The Definition of Sword & Sorcery

I don’t waste much time on defining Sword & Sorcery but it seems to be a thing again on the Internet. Men like Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp spent a goodly amount of time on it back in the 1960s so I didn’t need to. But it’s back again. And perhaps for different reasons.

In the pages of the fanzine Amra, Fritz Leiber (with Michael Moorcock’s assistance) gave the sub-genre its name. This was significant because it was really hard to know what you were talking about with some labels. The Amra crowd identified that this style of heroic fantasy has swords (combat and action scenes) and sorcery (magic, monsters and evil). Thus Lin Carter came up with his definition back in 1973 for the Flashing Swords anthologies:

We call a story Sword & Sorcery when it is an action tale, derived from the traditions of the pulp magazine adventure story, set in a land or age or world of the author’s invention—a milieu in which magic actually works and the gods are real—and a story, moreover, which pits a stalwart warrior in direct conflict with the forces of supernatural evil.

This definition has problems. It is limited to tales of barbarian hero taking out evil sorcerers. Which much of the sub-genre is but there are plenty of examples, even in Robert E. Howard’s work, where this falls down. This also could be a description of Beowulf. Which isn’t surprising since such old tales are the great-great (add more greats) grandfather of S&S.

And this, I think, is the current problem. Being a Bronze Age Boy, I can remember the early Conan the Barbarians, Savage Sword of Conans, etc. as they appeared in wire racks. (Yes, we still had those.) Which is why I don’t worry about the definition of S&S much. I can simply remember these old publications and think, “That’s Sword & Sorcery”.

But if you were born when people said things like “Sit on it!” or “Tubular!” or even “Meh!” you might not have this frame of reference. You came into a world that was far less clear on what was what. First, in the 1970s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons came along brought the Howardian school and the Tolkienian school of heroic fantasy together. You may have grown up in a world where Conan and Legolas hang out together. Things were never the same after 1973.

But it gets worse. The 1990s saw publishing abandon Sword & Sorcery as a label. You wrote “Fantasy” or “High Fantasy” or “Epic Fantasy” or god forbid “Vanilla Fantasy”. This was the result of the 1980s Barbarian movies, which pulled S&S down to the lowest level (and tiny budgets). Book sellers didn’t want to be associated with that (except for TOR and their Conan pastiche line and the publishers of Xena novelizations). Fantasy publishers wanted the sheen of the Fantasy bestseller in The Lord of the Rings/The Sword of Shannara/etc. for their products with hopes of big sales. Sword & Sorcery was now the domain of the fanzines again. (Which was okay. It dwelt there before.) AD&D published some along with dungeon crawls and articles on the difference between a broad sword and a bastard sword.

2008 comes along, riding high on the success of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films, and a rebirth of interest in old school S&S happens. Perhaps that was your first exposure to the sub-genre. Everybody’s talking about Sword & Sorcery again. But shouldn’t that make things easier?

Yes and no. Not surprising a new interest in Conan comics sprang from this. If you read Dark Horse’s Conan the Barbarian you might have an idea what we are talking about. But later we have DC and Marvel pulling Conan into the superhero genre. That’s going to muddy the waters. Is Conan a mutant? Does he have super-powers? We don’t want to be too precious about this. Kull did some time traveling to help out Bran Mak Morn. Elric had his share of Science Fictional episodes at the End of Time. Fafhrd & Gray Mouser time traveled to ancient Afghanistan before they hung out with Wonder Woman. Conan did some too with the What If line back in the 1970s. Heroic fantasy lends itself to imaginative combinations. And we wouldn’t want it any other way.

But it muddies the water.

So what is my definition of Sword & Sorcery? Well, my version of all this has been spiced by my wanting to sell my heroic fantasy fiction to certain magazines. One of these was Bardic Runes (1994) (which I never appeared in). The editor, Michael McKenny, wanted heroic fantasy but he did not want Sword & Sorcery. The tales he bounced taught me what S&S was.

Good Sword & Sorcery has Horror elements. The savage battle between hero and monster can be bloody and grim. The antagonist may be part ghost, a lich from eons ago, an evil necromancer, or a legion of goblins. What Michael McKenny wanted was fantastic stories that weren’t about any of that. His loss in the end, I think. I have tried to read old copies of Bardic Runes and I find most of the material tepid. But, of course, I do. I am a hopeless Sword & Sorcery fanatic. I can appreciate the softer stuff (I find Robin McKinley and Evangeline Walton brilliant.) But my soul belongs on the plains of Cimmeria where some Lovecraftian Horror lies in wait in a tomb. (And that sodding skeleton had better get up!) Much better!

Sword & Sorcery is Fantasy fiction with a strong dollop of the Gothic in it. (And you think defining S&S is tough, try defining the Gothic!) One key feature of the Gothic sensibility (oh, I felt all Jane Austin when I said that!) is the idea of the past haunting the future. What is The Lord of the Rings in one sentence: a ring from the past stirs up shit in the future. Conan faces a lich from the past, faces a dark cult that worships a Lovecraftian entity, faces a flying ape from a long, lost epoch, faces… You get the idea. Kull’s present day political struggles in Valusia are yawn-worthy until the force behind them turns out to be a prehistoric snake race who can appear human. The shadows of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft loam large here.

All of this is to arrive here: the best Sword & Sorcery writers are also Horror writers. Robert E. Howard wrote the classic “Pigeons From Hell“. Fritz Leiber wrote Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness. Clark Ashton Smith wrote such a blend it is often hard to tell which genre he is working in. Michael Moorcock would appear to be an exception but he isn’t really. Rather than base his Elric tales on REH’s heroic model he chose the Gothic novels of Radcliffe and Walpole, the forerunners to Horror fiction. If you want to make your dark forces appear scary, having a writer’s toolkit from the Horror genre makes sense. Others that fit this bill include Karl Edward Wagner (“Sticks”), Henry Kuttner (“The Graveyard Rats”), Michael Shea (“The Autopsy”), and even C. L. Moore, who wrote the Northwest Smith tales for Weird Tales, with a spacy-Horror blend.

This also explains why L. Sprague de Camp’s S&S (Novaria, Pusad, etc.) never quite works for me. De Camp is Science Fiction writer at heart and his heroic fantasy can never quite escape that fact. He inherited this curse (my opinion!) from John W. Campbell. Norvell W. Page and Jack Williamson suffer from the same. Their vision for S&S was always a logically explained branch of Fantasy. No ghosts need apply!

Conclusion

There’s my definition. Or my criteria anyway. I’m not really sure why anyone cares about this today. Being labeled Sword & Sorcery is not the handicap it was thirty years ago. My Arthan the bear-man novels are clearly Sword & Sorcery. I wanted that in the branding of the covers. You can’t look at M. D. Jackson’s excellent covers and think: is this vanilla fantasy? You know instantly there will action and evil in generous helpings. Is it old school? I think so, but with a modern sensibility (pass the tea please, Jane!) The days of alpha males rescuing helpless maidens (soon to be deflowered by said barbarian) are long gone. The worst of S&S can happily go away while the best, the raw power of heroes of all kinds against massive opposing forces of evil can stay.