The Sword & Sorcery of Clark Ashton Smith

Sword & Sorcery as an idea never existed back in 1936. I chose that date because it was the year Robert E. Howard killed himself. The man who created the idea wasn’t even aware of it as we are today. He never named it. All that came later…

Smith, Lovecraft and Howard…The Big Three

The three greatest Fantasy writers to come out of Weird Tales were H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. That’s a big claim but I base it on influence and vision. Lovecraft is renowned in horror circles but he also wrote The Dreamlands stories (influenced by Lord Dunsany) that were part of his over-all concept of other realities. Clark Ashton Smith did not have the followers that Lovecraft did but of the three he seems to be the one gaining the most critical supporters today. Only Jack Vance was able to take the brilliantly-hued visions of Smith and create something worthy in his The Dying Earth stories. Howard is the easiest of the three, for his Conan stories in particular, spawned an entire Fantasy boom, placing him beside J. R. R. Tolkien in the Halls of Fantasy.

But all that came after. Back before 1936, the Big Three dwelt is a less defined milieu of Fantasy and Horror that allowed these authors to pen a terror tale, an adventure tale, a fantastic tale, and sometimes all at the same time, as in the case of Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” (1927), Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” (1929) or Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Tale of Satampras Zeiros”(1929). Fantasy included the weird and terrible and wasn’t the province of Victorian fairies in English gardens.

Clark Ashton Smith is hard to classify. Unlike C. L. Moore who wrote the excellent Jirel of Joiry stories at the same time Howard wrote Conan, Smith’s fantasies have another feel altogether. (Moore is worthy to stand beside these men as the creator of female Sword & Sorcery that has sadly devolved into Red Sonja.) Smith’s style is one factor, ornate, bejeweled, byzantine, even incommensurable! (Those familiar with Smith’s style know what I was doing there.) Smith never used a five-letter word when a twelve-letter one was available. There are those who claim this style destroys the fiction but others say it is the very reason Smith works. Lovecraft had similar accusations of wordiness but remains well loved all the same. Howard by comparison is lean, modern and often under-valued as a writer because of it. Howard had a verbal magic that could convey excitement and vision that none of his imitators ever captured, as he did in “The Queen of the Black Coast”. Smith’s florid prose may have been directly counter to Howard’s but both strived to accomplish similar goals, visions of worlds that never existed.

Clark Ashton Smith wrote over a hundred stories and many of them qualify as fantasies. But are they Sword & Sorcery? Like Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales, Smith’s Fantasy fiction may not be what one would call S&S today. This depends on your definition, of course. If you define S&S as Fantasy with some horror in it, then Smith qualifies easily. Stories like “The Charnal God” or “The Collossus of Ylourgne” would stand beside any Conan tale. But there is more.

Clark Ashton Smith created much as an evil god might create. He stands high above his Fantasy worlds and he laughs. He laughs at the poor souls who must suffer his realms of terror and beauty. His is a sardonic humor that torments and feels no kinship with those who suffer under his machinations. Robert E. Howard, by contrast, makes you feel the hero’s skin, let’s you live inside it as Conan or Kull or Bran Mak Morn feels the hatred of the enemy, the bite of swords, the wickedness of evil. (This is also the essence that separates Tolkien from Howard, the immediacy of the hero, where Tolkien mediates them with hobbit in-betweens.) You cheer for the swordsman who must face the evil world. Smith’s heroes (characters really) are like Lovecraft’s (though not as wimpy perhaps) and equally as doomed. All of the Big Three held a fairly bleak world view, Lovecraft with his cosmic insignificance, Smith with his inescapable, fin-de-sicle malaise, and Howard with his ideas that all civilization is a fraud and only the barbarian is truly free. Each offered up these dark domains in his own style.

Is Clark Ashton Smith Sword & Sorcery? Who cares? His work is part of that triumvirate that could be renamed “Weird Tales Fiction”, the dark and beautiful fiction of the Big Three. Why restrict such visions with titles like “Sword & Sorcery”, “Cthulhu Mythos” or some unnamed Smithian label? The whole experience is so much bigger than that. Read all three them, enjoy their dreams, and laugh along with Clark Ashton Smith, the master of the ornate and rigorous sentence. Be brave, be wary, be gone…

A word on Clark Ashton Smith’s magazine illustrations. Since Smith wrote so many stories for Weird Tales, he had all the big names illustrating his work. But he also illustrated seven of his own stories. Only C. L. Moore can make this claim, having done the image for her “The Dark Land” in the Jirel of Joiry series. Smith did his own strange line work for stories in and around 1933-34.