Robert E. Howard muddied the waters when he created Solomon Kane, his first historical Sword & Sorcery series. By definition, heroic fantasy is set in an imaginary world such as Kull’s Atlantis or even Conan’s Hyborian Age (which isn’t quite historical). Solomon Kane wanders around Puritan England and Africa. I know hair-splitters will say Kane is not Sword & Sorcery but historical fantasy. I would counter: though the Kane stories are set in a historical period, the places Howard describes are a weird mirror to actual history. Like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Africa, this not a place of dry academic information but a fantastic realm all its own.
All labels aside, the Kane stories are enjoyed by Robert E. Howard fans with as much loyalty as any of his other characters. Bran Mak Morn is a character clearly set in Roman Britain. Turlough O’Brien in the age of the Vikings, and so on. To a Howard fan, the setting is often not as important as the ride. You know REH will deliver a roller-coaster’s worth of action whether it’s El Borak, Red Agnes, Cormac Fitzgeoffrey or Kirby O’Donnell. This was one of the reasons why L. Sprague de Camp found it so easy to turn non-Conan tales into Hyborian brew. Howard loved historical fiction. It was one of the major ingredients that Sword & Sorcery is composed of, along with Lovecraftian evil and imaginary worlds.
Historical Sword & Sorcery is certainly descended from Howard, but other writers have written books in this mode that stand out as important. Keith Taylor’s Bard series is set in the Dark Ages Europe and is all the more interesting for it. Richard L. Tierney’s Simon of Gitta series, David Drake’s Vettius and Dama, Karl Edward Wagner and David Drake’s Killer, Andrew J. Offutt’s version of Cormac Mac Art, and Jack Williamson’s Reign of Wizardry is an even earlier one.
Heroic fantasy writers will always have the choice: do I start from scratch and build a world as J. R. R. Tolkien did, or do I jump-start with a little historical help? Let’s be honest, even if the world is called Imaginaria, it most often resembles an idealized version of Medieval England. Throw in some AD&D and it gets even less interesting.
Comic books became part of the Howard ouvre in 1970 when Conan the Barbarian appeared. Roy Thomas and Barry Smith produced a phenomenon that still hasn’t fizzled to this day. Sword & Sorcery comic characters like Red Sonja seem to have an infinite shelf life. Among these were some historical S&S comics of note. Michael Urslan’s Beowulf Dragonslayer from DC, combined mythology and history in a way that certainly caught my eye in April-May 1975. The historical content was slight but bringing in Dracula and UFOs was surprising.
Roy Thomas built on this idea in September 1981 when he and Ernie Colon created Arak, Son of Thunder. Like Beowulf, Arak encounters ancient mythological monsters but he also has do deal with Dark Ages Europe, Asia and America. Thomas brings in plenty of history this time, with Charlemagne, Vikings, fallen Romans, Hannibal, and that’s just the first ten issues. The comic ran to 50 issues with Arak and his companions making it to White Cathay and dealing with Angelica and her crew of baddies. Arak never received the kudos it deserved. No comic had ever accomplished so much in terms of historical heroic fantasy. Roy and Ernie deserved more credit when it was begun and the comic might have been remembered as more than “Conan the Indian”.
The one historical Sword & Sorcery film that comes to mind is Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead that became The Thirteenth Warrior (1999) with Antonio Banderas. Crichton took an actual historical meeting between Muslim traders and Vikings. He added in Beowulf to get his tale of Ahmad ibn Fadlan and his band of Scands taking on the Mother of all Monsters. I find the film quite watchable even today. John McTiernan does a good job directing, the acting is superb and all the British Columbian locales are familiar to me.
There are a number of best-selling historical/fantasy writers that have been marketed more towards the historical than the magical. Morgan Llewelyn wrote of ancient Ireland, Greece, the Vikings and the Etruscans. Kenneth C. Flint wrote about Ulster and the trials of Cuchlain. Jack Whyte has written a very non-magical version of Camelot as did Mary Stewart. Marion Zimmer Bradley had more magic in her books about Avalon and Atlantis. For young adults there was Rosemary Sutcliff, who wrote of historical Romans but also Beowulf. Her book on Queen Boudicca is a classic. The line between history and mythology can be blurred in works like Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogeon series. The fantasies of Thomas Burnett Swann are quite mythological but have a historical underpinning as well. Are any of these “Sword & Sorcery”? I’ll let you decide.
The lure of history is great. Today a historical writer like Simon Scarrow or Bernard Cornwall can sell millions of copies with tales of Romans or knights set in their own time period. (Back in Howard’s time it was Harold Lamb.) To choose to add magic and monsters is a daring (and perhaps commerically risky) affair. For some there is no choice. If you are Sword & Sorcery addict, history is always better with monsters. As George R. R. Martin has explained in several interviews, fantasy is always bigger, brighter and more exciting. (And I think he sold a book or two.)
Some historical fantasy writers you may not have heard of, but I recommend, include D. Sandy Nielsen (who wrote about Vikings in Bardic Runes), and David A. Hardy, who wrote “Temple of the Rakshasas” in Swords of Fire as well as many other tales. What authors have you found?
For an excellent example of current Historical S&S l recommend the recent work of Scott Oden. A Gathering of Ravens and Twilight of the Gods are excellent S&S novels with well researched and detailed historical settings. And Scott writes action scenes that are equal to the mayhem that Howard did so well.
I have been planning on reading Scott’s book but I always stumble upon another Pulp piece that keeps me in the 1940s.