Sword & Sorcery 101

A good old friend of mine, Randy Griffin, wrote to say he was enjoying this blog and wondered if I would post a list of books, places to start for someone wanting to get into sword & sorcery.

Absolutely. The core, of course, is Robert E. Howard, who mixed the historical fiction of people like Dumas and Sabatini with the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany and maybe even Eddison's THE WORM OUROBOROS to create characters like King Kull and Conan the Cimmerian. Add humor and you've got Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser (all those stories are good, though my favorite remains the one full-length novel, THE SWORDS OF LANKHMAR, reviewed earlier.)

To me, Moorcock rounds out the basic triumvirate of essential Sword & Sorcery authors, though others might disagree. Elric of Melnibone, Moorcock's anti-Conan, is unavoidable. (I'm actually a big fan of Dorian Hawkmoon as well, having just reread the series recently.)

Just reading those three will keep you busy forever, but there are plenty of other places to go. Having championed Lin Carter, I'll have to cast a vote for his Thongor, a mix of Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Henry Kuttner's ELAK OF ATLANTIS stories, and C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY, have been collected numerous times and are great.

I have been on a Karl Edward Wagner kick lately; his Kane is the main evolution in the S&S hero I can think of following Conan, F&tGM, and Elric. Wagner called his stuff "acid gothic" and claimed not to have been influence by Howard; whatever the case, I'm digging it. (NIGHT WINDS -- novellas -- is a winner; I'm halfway thru DARK CRUSADE, which is so-so so far, and haven't read BLOODSTONE yet, though it's perched right here by my elbow.)

All the above is just the tip of the iceberg. You'll have to dig around and figure out what you like. I loved James Enge's BLOOD OF AMBROSE and can't wait for payday so I can order the sequel (one more week!) And I can't pass on mentioning two favorites, Tim Powers' THE DRAWING OF THE DARK and P.C. Hodgell's GOD STALK, which is set in my second favorite fantasy city ever, Tai-Tastigon (second only of course to Leiber's Lankhmar.)

In my to-be-read stack? Charles Saunders' IMARO; David Gemmell's LEGEND; George R.R. Martin's A GAME OF THRONES; and a couple of Warhammer omnibuses that looked pretty good, Nathan Long's BLACKHEARTS and C.L. Werner's MATHIAS THULMANN: WITCH HUNTER. (I am a big Solomon Kane fan, and just saw Vincent Price in "Witch Finder," aka "The Conquerer Worm," so I can see where Werner's headed with this one!)

Anyway, that's it. Any suggestions out there? Randy, does that help?

Solomon Kane

I assume the impending Solomon Kane movie is of more interest to us than anything since the original "Conan the Barbarian," 27 years ago. I have read rave reviews of it and screaming bashes. The previews, of course, look amazing.

There are two ways the movie can go wrong; one is that it isn't true to the original material, and the second is that it just sucks as a movie.

For a certain group of people -- purists -- if a movie doesn't hew closely to the source material, it's wrong. I take it from reviews that the movie gives Kane a sort of redemption motivation lacking in the original Howard series of stories.

Personally, I don't have a lot of problem with that, as presented. Howard's Kane is kind of a static character, described (in the Wikipedia entry on him) as "a somber-looking man who wanders the world with no apparent goal other than to vanquish evil in all its forms." Certainly fine for a short story series character, but one imagines even Howard would have fleshed out his background had he tackled Kane at novel length.

The other way the movie can go wrong is if it simply blows. Maybe it does. The Internet Movie Database gives it 8.5 stars out of 10. Rotten Tomatoes doesn't have a rating yet but the few remarks there were positive.

Prediction: if you're not up on Solomon Kane, you'll dig the movie. If you are a hardcore REH fan, you'll pick it apart. If you have a tolerance for screen adaptations, I'll bet it's great. I will be there as soon as it comes to town, myself.