Sword & Sorcery has become a term of derision since the 1980s. There are good reasons for this but much of that derision is out of ignorance. The barbarian baby has been thrown out with the Hyborian bath water. This blog will outline the history of S&S, its major players, its ups and downs, and hopefully at the end, show why the term has become a euphemism for “bad Fantasy”, which is incorrect. There is good S&S and there is bad. The good stuff these days usually hides by calling itself something else.
The term “Sword & Sorcery” was coined in April 1961 by Fritz Leiber. In the discussion letters of the Amra fanzine (published by George H. Scithers from 1959 to 1982), Michael Moorcock wanted a name for the branch of Fantasy fiction that featured heroes fighting against sorcerers and such, descended from the works of Robert E. Howard in the 1930s. Leiber mutated the expression “Sword & Sandle” (a type of historical movie) to “Sword & Sorcery”, which not everybody agreed with. L. Sprague de Camp preferred the slight variation of “Swordplay & Sorcery” (not as catchy) and even to the present day a writer like Charles Saunders uses “Sword & Soul” to mark his own brand of the sub-genre. One snarky critic in the 1970s labelled it “Tits & Daggers”, but if you look at a few Frazetta covers you’ll see that’s not entirely inaccurate either.
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