High Fantasy vs. Low Fantasy has always been a bit of gray area for me. I can remember submitting to Bardic Runes back in the 1990s and getting rejected as “Sword & Sorcery”. Understanding the genre history of commercial fantasy has helped me to see the difference. The term “High Fantasy” was coined by one of the first practitioners, Lloyd Alexander in 1971 in the essay, “High Fantasy and Heroic Romance”, (originally given at the New England Round Table of Children’s Librarians in October 1969). The unfortunate counter term for what is not “high” is “Low Fantasy” (or Sword & Sorcery).
The 1960s
But we have to go back further than 1969. We have to go to 1961 when Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber in discussing heroic fantasy tales, the legacy of Robert E. Howard, coined the term “Sword & Sorcery”. The new interest in writing tales of heroes and monsters grew from places like the fanzine Amra, in the pages of Cele Goldsmith’s Fantastic magazine, to the point where that new term signaled a growing underground movement. It would not explode for another few years. Something else had to happen first.
The second important event took place in 1965 when Donald A. Wollheim published the unauthorized paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings. That act brought commercial Fantasy fiction into existence. Not the writing of The Hobbit in 1937. Not even the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954-55. It was this paperback that DAW managed because of a copyright loophole in the US. Tolkien’s masterpiece bore the description “Sword & Sorcery” on that paperback in 1965. That was about to change.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were important to Rock&Roll but they were equally important to Fantasy fiction. Lancer Books would drive the Sword & Sorcery field with the republication of Conan (the original stories and new pastiches by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter). Other publishers jumped on the bandwagon for a few years but in the end ACE Books would capture the market (Donald A. Wollheim again!) even winning Lancer’s properties after the company failed.
The 1970s
While this was going on Tolkien got an authorized edition of The Lord of the Rings out and it sold on a level that even dwarfed Lancer’s purple-edged Conan books. Ballantine Books, who published this edition, knew it had to have more Tolkien to keep things going. This was done by creating the Ballantine Fantasy Series, a reprint catalogue of elder novels and stories that formed the harbingers of Tolkien: William Morris, George MacDonald, E. R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake and James Branch Cabell selected by Lin Carter. (They sold well the more they resembled Tolkien.) It was Ballantine’s intentional branding of these books as something different from the Frazetta-covered S&S that truly began the idea of a Tolkien-based “high fantasy”.
New writers came under this umbrella: T. H. White’s Once and Future King, Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, Katherine Kurtz and the Deryni trilogy, Evangeline Walton and the Mabinogion series and many others. This was the arena in which Lloyd Alexander created his Prydain series of six books with The Black Cauldron being made into a mediocre Disney film. Here was a style of Fantasy that borrowed from the realms of fairy tales and folk lore but didn’t go into Howardian bloodshed or Lovecraftian terrors.
Ballantine, later Del Rey Books, dropped the old stuff for the new material, covering them in Darrel K. Sweet and Brothers Hildbrandt covers. The big experiment was Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara (1977), a painfully obvious re-writing of The Lord of the Rings with plenty of artwork. Peter S. Beagle wrote in The Secret History of Fantasy (2010) about how Lester Del Rey knowingly created the phenomenon understanding the desire of the Tolkien audience and the lack of another volume as The Silmarillion was being prepared.
The 1980s
Del Rey, and later other publishers, had a new publishing genre. Fantasy was no longer the poor cousin to Science Fiction, but a million dollar business of its own. Best sellers, always in the Tolkien mold, sold fat trilogies like paper gold bricks while Sword & Sorcery sank lower and lower, finally coming to the screen in 1982 with Conan the Barbarian with Anold Schwartzenegger. Followed by many poorer films as well as dozens of role-playing game novels, the lowly tale of the swordsman who fights the darkness became persona non grata in the 1990s. Only Conan pastiches and novelizations based on Xena, Warrior Princess offered anything remotely like REH.
So there we have it. One strain descended from Howard, the other Tolkien, the worlds of Heroic Fantasy diverged into one variety that published in fewer and fewer, specialized periodicals like The Dragon Magazine, and the other, in bigger and bigger novels with dragon covers. The Fantasy genre as a commercially successful engine that produced trilogies of trilogies clanked on giving us David Eddings, Piers Anthony, Melanie Rawn, etc., etc., etc…
Is This a Sex Thing?
There is another seeming dichotomy going on here as well. The tales of brawny barbarians seemed to be marketed to men, while Tolkienesque Fantasy to women. This is not to say that only men or women wrote or read these, but the general direction seems to split here. Writers like Karl Edward Wagner with his Kane, Michael Moorcock and Elric, as well as a plethora of Dragonlance, Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms sold to largely men, while an entirely new fairy-tale based crew of new writers (which S&S fans called “Vanilla Fantasy”) exploded on the Tolkien side: Robin McKinley, Patricia A. MacKillip, Jane Yolen, Ellen Kushner, Charles de Lint and many others produced fiction that appealed to men, women and children. Though writing for adults, writers like Jane Yolen, Peter Dickinson and Lloyd Alexander also wrote for children, bringing a kind of “library respectability” to the genre as well.
Two Sides of the Coin
So I guess now is as good a time as any to admit my background is in Sword & Sorcery but I do not dislike the Tolkien branch either. I quite enjoyed Alexander’s Pyrdain series, Walton’s Mabinogion, Beagle, White and many others. Jane Yolen is a treasure. Roger Zelazny strikes me as a guy who could ride either side of the line, with Dilvish on one side and Amber on the other. He was a wonderful writer. As was Karl Edward Wagner on the Sword & Sorcery side. A good writer is more than the genre they write in.
Is the delineation of High and Low useful? Let’s be honest, it’s largely marketing. But marketing is not always intended to be evil. The goal is to get the right book to the right reader. I think the more I read the more I realize I am both of those readers. One day I might like a good bloody swordfest with Glen Cook then the next a tale of mer-people on Skule Skerry with Jane Yolen. (Or a Sword & Sorcery tale of Skule Skerry with Keith Taylor and his Bard series, another one that rides both sides of the line.)
Two Visions
I’ve said it elsewhere that the real difference between Tolkien and Howard is largely one of tone. It is tone makes the high/low difference happen. Take Aragorn for instance. If you told his story from a more immediate POV without hobbits acting as intermediaries, you’d have Conan. Or maybe King Kull. Born fourteen years apart, both authors had a love of the old stories, the “Northern thing” as it is sometimes called. Howard modeled his stories on adventure fiction for the Pulps, while Tolkien used the Victorian fairy tale fiction of his youth. John Ronald Reuel never tried to pay his bills with his writing, ironically becoming a big hit in the last years of his life. And that may be the real high/low difference, economic and class structure. Howard was a Texan Pulpster while Tolkien was a respectable university don. One is seen as seedy and visceral, the other as cosy as a vicar murdered in an English garden.
Rock On!
And if I might circle back to Rock&Roll again. This split is quite evident if you are familiar with rock and folk music of the time periods discussed. Led Zeppelin famously referenced The Lord of the Rings twice in “The Battle of Evermore” and “Ramble On”, while bands like Hawkwind worked directly with Michael Moorcock on their heavy S&S feel. In later days, Molly Hatchet borrowed the Frank Frazetta paintings of Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane for their Southern hard rock look. In folk rock circles, Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention covered old ballads and inspired writers like Charles de Lint (who also wrote S&S for Andrew Offutt) and Jane Yolen. The gritty hard rock of Heavy Metal (yes, the film too) is associated with Sword & Sorcery while ballads with the High Fantasy crowd.
I wish Bardic Runes was still going today. I might have been able to write something Michael McKenny would publish. Well, probably not. The darkness of Cthulhuian evil and Howardian metal guitar rest too deeply in me. C’est la vie….
Interesting. I liked the line, “Only Conan pastiches and novelizations based on Xena, Warrior Princess offered anything remotely like REH.” Some REH fans (if they truly like S&S) are their own worst enemy for damning the pastiches. I liked the majority of them and found no fault with the idea of continuing Conan’s adventures. Whether they keep REH “alive” is debatable, I suppose, but they definitely keep Conan alive. What REH fan should dislike that?
I agree pastiche too but they vary.