In the October 1939 issue of Unknown, editor John W. Campbell published a story called “The Elder Gods” by Don A. Stuart. Though not an especially well-remembered tale, (he co-wrote the piece with an uncredited Arthur J. Burks) it served one purpose splendidly. It set the rules for Campbell’s version of Heroic Fantasy. In the story a man named Daron is charged with challenging the gods themselves. The final effect of his quest is humanity breaks with unearthly beings and become rationalists. This was Campbell’s ideology and he passed it along to the other Sword & Sorcery writers in Unknown. With the exception of Fritz Leiber, who did his own wonderful thing, it was the manifesto of the magazine. Write Fantasy as it were Science Fiction.
Not everyone agreed with Campbell, as Poul Anderson proved in 1951 when he published The Broken Sword, a novel set in a Scandinavian world with elves and trolls. (Later in 1953, he did followed Campbell’s ideas in Three Hearts & Three Lions, but oh well…) Another of Campbell’s acolytes was L. Sprague de Camp who would win Fantasy fame as the editor and pasticher of Robert E. Howard’s Conan. But while Sprague was working to bring more Conan to the masses he also penned the novel The Tritonian Ring and with it he tried to shape the future of Sword & Sorcery.
Now if Robert E. Howard is the Homer of Sword & Sorcery then L. Sprague de Camp is the Ovid. De Camp’s first forays into humorous Fantasy were the Harold Shea stories with Fletcher Pratt. These parodies of ancient mythologies are a counter point to Sword & Sorcery, just as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was to Arthuriana. To do this, de Camp fell back on the ideas of John W. Campbell’s dictum that Magic is just Science misunderstood. The novel first appeared in Two Complete Science Adventure Books (Winter 1951) then in hard cover in 1953. This sprawling, episodic novel stars Vakar of Lorsk, the second son of King Zhabutir and future heir to the throne. Vakar is sent on a quest to find the one thing the gods fear most for the Deities plan the destruction of Lorsk. (Sound familiar?) Chapter by chapter Vakar visits all the different countries of the Pusadian map, encountering weird characters and monsters, a satyr woman with lusty tastes, evil sorcerers, and finally about halfway through the book discovers the secret, then goes in search of the Tritonian Ring, made from the metal of a meteorite. Vakar fails to get the ring so he seeks out the original stone from which the metal was taken and has a sword made from it. And with the only iron sword in the world he returns home to single-handedly stop the invading army with their Medusas, lizard creatures able to freeze people solid. In the end, he wins out but loses the throne to his brother, Kuros, but doesn’t care for he has always preferred to live with Queen Porfia and study philosophy in Ogugia anyway.
The tone of The Tritonian Ring is odd, especially in 1951. It is sexist but it isn’t. It is violent and cruel but it’s funny. It is satirical but isn’t a parody. What de Camp penned was a quest worthy of Odysseus, filled with a consistent universe, one that sees the end of Magic and the beginning of Science. His writing about sword fighting, ships, horsemanship and battle formations is faultless, having a wide knowledge of all these things from his historical non-fiction, but the whole thing feels more like Science Fiction than good Sword & Sorcery. It is almost an un-Fantasy. And that may have been the point. Life is cruel but also funny, people are weak but strong and Fantasy should sometimes be more realistic and less Howardian.
Which makes the idea that some critics hold, that the novel is based on Robert E. Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon, the only full Conan novel, hard to imagine. Personally, I don’t see it. If anything, The Tritonian Ring is a reaction to The Hour of the Dragon, after de Camp read it when the editors sent a copy to Fletcher Pratt. De Camp liked Sword & Sorcery but wanted to change its direction, a feat I think he failed in if the legacy of writers like John Jakes, Roger Zelazny and Lin Carter are any proof.
This novel was followed by seven stories written between 1951 to 1977. None of these challenge the achievement The Tritionian Ring, but each has its moments. The stories that followed were:
“The Eye of Tandyla” (Fantastic Adventures, May 1951) features a king’s pet wizard, Derezong Taash and his manservant, Zhamel Seh, who must steal a gem called the Eye of Tandyla from a giant statue in Lotri. Once they have it, they realize they have been duped and the Lotrians won’t allow them to put it back. Zhamel Seh manages to return the stone but the duo don’t want to go back empty handed to the king. Instead, they go to Kelk and steal a second stone that looks like the Eye. Only after the king’s concubine attempts to kill them all with the gem does the truth come out.
“The Owl and the Ape” (Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy, November 1951) is the first tale of Gezun, who will appear in four other tales. The fourteen year-old Gezun is also a Lorskan like Vakar, a minor noble kidnapped and sold into slavery. His master is Sancheth Sar, an old wizard who sends Gezun to an auction of mystical items. The boy successfully bids for a scroll that contains a spell that will stall the sinking of Pusad. Sancheth Sar plans to use it to extort money from the Pusadian kings. Gezun is set upon by rogues but kills them both. He even resists the wiles of a sexy enchantress. He only loses the scroll at the very end, though still winning his prize, a ring of star metal that protects him from magic.
“The Stronger Spell” (Fantasy Fiction, November 1953) features a contest between a druid and a magician and the bystanders such as Suar Peial, wandering bard. The druid is Ghw Gleohk, a Kelt armed with a new kind of magical weapon, a tube that shoots lead balls with a strange black powder. He takes on Semkaf, a wizard who can summon the god Apepis. The Kelt is swallowed by the invisible snake while the wizard’s apprentice is shot dead. In the end only Suar and his blacksmith friend, Midawan, escape. The smithy throws the magic tube in the sea, happy that his armor-making business will be safe from its plate-piercing bullets.
“The Hungry Hercynian” (Universe Science Fiction, December 1953) is kind of a Road to Oz for the series, in that most of the characters from the stories appear together. Gezun steals Yorida, a beautiful lass who was purchased by Derezong Taash, but who Lord Noish intends to be feed to the cannibalistic Hercynian wizard, Zyc. Another wizard, Bokarri, acts as a go-between and ends up with most of the treasure while Gezun seems to lose out in this tale of double-crosses. It is actually the social climber Noish who fares ill, ending up as a cannibal’s dinner.
“Ka the Appalling” (Fantastic Universe, August 1958) is a tale of how Gezun meets his wife, Ro. Gezun falls under the power of the wizard Ugaph after killing a cat in Typhon. Gezun works for the wizard, who makes his wealth by robbing temples. Ugaph’s daughter, Ro, has the job to catch bats to feed the imps that do the stealing. When this venture fails, Gezun gives the wizard the idea of opening his own temple for the make-believe god, Ka the Appalling. Now a success, Ugaph decides to sacrifice Gezun on the temple’s altar but an unexpected miracle saves Gezun. He flees with Ro.
“The Rug and the Bull” (Flashing Swords #2, 1974) sees Gezun and Ro, now married and with kids, come to Torretuish with the idea of making flying carpets. These magical rides are meant for the king to use with his armies. Gezun meets up with Bokarri again and the two of them start the carpet venture. The only problem is the carters realize they are going to be driven out of business and bribe Bokarri to destroy his partner. He does this by transferring Gezun’s soul into a bull on the day of the big bull-fight. Gezun, of course, acts like a man, not a bull and trounces the bullfighters, even attacks the king and steals his crown. When the spell wears off, Gezun and family leave with the crown for seed money in their next venture.
“The Stone of the Witch Queen” (Weirdbook #12, Fall 1977) is an earlier tale of Gezun, before his marriage. He steals a magic broach from Plotia and plans to sell it back to the original owner, Queen Bathyllis. On the road, he partners up with Aristax, a scholar, and together they figure out a way to sell the stone back to the queen without being killed or betrayed. The plan fails and Gezun loses the stone in a fight with Plotia’s soldiers (who have been tracking him), a gorilla and the witch queen herself. The dissatisfying ending may have been the reason this story appeared in a small press magazine.
Heroic Fantasy as a genre is usually based on a hero defeating a monster. This classic “plot” (using the word in the Christopher Booker sense here) culminates in the hero being heroic and fighting at great cost, be it “Beowulf” or Conan in “The Queen of the Black Coast”. In video game terms, this would be the “boss fight”.
Sprague de Camp in the majority of his Pusad tales does not follow this convention. (One exception is Vakar’s defeat of the Medusas at the end of The Tritionian Ring.) His Fantasy is a based more upon the idea of the Science Fiction puzzle story. Science Fiction under John W. Campbell was not about space battles or gadgets, but ideas that were often expressed almost like Mystery stories. For example, “A Can of Paint” by A. E. van Vogt (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1944) has an astronaut dosed in Venusian paint. The removal of the paint is an intelligence test with the prize being humans will be allowed to visit the planet. The solution is never a shoot-out with pirates or a desperate fight with aliens but a deadly puzzle with the answer lying in Science. It is this type of plot de Camp uses. His hero (who is almost always unheroic) must figure out a clever trick to avoid a magical version of the SF puzzle. When his heroes resort to violence as Gezun must in “The Owl and the Ape”, it is brutal, cruel and naturalistic. There is no heroic daring-do or valiant questing. Gezun stabs his opponent, runs away and waits for him to bleed to death. Conan would blanch at such cowardice. De Camp does not.
This is the core of the Pusadian series, brain over brawn. Even though the series began in 1951, nine years after Campbell’s Unknown Worlds folded, these tales would have been quite at home in those pages, alongside Norvell W. Page’s Wan Tengri novels or Jack Williamson’s The Reign of Wizardry.
These kinds of humorous Fantasy stories, though disappointing to true Heroic Fantasy fans such as myself, have fans of their own. The 1970s embraced this style in works like Craig Gardner Shaw’s Ebenuzum, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and Robert Asprin’s Myth Adventures. (Even Piers Anthony’s parody Xanth novels owe a debt to de Camp, though perhaps more to his Harold Shea novels.) De Camp himself would produce another series with the same feel in the Novaria novels, written between 1968 and 1985. As I said at the beginning, de Camp is not the valor-slinging Homer of Fantasy, but the sharp-tongued Ovid who gave us The Metamorphosis. De Camp in this same vein does not want to tell valorous tales but point out the very real foibles and nastiness of humanity. (If he had been a writer of Westerns he would have been sure to point out the road apples in the street and the dance hall girl’s missing teeth.) Groff Conklin said in Galaxy Magazine of The Tritonian Ring: “…”in the Conan tradition in every sense of the word, though better written.” If you prefer warts to wonders then he may be right. I don’t and I doubt the legions of Conan fans do either.
