Editor and popular fantasy and horror writer Karl Edward Wagner rightly noted that sword and sorcery, and fantasy in general, has its roots in Earth's mythologies. The exploits of Herakles, Theseus, Rama and Hanuman, Siegfried, Aeneas, and countless others are clearly recognizable as ancestors to sword and sorcery.

To quote Wagner directly:

". . .the history of every race and culture has its legends and mythologies, preserved as formal literature or no more than oral tradition. The settings will vary, the names and pantheons are different, but the grandeur of the epic remains the same. These are tales of men and gods, of warriors and monsters, of savage battles and duels, of kingdoms and unexplored lands, of heroism and villainy, of love and hate, of triumph and tragedy, that transcend the age of their creation." (1)

Stories with heroes and monsters did not die with mythology. The Renaissance saw the rise of the great romances which Don Quixote was written to parody, so overshadowed by the man of La Mancha that most lie, probably deservedly, forgotten.

 (The best of these romances are worthy of study, however--some, like The Madness of Roland, are full of surprises, for instance, heroines who can sound and act quite modern, despite their birth from the pen of a 15th century poet, Ludovico Ariosto.)

There were odd gems like William Beckford's Vathek, an Arabic-inspired fantasy,








and the dream-like, spiritual, and often allegorial writing of George Macdonald, who inspired C.S. Lewis.

Yet the first true fantasy novel set in a world other than our own, a land that was clearly not a dream world, seems to have been the work of William Morris. Before Morris, it simply wasn't necessary to invent new worlds "because the world itself was still largely unknown, unexplored, unmapped. . .but by the 17th and 18th Centuries, it was beginning to get difficult to write wonder-tales because we knew much more about the real world, and were finding out more all the time. . . And by the 19th Century, things really got tough for the tellers of fantastic tales. . . The authors of the wonder-tale solved this problem in three ways. They turned to the remote past and wrote stories laid in the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Or they invented science fiction and found a fertile field for Marvels on the dead sea-bottoms of Mars or the mysterious caverns within the Moon, or on a planet circling a remote star. Or they invented the purely imaginary world for their own settings." (2)

William Morris

Morris (1834-1896) was one of those rare individuals who lived to influence dozens of fields. He spearheaded the arts and crafts movement, and his designs are revered to this day. He was a prominent socialist, translated Norse epics for popular consumption, and was even offered the poet laureate of England. Near the end of his life, in 1895, he created the first true novels set in a realm that was not the Earth. His languid, affected style had much to do with Sir Thomas Mallory and sounds little like the sword and sorcery which followed. Yet he cannot be overlooked in any discussion of heroic fantasy, for he was the first.

Many of his books are available today through Wildside Press.

Lord Dunsany

If Morris sounds old fashioned to modern ears--partly because his style was intentionally archaic--there is little dated about the next great fantasy writer, Lord Dunsany (1878-1957). His prose is stately and formal, but eminently readable.

Dunsany has been labeled by many as the greatest fantasy writer of all time, and almost all students of fantasy literature agree that he was the most important fantasy writer in the first half of the twentieth century. His work is a rich, heady mead, brimming with incredible vibrancy and color, compassion, humor, horror, and adventure, seasoned almost incidentally with peerless imagination. His best fantasy work probably dates from the eight slim collections of stories he published at the beginning of the twentieth century, but he authored a number of enjoyable fantasy novels besides. In general his work has more to do with heroic fantasy than true sword and sorcery, but they joyfully defy convention.

Like Morris, Dusany was a man of many gifts. Born Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, he was both a famous playwright and master chess champion, big-game hunter and Irish peer, soldier and successful novelist. To those unfamiliar with his style, he is a little something like a Ray Bradbury of fantasy. It may be that H.P. Lovecraft, one of his ardent admirers, best described the thrill of coming upon his work for the first time, capturing the exhiliration of his prose better than any short excerpt might do:

On Reading Lord Dunsany's "Book of Wonder " (3)

H.P. Lovecraft

The hours of night unheeded fly
And in the grate the embers fade;
Vast shadows one by one pass by
In silent Daemon Cavalcade.

But still the magic volume holds
The raptur'd eye in realms apart,
And fulgent sorcery enfolds
The willing mind and eager heart.

The lonely room no more is there-
For to the sight in pomp appear
Temples and cities pois'd in air
And blazing glories-sphere on sphere.

For the first time in many years Lord Dunsany's work is available through many different firms.







Through www.amazon.co.uk you can order an omnibus that collects four of Dunsany's six fantasy short story collections,






and Wildside Press has reprinted others.

E.R. Eddison

Like Morris, the next fantasy giant, E.R. Eddison, worked at translating Norse epics, even creating a standalone Viking tale of his own, Styrbiorn the Strong. His great work is a harder read than Dunsany, yet The Worm Ouroboros is worth the effort. It is layered with lyrical beauty and poetic prose, flawed yet wonderful--a sweet wine that should be slowly sipped and savored. His action is more immediate than that of Morris.

Consider the following scene, amongst one of the most celebrated sections of the novel, when the heroes Brandoch Daha and Lord Juss are climbing the height of the great mountain, Koshtra Pivrarcha.

Swinging from hold to hold across the dizzy precipice, as an ape swingeth from bough to bough, the beast drew near. The shape of it was as a lion, but bigger and taller, the colour a dull red, and it had prickles lancing out behind, as of a porcupine; its face a man's face if aught so hideous might be conceived of human kind, with staring eyeballs, low wrinkled brow, elephant ears, some wispy mangey likeness of a lion's mane, huge bony chaps, brown blood-stained gubber-tushes grinning betwixt bristly lips. Straight for the ledge it made, and as they braced them to receive it, with a great swing heaved a man's height above them and leaped down upon their ledge from aloft betwixt Juss and Brandoch Daha ere they were well aware of its changed course. (4)

This is far closer in tone to the battles of epic mythology, but not quite sword and sorcery, which is more direct and less ornate. The genre had not yet been invented. Fantasy scholars usually credit Robert E. Howard with that feat. Yet he did not create it from whole cloth.

There was yet another flavor to be added to the mix: historical fiction.

1. Wagner, Karl. "Foreword." The People of the Black Circle. Robert E. Howard. New York: Berkley. 1977.

2. Carter, Lin. "Diana's Foresters." The Young Magicians. Lin Carter, ed. New York: Ballantine. 1969.

3. Eddison, E.R. The Worm Ouroboros. New York: Ballantine. 1967 (reprint).

4. Lovecraft, H.P. "On Reading Lord Dunsany's 'Book of Wonder'." Over the Hills and Far Away. Lord Dunsany. New York: Ballantine. 1974.