I once taught junior high school, which is as exhilarating and demanding a task as any sword-and-sorcery hero ever faced. Teaching was my first experience with junior high students since I had been one, and I learned some amazing things about them when I looked at them through adult eyes. First, I found that young teens know what they love—honestly love, as opposed to what the pop-culture gods force-feed them—and love it without reservations. They don't care what other people, especially adults, might think of their tastes. They scorn 'knowledgeable' criticism. Second, I discovered that they dream grand dreams without worrying about big business buzzwords like 'productivity,' 'efficiency,' or 'practicality.' They wonder why adults, who apparently have so much more power and freedom than they do, chain themselves up to such bunk. Whenever adults intrude on their unusual world, teens sneer at them: "You just don't get it." Well, I asked myself after two years of teaching junior high schoolers, what if the adults really don't get it?

And this made me think about the literary elites who look at fantasy, and sword-and-sorcery in particular, and snipe that "it's just junk for thirteen-year-old boys."

That's possible. But what if the thirteen-year-old boys are right?

Leaving the children out of the argument for the moment, let's harken to the words of the wise scribe Klarkash-Ton, who knew something about scoffers who turn up their sharp noses at the mention of 'fantasy':

We have been told that literature dealing with the imaginative and fantastic is out of favour among the Intellectuals, whoever they are. Only the Real, whatever that is or may be, is admissible for treatment…. Chimeras are no longer the model, the infinite has been abolished; mystery is obsolete, and sphinx and medusa are toys for children…One may write of horses and hippopotami but not of hippogriffs; of biographers, but not of ghouls; of slum-harlots or the hetairae of Nob Hill but not succubi….all pipe-dreams, all fantasies not authorized by Freudianism, by sociology, and the five senses, are due for the critical horse-laugh, when, through ignorance, effrontery, or preference, they find a place in the subject matter of some author unlucky enough to have been born into the age of Jeffers, Hemingway, and Joyce.

Klarkash-Ton, better known by the name of his earthly avatar 'Clark Ashton Smith,' was born in the age of Jeffers, Hemingway, and Joyce. The majority of us who read his words must count ourselves extra unlucky, since we were born into the age of Oprah's Book Club, The Bridges of Madison County, and some hideous entity known as 'reality television.' Smith wrote at a time when fantasy literature was a field so small that it was possible to read everything available (if you knew where to hunt for it). We find ourselves in a different situation. Today fantasy and science fiction surround us: popular movies, entire walls of bookstores, fan clubs, the internet (speak of the devil!), comic books, first-person shooter videogames, and the boob tube (in between reality shows, of course). And yet, Klarkash-Ton's words still have disturbing poignancy and accuracy. Fantasy and its sister-genre science fiction still exist as a kind of gutter trash for the literati and their acolytes, the 'serious' college students, to sneer at.

But more people than just literary dilettantes have a dim view of the literature of the fantastic. Average readers who rip through mainstream bestsellers would never consider picking up a volume of even the most popular fantasy novel. High school English teachers would rather students write papers on The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and "Billy Budd" by Herman Melville than The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett or Swords and Ice Magic by Fritz Leiber (hell, anything with "Sword" in the title—fuhgeddaboutit!). Teachers assume that any student who tries to use a genre novel as a subject is really trying to duck doing real work. Proponents of back-to-the-basics education condemn classes on science fiction and fantasy as useless 'slacker' offerings. And among the sub-species of fantasy one in particular causes shivery revulsion from the literary bluebloods: sword-and-sorcery. Even broad-minded people who allow some recognition of fantasy still flinch at the mention of this sub-genre, although they may have no concrete idea what the term means. To them it sound likes that Dungeons & Dragons garbage; the only people who read that stuff are pimply kids who can't get dates.

Why this antagonism toward the fantastic and the complete rejection of sword-and-sorcery? Do these people just not like sharp, pointy objects? Do they feel embarrassed trying to pronounce words like 'Xaltotun' and 'Fafhrd'? Perhaps they've confused simple fairytales (which Freud and Joseph Campbell have taught us are never simple) with complex fantasy literature? All these reasons might underlay the critical attacks, although the critics never would say so outright. Most of the time they mount their assaults against the seriousness of the genre. They claim that, in some nebulous way, fantasy is deficient because it does not confront readers with serious issues or conflicts relevant to the intricacies of modern life and the human condition. To boil the argument down to its imprecise essence: fantasy lacks messages of any merit and exists purely as literature of entertainment instead of literature of ideas, fit only for children.

I'll step back here and let one of the masters of mainstream literary criticism have his say. Edmund Wilson, a man who championed William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and was pals with Vladimir Nabokov, reasoned that a minor novel called The Lord of the Rings was popular because "certain people—especially, perhaps, in Britain have a life-long appetite for juvenile trash" (The Nation, 14 April 1956). There you have it: fantasy is just for the dumb teens.

Why let Edmund Wilson and the professional critics have all the fun? Here's an average anonymous reader from Amazon.com regarding the same book: "I tried and tried again to get through these books in their entirety but haven't been able to do it. Who wants to read about this stuff anyway? The answer is: WEIRDOS! Stay away not only from these books, but from the people who read them." To keep balance, here's a quotation from a professed 'fantasy fan': "I just got an impression the whole way through that the books were written for children, with a whole bunch of pretty words thrown in to please the adults who get off feeling smart reading intellectual gibberish."

Juvenile…literary gibberish…children…weirdoes (notice the correct spelling)…trash. We hear the same themes over and over again from the whole spectrum of critics.

Hogwash, balderdash, and pig slop. If the curmudgeons who make such assertions have any sense of self-examination they know how ludicrous and elitist (not to mention vague) this argument sounds, and how wrong it is on even cursory examination. Fantasy literature not only contains ideas, it contains ideas writ larger than our own modern lives can handle. (In fact, more knowledgeable critics of speculative fiction often use the reverse criticism that the genre too often lets unskilled writers overwhelm character and style with a flood of ideas; neophyte writers of sword-and-sorcery often have this problem.) To dismiss fantasy as empty and containing nothing except a quick-fix thrill is to ignore the truth, the kind of critiquing that people who have never bothered to read fantasy use in their arguments. Good literature always contains worthwhile themes, regardless of the topic or subject. In sword-and-sorcery you can find a lot of poor work, but in the exact same percentage to quality work that you would find in any genre. However, the poor work in sword-and-sorcery stands out and draws more glaring attention to itself. You would expect this from such a physical and demonstrative genre. The failures of the bad should not distract us from the merits of the good.

But hollow as the typical argument against fantasy is, it has inflicted serious damage on readers, turning them into their own worst enemies: self-hating speculative fiction fans. These poor souls have learned to mistrust their own taste and must excuse their reading habits to themselves and others. These are the fans who dismiss their favorite books as nothing more than time-passers or mindless 'escapism,' which is a way of excusing themselves for picking them up in the first place.

I don't see much purpose in defending the whole of fantasy on the level of whether it contains worthwhile ideas or themes. I prefer to defend the ideas on a case-by-case basis, for example arguing that Howard's best Conan adventure, "Queen of the Black Coast," has as much intriguing complexity as Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. (And which story would you rather read?) But there exists a much more potent, general argument against the critics both inside and outside the genre of fantasy and its most vibrant child, sword-and-sorcery. And it brings me back to the junior high school kids, the ones whom the wise told us are pimply and dateless, and therefore—for some reason—unqualified to judge what they like. One junior high school kid in particular: me.

I have stood on both sides of the cultural fence that keeps 'mainstream' literature separate from genre fantasy, and I can shed some light on what I learned when I climbed over that barrier. Unlike many fans of speculative fiction, I did not fall in love with the genre until I was a fully declared 'adult' in my early twenties. When I was a pimply kid who couldn't get a date, I had a dim view of fantasy. By age thirteen I had made myself into a literary snob who dismissed what those other thirteen-year-olds liked …even the ones with clear skin who claimed they got dates. My favorite novel may have been The Lord of the Rings (it still is), but I didn't want to know from any other fantasy novel, or that silly sci-fi drivel. I knew, because intelligent adults had told me so, that science fiction and fantasy never contained great writing or developed characters. And sword-and-sorcery? Puh-leeeze! Dumb brawny guys slaughtering monsters while chicks in bronze brassieres screech and cower. All crap. I had important literature to read, thank you very much; I had greatness to aspire to. I wasn't sure what greatness exactly, but I knew I couldn't achieve greatness if I spent my formative years reading about guys with swords hacking each other up in order to rescue a princess. Never mind if that's the plot of the Iliad…that's a classic. That's different.

But this narrow-minded resolve started to crumble when I entered college. I took the dictum "question authority" too literally. I started to question the very authority that demanded that I question authority. After two years of playing of the 'smart college guy' role, I stumbled upon the dark corners of American literature—the pulp magazines—and loved what I saw oozing from those shadowy niches. First I started with the hard-boiled detective masters, then the corral of Astounding Science Fiction writers, and then I moved to Weird Tales, where I first met sword-and-sorcery in a head-on collision with Robert E. Howard and his mighty-thewed heroes Conan and Kull. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the freedom that Howard breathed into me during those last days of college prepared me to face the outside world. The bloody rush of Howard's prose, the intensity of his feelings, the sheer imagination that imagined for its own sake, and without limits or rules imposed on it… in all of that I saw the rest of the world, "The Whole Wide World" (if you'll forgive a reference to Dan Ireland's excellent Robert E. Howard biopic) spreading out before me at the edges of the sheltered academic world. While other students rushed to the library and bookstores to hunt down a list of authors that Maya Angelou had commanded them to find during her convocation speech, I dug through lists of pulp writers and tracked down paperbacks of H. P. Lovecraft (who, at the time, had hit a publishing lull).

Based on this redemption I experienced, I am about to make a grand argument for the importance of fantasy literature. I know I may lose a few of you when I say this (hopefully not many, since you are visiting an online site called Sword and Sorcery of your own free will). But here it is: fantasy, and sword-and-sorcery in particular, is beneficial for the health of the human mind.

Now, while you start questioning my mental health (I'm fine, really; the medication has done wonders), take a look at those thirteen-year-olds. Provided they don't come from abusive backgrounds or suffer from medical disorders, children have superior mental health compared to adults. Everyone knows that children have an incredible ability to snap back from tragedies and to endure hardships. When problems seem too great for them, they just ignore them. They dwell in the here-and-now, they take most of life on a case-by-case basis. Children have no inherent prejudices; they must learn these from adults. Children don't end up on psychologists' couches talking about wasted dreams, failed ambitions, inabilities to connect with others; you will only find adults talking about this. The psychological construction of the child's mind is stronger than the adult's. The adult brain can handle more information, but it seems far less equipped to deal with life than the child's does.

The world slowly grinds the free-willed healthy child into the restricted neurotic adult who believes that, once he or she is older, there is no point in writing or reading about hippogriffs, succubi, and unicorns. The adult dismisses such things as 'childish' and hands the medusas and the chimeras to the kids to play with. But the issue, I believe, goes even deeper. It isn't so much that adults aren't allowed to write or read about hippogriffs, succubi, and their kind, as Clark Ashton Smith claimed; it's that most of them can't write or read about them. Their unhealthy minds cannot handle such concepts anymore. In the process of growing up in this era of rapid information exchange, ad creep, spam, and (alas) reality television, making the escape from their own minds into the worlds beyond has turned close to impossible.

But they must find that escape route. Mystery author Raymond Chandler once observed: "All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings."

Aye, there's the rub! Literature of 'escape' and 'escapism,' nasty pejoratives we've heard before to dismiss fantasy as nothing but a drug to dull the senses from what's really import, is actually the most crucial kind of literature. And since sword-and-sorcery, the most wild and imaginative variant of the imaginative fantasy genre, offers worlds so far removed from the deadly rhythms that our technocratic world imprints on our brains, it follows that sword-and-sorcery must be one of the most vital and necessary types of writing for the sanity of the human mind. Sword-and-sorcery allows the information held in the adult mind to fuse with dream-like acceptance of the child's mind.

In other words, the thirteen-year-olds are right. Reading tales of the fantastic transforms us back into dreaming children who love without reservation and can resist the grinding banality of the bureaucratized world where all that seems to matter is paying taxes and scraping together enough money to pay taxes again next year. To change our minds into the mode of the child does not mean that we lose our adult intelligence, but that we regain our free minds. Our thoughts expand and our intelligence has more to work with then it had before. We do not become innocent; (have you ever met an innocent thirteen-year-old? be honest) we become more accepting, and more aware. Saying that reading sword-and-sorcery reduces you to childhood is looking in the wrong direction; it brings childhood up to the adult. Wouldn't you love to stand up to the annoyances and de-humanizations of our world shout: "You just don't get it!"

But, as I mentioned before, this is a tough task in this age. Lovers of fantasy must act as iconoclasts, rebels, breakers of tradition, daring thinkers of their own thoughts in the midst of a society that praises group-think. Fantasy readers do not think outside the box; they rethink the whole box! Since everyone else is used to the box, such attitudes seem frightening and dangerous to many. Good. Be frightening. Be dangerous. A sword-and-sorcery reader and writer must play Winston Smith to the Big Brother of mainstream tastes. But this time, Smith doesn't have to lose. He doesn't have to have a victory over himself. He can still love fantasy. He can still write read of hippogriffs, ghouls, and succubi.

I still do. I read of them, I write of them, I dream of them. For this I can thank Robert E. Howard and the people who followed the same path of bold, lusty, and sometimes dark dreams. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clark Ashton Smith, A. Merritt, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, C. L. Moore, and too many others to name, turned me today into the thirteen-year-old that I somehow missed being the first time around.

That is the true gift of sword-and-sorcery: it isn't merely entertainment…it's tonic for your wearied mind, and freedom for it as well.

(If you still want to commit me to the loony-bin, I will go willingly. But you have to let me take my Robert E. Howard books with me into my padded cell.)

About the Author

Ryan Harvey is the Managing editor of Sword and Sorcery. He has lived most of his life in Los Angeles, although he attended Carleton College in Minnesota where he studied Medieval History, Classical Islam, and Film. He considers himself a full-fledged writer, with three completed novels, but has supplemented his income at various times as a speed reading instructor, reading development teacher, and magazine copyeditor. When not absorbing mounds of science fiction and fantasy literature and indulging in pulp, he swing dances wearing bizarre 1930s clothing. He also maintains his own website: The Realm of Ryan.