Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

Furthermore, Howard’s contemporary Clark Ashton Smith is notable for his own contribution to the genre, not the least of which were his own Hyperborean tales, set, like Howard’s, in a lost mythical age. In this case, though, his Hyperborea was an Arctic continent, the last gasps of a civilization facing the encroachment of an Ice Age. By peopling them with sorcerers and strange deities, Smith seemed to merge the worlds of Robert E. Howard with that of the third great writer from this era of Weird Tales, their friend H. P. Lovecraft.

Come the 1960s, however, the sword and sorcery genre, with the exception of Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales, had waned in popularity, until writer Lin Carter crafted the first successful ongoing series in imitation of Howard’s Conan. Carter’s Thongor series, beginning with The Wizard of Lemuria in 1965, blended Howard’s barbarian with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Set across the lost continent of Lemuria, they featured magic, flying machines, and mankind’s attempts to throw off the shackles of a serpentine race of “Dragon Kings.” Carter’s Thongor tales diminished, however, when he was recruited by L. Sprague de Camp to assist in a Conan revival.

De Camp had contributed his own notable sword and sorcery in the 1950s. His Pusadian series was an attempt to write in a Hyperborean setting that paid more attention to what was then known about the geology of the earth. But beginning in the 1950s, though primarily in the 1960s, de Camp began to work to republish the existing Conan tales, as well as to publish the many Howard-penned Conan stories unpublished in the author’s lifetime. In the aforementioned collaboration with Lin Carter, he worked to popularize Howard and bring him back into print. Adding their own contributions to the mythos, de Camp and Carter rewrote many of Howard’s unpublished non-Conan tales as new exploits of the Cimmerian. This led to a boom in Conan’s popularity, with the character spilling out into new novels, comic books, and even film, though a 1983 biography of Howard, penned by de Camp and titled Dark Valley Destiny: the Life of Robert E. Howard, had the unintended consequence of refocusing attention on Howard’s undiluted Conan, with de Camp and Carter’s additions and alterations dwindling in public favor.

Sword and sorcery wouldn’t officially be labeled as its own subgenre until 1961, however, when Michael Moorcock published a letter in the fanzine Amra, demanding that the type of swashbuckling adventure story pioneered by Howard be given a name. Ironically, Moorcock originally proposed the term “epic fantasy,” a label that has since come to be applied to the other side of the coin, that of J. R. R. Tolkien and his successors. But Fritz Leiber christened the subgenre when he wrote in the July 1961 issue of Amra, “I feel more certain than ever that this field should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story—and (quite incidentally) from the cloak-and-dagger (international espionage) story too!”