The Style of Sword & Sorcery

Victorian Medievalism

The style of Sword & Sorcery was created by Robert E. Howard back in 1929. C. L. Moore amended this in 1934, as Fritz Leiber would again in 1940. To understand what they did you have to go back to the authors that inspired them, the ones who had made Fantasy fiction a possibility. And to understand these authors, you have to know what “elevated style” means. So let’s begin there.

If you ask a non-Fantasy reader what Fantasy fiction sounds like they will give you something like this: “I prithee would deal grievous harm upon thy body, old worm.” To which the dragon reply, “Bringth whateth thou canst,” with a little flicker of her dragony fingers. This old fashioned sounding speech was created by William Morris at the end of the 19th Century in his mock medieval novels like The Well at the World’s End (1896). Here’s a taste:

” I thank thee, mother,” quoth Ralph, “and it is like that I may abide here beyond the two days if the adventure befall me not ere then. But at least I will bide the eating of my dinner here to-day.”

Elevated Speech

This is what we call an “elevated” style, meaning it is higher than the usual, or real speech, of people. Shakespeare used it in his plays just as poets used it in their rhymes. It is not meant to be realistic. It is meant to be better, richer, more glorious than what we lowly humans actually speak.

George MacDonald was a Scottish preacher who also wrote the first classics of Fantasy at this time. MacDonald could be elevated in his adult works, like this one, Phantastes (1894):

” I am ashamed,” he said, ” to appear a knight, and in such a guise ; but it behoves me to tell you to take warning from me, lest the same evil, in his kind, overtake the singer that has befallen the knight. Hast thou ever read the story of Sir Percival and the ” (here he shuddered, that his armour rang) ” Maiden of the Alder-tree ?”

But he was less so in his work for children, which were inspired more by fairy tales than medieval manuscripts:

“What’s all the haste, nursie?” asked Irene, running alongside of her.

“We must not be out a moment longer.”

“But we can’t help being out a good many moments longer.”

This is from The Princess and the Goblin (1871), an important work that gave us the goblin as adversary and inspired all those Tolkien orcs.

Old Testament Thunder

You might think this old style sounds like something from church. In the next case you would be right. Lord Dunsany did for Fantasy short fiction what Morris and MacDonald did for novels. His tales of the gods of Pegana and other strange places has an Old Testament feel:

In a wood older than record, a foster brother of the hills, stood the village of Allathurion ; and there was peace between the people of that village and all the folk who walked in the dark ways of the wood, whether they were human or of the tribes of the beasts or of the race of the fairies and the elves and the little sacred spirits of trees and streams.

That’s the opening sentence (yes, just one sentence!) of “The Fortress Unvanquishable Save For Sacnoth” (1908), which I picked on purpose because it is pretty obvious it had an influence on Robert E. Howard’s “The Tower of the Elephant” (Weird Tales, March 1933). This is a heroic tale of a warrior with a magic sword who slays giants spiders and dragons.

E. R. Eddison’s Fighting Men

One more precursor to look at: E. R. Eddison and The Worm Ouroboros (1922), perhaps the last great novel of the Victorian Fantasy kind before Howard and the Pulps would change things:

“ Here, too,” said Juss, “ my dream walked with me. And if it be ill crossing there where this stream breaketh into a dozen branching cataracts a little above the watersmeet, yet well I think ’tis our only crossing.”

Eddison tells a rousing tale of the forces of demonland fighting the armies of goblinland. This novel of heroic daring duo would be important to Fritz Leiber after Robert E. Howard’s death.

Enter a Soldier, Name Him Kull

Robert E. Howard was a Pulp writer. No matter what any critic says about him this late in the game, this fact can not be denied. His desires as a writer was to sell to the Pulps, especially the adventure Pulps. The crown jewel was Adventure, a monthly magazine that published Howard’s idols: Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb and others. It was the style of these straight forward story tellers he emulated. Let’s look at the opening paragraph of “The Shadow Kingdom”, the first S&S tale that appeared in Weird Tales, August 1929:

The blare of the trumpets grew louder, like a deep golden tide surge, like the soft booming of the evening tides against the silver beaches of Valusia. The throng shouted, women flung roses from the roofs as the rhythmic chiming of silver hoofs came clearer and the first of the mighty array swung into view in the broad white street that curved round the golden-spired Tower of Splendor.

Fantastic enough, I suppose, but that could just as easily be Caesar returning to Rome. Let’s look at the dialogue:

“Even so. I object to Kaanuub for many reasons, yet most of all for the fact that he is but a figurehead.”

“How so? He was my greatest opponent, but I did not know that he championed any cause but his own.”

“The night can hear,” answered Ka-nu obliquely. “There are worlds within worlds. But you may trust me and you may trust Brule, the Spear-slayer. Look!”

Howard has dialed things down a bit from Morris’s “thee and thou” but has not removed the elevation completely. Kull is talking to Ka-nu the Pict. This doesn’t should like ordinary talk. There is a difference in the phrasing as well as a poetic feel. Ka-nu doesn’t say, “Shh, somebody could be listening.” He says, “The night can hear.”

Jirel of Joiry

C. L. Moore was the second writer to create characters in the Sword & Sorcery mode. She wrote six tales about the swordswoman, Jirel of Joiry, beginning with “Black God’s Kiss” (Weird Tales, October 1934). Moore’s inspiration did not come from Howard, though his tales of heroic fantasy, certainly paved the way for her to have a market for her Jirel tales. Moore’s work is descended from another great Fantasy writer, A. Merritt. Merritt was the darling of the soft magazines before the Pulps, like All-Story, where his tales of lost worlds and strange magic did not exactly fall into the heroic fantasy category. Merritt wrote for fun rather than money, so his work is varied, the random jumps of an amateur. Moore borrowed his moody (some call “fruitcaky”) style for a heroic tale, making the horror elements as important as the action ones.

All about her, as suddenly as the awakening from a dream, the nothingness had opened out into undreamed-of distances. She stood high on a hilltop under a sky spangled with strange stars. Below she caught glimpses of misty plains and valleys with mountain peaks rising far away. And at her feet a ravening circle of small, slavering, blind things leaped with clashing teeth. They were obscene and hard to distinguish against the darkness of the hillside, and the noise they made was revolting. Her sword swung up of itself, almost, and slashed furiously at the little dark horrors leaping up around her legs. They died squashily, splattering her bare thighs with unpleasantness, and after a few had gone silent under the blade the rest fled into the dark with quick, frightened pantings, their feet making a queer splashing on the stones.

The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar

After Howard’s death, Moore drifted away into Science Fiction. There were others who tried to carry on the Howardian style: Clifford Ball (not so good) and Henry Kuttner (much better). But it was an author who was rejected by Weird Tales (not because of his work but a shift in editorial direction.) This was Fritz Leiber. He created two scalawags named Fafhrd and Gray Mouser for a tale called “Two Sought Adventure” (aka “the Jewels int he Forest”), which Farnsworth Wright rejected in  1939. John W. Campbell snapped it up for Unknown where the story appeared in August 1939 (ten years after “The Shadow Kingdom”.)

Leiber enjoyed Howard’s work but found it humorless. His inspiration came less from Dunsany and more from James Branch Cabell and E. R. Eddison. Heroes should go on adventures, fight magical creatures and defy alien gods, but with a smile on their lips, not a barbarian growl. Leiber brought a fun playfulness to the whole experience.

Here is how we meet the two rogues:

“By the Hedgehog,” said the smaller, grinning wickedly, “but they will think twice before they play at ambuscades again!”

“Blundering fools,” said the larger. “Haven’t they even learned to shoot from their saddles? I tell you, Gray Mouser, it takes a barbarian to fight his horse properly.”

“Except for myself and a few other people,” replied the one who bore the feline nickname of Gray Mouser.

Afterwards

The style of Sword & Sorcery would change with the years and the author. Poul Anderson would bring in Norse elements in The Broken Sword (1954) just as Roger Zelazny would begin in a Dunsanian mode and slowly morph into a more straight forward action style. Others like Gardner F. Fox and John Jakes would channel Robert E. Howard and make their barbarian hero tales told in a simple action prose.

Not until J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) arrived in paperback to dominate Fantasy publishing in the late 1960s, would Fantasy writing style change much. The action-oriented style that Robert E. Howard excelled at would become the norm for Sword & Sorcery. Tolkien’s more leisurely style, inspired by those Victorians like E. Nesbit, George MacDonald and William Morris, would become the dominant way to write an Epic Fantasy novel. While these two share many features, a slightly elevated style that shows up mostly in dialogue, they differ too.

The Sword & Sorcery writer, usually focusing on a single character, tends to be more immediate. Epic or High Fantasy tends toward the use of intermediate characters (like hobbits) to lessen this effect. If you want to feel the power and rage of the warrior, you read S&S. If you want a wider view, of armies and sorcerers, politics and all the details that make that secondary world, you read Epic Fantasy. Some argue that one is better than the other, but I say, let’s be glad we have both. And we can thank both Howard and Tolkien, for delivering it in a readable style.