It’s easy to assume, while perusing through old Lancer paperbacks or any of the dozens of 1970s novels, that Sword & Sorcery was a roaring success after Robert E. Howard created the sub-genre back in the pages of Weird Tales. This is not the case. After Howard committed suicide, Sword & Sorcery could easily have become one of the strange relics of the Pulps, alongside the robust vocabulary of Clark Ashton Smith or the over-the-top tales of Jules de Grandin. Howard conjured the magic but his fire was gone and Fantasy fiction would need twenty years to truly embrace what he had created.
Part of the problem was timing. In the depths of the Great Depression Howard’s colorful adventures had great appeal but as WWII arrived, Fantasy was pushed aside in favor of bright, metallic Science Fiction. Astounding Science Fiction, under the aegis of John W. Campbell lead the charge towards a new fantastic literature in magazine publishing, in 1938, about the time Howard’s name was fading the from the covers of Weird Tales.
What saved Sword & Sorcery was a small collection of works by a select group of writers, those who saved Sword & Sorcery from the crumbling pages of the Pulps. The first of these were writers who tried to step into Howard’s shoes, writing new tales for Weird Tales. The first was Clifford Ball, unlike C. L. Moore and Nictzin Dyalhis, who wrote their own brand of Fantasy while REH was alive. Ball was the first of the acolytes of Howard. Very little is remembered of him except the half dozen stories he left behind. This isn’t really surprising. His Duar the Accursed is almost a tongue-in-cheek version of Conan, the first of the imitators who did not have Howard’s gifts.
The Duar the Accursed Series
“Duar the Accursed” (Weird Tales, May 1937)
The Rald Series
“The Thief of Forthe” (Weird Tales, July 1937)
“The Goddess Awakes” (Weird Tales, February 1938)
That was not Henry Kuttner’s problem. Destined to be one of the greats of Science Fiction, Kuttner cut his teeth first on Lovecraftian Mythos tales and secondly on Howardian Fantasy. His tales of Elak of Atlantis were uncollected until the 1980s but truly worthy to sit at Conan’s table. Though many small details such as names are borrowed from Howard, Kuttner really does his own thing, processing Howard into what will become modern Sword & Sorcery, through the writers he would inspire, men such as John Jakes and Roger Zelazny. Kuttner, ever the craftsman, tried a second series for Weird Tales’ biggest competitor, Strange Stories. The Prince Raynor stories are less Conan and more Kuttner’s own.
The Elak Series
“Thunder in the Dawn” (Weird Tales, May-June 1938)
“The Spawn of Dagon” (Weird Tales, July 1938)
“Beyond the Phoenix” (Weird Tales, October 1938)
“Dragon Moon” (Weird Tales, January 1941)
The Prince Raynor Series
“Cursed Be the City” (Strange Stories, April 1939)
“The Citadel of Darkness (Strange Stories, August 1939)
Norvell W. Page, best known for writing The Spider novels as Grant Stockbridge, took up Howard’s torch for two novels published in Unknown, Flame Winds (June 1939) and Sons of the Bear God (November 1939). Ironically this magazine was published by John W. Campbell of Astounding fame. Campbell had felt Fantasy could be tailored to follow rules as his Science Fiction did, using a consistent system for magic and using magic like a form of technology. Page had no problems satisfying Campbell’s requirements, having written stories of every kind for the Pulps. These novels feature Hurricane John (aka Wan Tengri) who is the legendary Prestor John. Marvel adapted Flame Winds for Conan the Barbarian #32-36 (November 1973-March 1974).
Prestor John Series
Flame Winds (Unknown, June 1939)
Sons of the Bear God (Unknown, November, 1939)
The next writer deserves the title of Dean of Sword & Sorcery, with a career at penning Fantasy stories running for four decades. Fritz Leiber, who coined the term “Sword & Sorcery” in 1961, began his stories of Fafhrd, the red-bearded barbarian, and Grey Mouser, the slim city-dweller in 1939. Like Page, he published the first stories in Unknown, which was not a problem, being an SF writer as well. Only the paper shortages of WWII killed the publication, ending a wonderful run of new American Fantasy.
Despite the end of Unknown, Leiber published his tales of Newhon where ever he could find editors willing to accept them, many of them as obscure as Suspense Magazine and Other Worlds. August Derleth included a Fafhrd & Grey Mouser tale in Arkham House hard cover Night’s Dark Agents (1947), largely a collection of horror tales. This same publishing house had put Howard’s horror stories in hard cover the year before with Skull-Face and Others. The sword-swinging duo found their next true home in the pages of Cele Goldsmith’s Fantastic Stories, first publishing in November 1959 with stories running off and on until April 1975.
The Lankhmar Series
“Two Sought Adventure” (aka: The Jewels in the Forest”) (Unknown, August 1939)
“The Bleak Shore (Unknown, November 1940)
“The Howling Tower” (Unknown, June 1941)
“The Sunken Land” (Unknown, February 1942)
“Thieves’ House” (Unknown, February 1943)
“Adept’s Gambit” by Fritz Leiber (1947) Night’s Black Agents (Reprinted in Fantastic, May 1964)
“Claws from the Night” (aka “Claws in the Night” and “Dark Vengeance”) (Suspense Magazine Fall 1951)
“The Seven Black Priests” (Other Worlds, May 1953)
“Lean Times in Lankhmar” (Fantastic, November 1959)
“When the Sea-King’s Away” (Fantastic, May 1960)
“Scylla’s Daugher” (Fantastic , May 1961)
“The Unholy Grail” (Fantastic October 1962)
“The Cloud of Hate” (Fantastic, May 1963)
“Bazaar of the Bizarre” (Fantastic, August 1963)
“The Lords of Quarmall” with Harry Otto Fischer (Fantastic, January February 1964)
“Stardock” (Fantastic, September 1965)
“Their Mistress, The Sea” (1968)
“The Wrong Branch” (1968)
“In the Witch’s Tent” (1968)
“The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar” (Fantastic, August 1968)
“The Snow Women” (Fantastic April 1970)
“Ill-Met in Lankhmar” (Fantasy & SF April 1970)
“The Circle Curse” (1970)
“The Price of the Pain-Ease” (1970)
“The Sadness of the Executioner” (Flashing Swords #1, 1973)
“Trapped in the Shadowland” (Fantastic, November 1973)
“The Bait” (Whispers, December 1973)
“Beauty and the Beasts” (The Book of Fritz Leiber, 1974)
“Under the Thumbs of the Gods” (Fantastic, April 1975)
“Trapped in the Sea of Stars” (The Second Book of Fritz Leiber, 1975)
“The Frost Monstreme” (Flashing Swords #3, 1976)
“Rime Isle” (Cosmos SF&F Magazine, May 1977)
“Sea Magic” (The Dragon, December 1977)
“The Mer She” (Heroes and Horrors, 1983)
“The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars” (Heroic Visions, 1983)
“The Mouser Goes Below” (Whispers, 1987)
The 1950s, hard to believe, were even harder than the 1940s. There were other writers than Leiber who were doing what they could. One of these was Poul Anderson who wrote many tales for Planet Stories with titles like “Witch of the Demon Seas” and “Swordsman of Lost Terra” which look like adventure Science Fiction but are actually Sword & Sorcery dressed up for space. Along with these, Anderson wrote two important novels. Three Hearts and Three Lions (1954) was Fantasy in the Unknown vein much as Robert Heinlein’s later Glory Road (1963) was. More important was The Broken Sword (1954) which was the first of Anderson’s Scandinavian Fantasies, a new branch of Sword & Sorcery with a strong mythological basis. The book did not sell well in 1954 (right in the middle of the new age of SF publishing) but was reprinted by Lin Carter for the Ballantine Fantasy series, vaulting it to classic status. Anderson has since written more books in the same setting.
The Scandinavian Series
The Broken Sword (1954)
Hrolf Kraki’s Saga (1973)
The Merman’s Children (1979)
The Demon of Scattery with Mildred Broxon Downey (1979)
The War of the Gods (1997)
Another writer who braved the cold waters for Fantasy in the 1950s was Jack Vance, who took a leaf from Clark Ashton Smith’s weird book and created a futuristically bizarre Fantasy world called The Dying Earth. This series of stories was enough like Science Fiction that readers and editors may not have known they were reading Sword & Sorcery. As the Fantasy revival came in the 1970s, Vance’s stories became more openly fantastic. He continued the series with new tales about Cugel the Clever, an anti-hero rogue with a sardonic Clark Ashton Smith flavor. Michael Shea wrote an authorized sequel to The Dying Earth called A Quest for Simbilis (1974).
The Dying Earth Series
The Dying Earth (1950)
The Eyes of the Overworld (1966)
Cugel’s Saga (1983)
Rhialto the Marvellous (1984)
Michael Shea ‘s A Quest for Simbilis (1974).
After Fritz Leiber, the next most important author who saved Sword & Sorcery, was L. Sprague de Camp, one of Campbell’s stable of SF masters. Writing Sword & Sorcery tales in the early 1950s, set in the imaginary world of Pusad, he was the logical choice as editor and collaborator for the collected Conan stories at Gnome Press. Finishing incomplete manuscripts, converting some non-Fantasy stories (and later writing entirely new ones alongside collaborators, Lin Carter and Bjorn Nyberg) he helped to shape what would become the Conan Saga as we know it today. And though these hard covers did not change the world, they were later the basis for the Lancer paperbacks that would explode in the late 1960s.
Pusad Series
The Tritonian Ring (1951) (Two Complete Science Adventure, Winter 1951)
“The Eye of Tandyla” (Fantastic Adventures, May 1951)
“The Owl and the Ape” (Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy, November 1951)
“The Hungry Hercynian” (Universe Science Fiction, December 1953)
“The Stronger Spell” (Fantasy Fiction, November 1953)
“Ka the Appalling” (Fantastic Universe, August 1958)
“The Rug and the Bull” by L. Sprague de Camp Flashing Swords #2 (1974)
“The Stone of the Witch-Queen” by L. Sprague de Camp Weirdbook, Fall 1977
De Camp did one other favor for Sword & Sorcery. He published the first anthologies with Swords & Sorcery (1963), The Spell of Seven (1965), The Fantastic Swordsmen (1967) and Warlocks and Warriors (1970). These books were soon followed by other anthologies by Hans Stefan Santesson, Lin Carter and Robert Hoskins which brought new as well as classic S&S back into the spotlight. Without these books many fans would never have known about characters like Brak the Barbarian, Dilvish the Damned or Elric of Melnibone. By 1967 Sword & Sorcery was safe from extinction. The boom was on in Fantasy with The Lord of the Rings a hit in America, Lancer
pumping out purple-edged paperbacks, The Ballantine Fantasy Series, a popular Conan the Barbarian comic at Marvel, and many, many more imitations and innovations to follow. Love it or hate it, Sword & Sorcery was here to stay, thanks largely to the work of Clifford Ball, Henry Kuttner, Norvell W. Page, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance and L. Sprague de Camp. When Lin Carter edited the Flashing Swords books he introduced S.A.G.A. (The Swordmen and Sorcerers Guild of America) with the roll call including all of these men who were still living, to the rest he dedicated each volume. They kept the fire burning for others like Roger Zelazny, John Jakes, Michael Moorcock and a host others to take up the torch. We thank them all.
