chain mail bikinis, and living up to the strength of those strong female characters mentioned earlier in the article.

Personally, I believe there will always be a place for the damsel in distress trope. But those damsels ought to go into distress after slaughtering a number of henchmen, biting off a few noses, and drenching the room with blood. Or maybe they are the fair type who really could not stand up to the seven foot tall ogre that abducted them. There are all kinds of women in the world, and therefore there is room for all kinds of stories.

Seeing as that’s true, that there is room for all kinds of stories, then it ought to warm our hearts that Sword and Sorcery is making a comeback. Howard Andrew Jones is one of many who have led the charge, and the revolution is coming as swift as the sunrise.

In fact, it’s already here.

My next post will talk a bit about the return of Sword and Sorcery, and point you toward a few contemporary Sword and Sorcery authors you may or may not be familiar with.