“Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”
That is the last sentence of the short invented chronicle that opens “The Phoenix on the Sword”, the first Conan story, printed in the American pulp magazine Weird Tales in December 1932. It arrives all at once, it is far too much, and it is gone before you have quite decided whether you approve. I have had a long time to decide. I approve.
The man who wrote it was Robert E. Howard, a Texan from the small town of Cross Plains who sold his first story to Weird Tales at eighteen and spent the rest of a short life writing for the cheap fiction magazines that were printed on wood-pulp paper and sold cheaply on news-stands. Out of that trade came a kind of fantasy that had not existed before him, and which the genre has spent the last forty years forgetting how to write.
What the form was
Howard’s first attempt at it was not Conan but Kull, an exiled barbarian who has made himself a king, in “The Shadow Kingdom”, published in Weird Tales in 1929 and often called the first true sword and sorcery story. Conan followed three years later, and was such a success that Howard placed seventeen Conan stories in the magazine by 1936. He was dead in June of that year, at thirty.
The magazine paid on publication rather than on acceptance, and by 1934 it owed Howard more than fifteen hundred dollars. I gather this was a considerable hardship. I have never fully understood why a writer should need his money on any particular day, rather than whenever the house finds it convenient to settle, but I am assured by my landlady here in Barrel Town that rent, in Texas as elsewhere, falls due on a date.
What Howard built, and what others built beside him, has been described best by Lin Carter, an American writer and editor who later spent a good part of his career championing it. It is “an action tale” set “in a land, age or world of the author’s invention”, where magic works and a “stalwart warrior” is pitted “in direct conflict with supernatural evil.”
To that one need only add the things the form did not have. It had no prophecy and no chosen one. The world was not at stake, only the hero’s skin and the contents of his purse. Its heroes were thieves, mercenaries and adventurers working for pay or for spite, and the magic belonged almost entirely to the other side, so that it was something to be survived rather than studied. And it was short. A Conan story was written to be read in an evening, and it ended when the business was done.
The others at the table
Howard was not alone for long, and two of the writers who joined him were better stylists than he was.
C. L. Moore, who published under her initials, wrote “Black God’s Kiss” for Weird Tales in October 1934. Its heroine is Jirel of Joiry, a warrior who rules a castle in an imagined medieval France, and the story sends her through a secret passage beneath it into an alien otherworld, in search of a weapon against the man who has taken her castle. Jirel is generally counted the first significant heroine of sword and sorcery, and the story is still among its finest.
Fritz Leiber, an American who became one of the most decorated writers in the field, came to it through a friend. In a letter of September 1934 Harry Otto Fischer invented a pair of adventurers, a towering northern barbarian called Fafhrd and a small, sardonic city thief called the Gray Mouser, and gave them a home in the decaying city of Lankhmar. Leiber made them his own, and their first story, “Two Sought Adventure”, appeared in the magazine Unknown in August 1939. He went on writing them until 1988. He wanted heroes closer to true human nature than the ones then in fashion, and he got them: two friends who drink too much, quarrel, and come home from their adventures poorer than they set out more often than not.
The world was not at stake, only the hero's skin and the contents of his purse.
The best of them is “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, a novella written in 1970, thirty years after the pair first appeared, to tell how they met. In it two thieves cross paths robbing the same robbers, decide on the spot to be friends, try to get inside the city’s Thieves’ Guild in disguise, lose the two women they love to the sorcery of the Guild’s warlock, and fight their way back into the Guild’s house to kill him before leaving Lankhmar for good. An origin, a friendship, a grief and a revenge, at novella length. It won the Nebula Award for that year and the Hugo the next. I can think of a dozen modern trilogies that set out to do less with nine times the paper, and I have dined at too many houses where the meal ran to eleven courses when three would have sufficed.
How it got its name, and lost its shelf
The form had no settled name until 1961, when Michael Moorcock, a young British writer, demanded one in a letter to the fan magazine Amra. His own suggestion was “epic fantasy”, which history has since given to the very thing that pushed the form off the shelf. Leiber replied in another fan magazine, Ancalagon, that April, proposing “sword-and-sorcery” as “a good popular catchphrase for the field”. It stuck. That June Moorcock published “The Dreaming City”, which introduced Elric of Melniboné, a sickly albino emperor kept alive by drugs and by a black sword that drinks souls: a deliberate inversion of everything Conan was, and a sign that the form was already old enough to argue with itself.
Then came the boom. From 1966 Lancer Books, an American paperback house, reissued Howard’s Conan stories, edited and in places completed by the writer L. Sprague de Camp, under cover paintings by Frank Frazetta that are now better known than most of the stories. They became surprise bestsellers and sold millions. Carter edited five Flashing Swords! anthologies between 1973 and 1981 for a society of the form’s writers, and in 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger played Conan in John Milius’s film Conan the Barbarian.
That was the high-water mark. The film brought a decade of cheaper imitations, the paperback racks filled with barbarians who had read Howard and not much else, and by the late 1980s the form was in retreat. What replaced it on the shelf was the long epic in Tolkien’s line, a genre of maps, destinies and series, which Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara had shown in 1977 could be sold by the yard. Readers who wanted to spend a winter inside one world got what they wanted. Readers who wanted a story they could finish before bed lost theirs.
It should be said plainly that much of what was lost deserved to be. The imitators were thin, Howard himself repeats his effects and overheats his prose more often than his admirers like to admit, and a genre in which the hero’s appetite is the whole of his inner life has a short reach. But the best of it did something the epic has never learned, which is to make a reader care about a person in a few thousand words and then let them go.
Where Sword and Sorcery went
It did not die. It went to the gaming table.
When Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, published the Dungeon Masters Guide for its advanced edition in 1979, he included a reading list, now known as Appendix N, and a frank account of where his game came from: “The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt.” Tolkien is on the list. He is not among the most immediate influences. Leiber’s world was written up in one of the game’s early supplements, Deities & Demigods, and anybody who has sat at a table with a fighter, a thief and a wizard who met in a tavern and went underground for the money has played sword and sorcery, whatever the box said. The most decorated game of 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3, is built on those rules, and the problems that creates for its adaptations are the subject of Cassia Fenwarden’s piece in this issue.
The short form has lately come back the way it began, in magazines. Tales from the Magician’s Skull was launched in January 2018 by Goodman Games, whose own role-playing game, Dungeon Crawl Classics, was designed by reading through Appendix N. Its editor was Howard Andrew Jones, a novelist who spent much of his career arguing for the form and who died in January 2025. New Edge Sword & Sorcery, edited by Oliver Brackenbury, followed in 2022. Meanwhile the grimmer modern fantasy of writers such as Joe Abercrombie kept the mercenaries and the mud and dropped the brevity: The Blade Itself is the first of three.
That is the one inheritance the epic has never taken up. It has borrowed the form’s moral murk, its sell-swords and its sense that wizards are not to be trusted. It has not borrowed the discipline of ending.
The paper has argued before that fantasy leans too heavily on the prophecy. The cure was on the news-stand in 1932, and it could be read in an evening. Give me a hired sword, a sorcerer who has earned what is coming to him and enough pages to read in one sitting, and I will give you back everything the genre has since spread across three volumes. The rest is upholstery.