When people think of 1929 they usually recall the Great Depression and “Black Tuesday” (October 29th). I prefer to think of it as the year Sword & Sorcery was born. For S&S, like its greatest hero, Conan, was a child of the Great Depression. But the first tale was written before the darkness fell over America. The first tale in a new sub-genre of Fantasy that would grow slowly for eight decades until it was part of our culture.
But it is unlikely that any of that crossed Robert E. Howard’s mind as he wrote “The Shadow Kingdom” in 1927-28. He wasn’t out to invent a new sub-genre. He was simply doing what all writers do: taking lessons from the authors who inspired him, and telling a story. He had tired of writing about Solomon Kane, a most unpuritanical Puritan who wandered a quasi-historical Europe and Africa. Much in the Kane stories feels like Howard’s S&S but they lack one important element: a Fantasy backdrop (what Tolkien would later call “a secondary world”) such as this new tale had. Kull lives in Valusia, a land in Atlantean times before the Great Cataclysm that would reshape the world into something we might recognize.
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