If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by the Swords of Fire anthology series, with the fourth book due in Summer of 2026. Like the three previous collections, this one will feature four longer Sword & Sorcery adventures with one being “The Dragon God”, a Sirtago & Poet tale set in a country much like Japan. This is by Jack Mackenzie, of course. There is also the next adventure of Bradik the Slayer by M. D. Jackson, “the Star of Kanshalsus”. One of the other two tales is a new Arthan the Bear Man story, “The Twilight War” featuring an army of mercenaries versus giant spiders. And to round out the four, “Between the Dragon and His Wrath” by Will Parker. For the previous anthologies, go here.
The 1970s was the decade when Sword & Sorcery came of age. The excitement started in the 1960s but it took ten years for the sub-genre to really start hitting above its weight class. There were still some high points left for the 1980s which will jump he shark with Arnie playing Conan in the movies. The 1970s was the first decade to support comics, new paperback novels, shared world anthologies and Fantasy role-playing games. There was a lot more to spend your quarters on between 1970 and 1979. And there is just no way we can do it all, so here are ten (of many) firsts in the 1970s.
First Long-Running S&S Comic Book
Conan the Barbarian started in October 1970 with Roy Thomas as writer and Barry Windsor-Smith as artist. A little shaky at first, it found an audience quickly and just kept gaining speed. Stan Lee admitted to Roy that he didn’t “get it” as a concept but trusted Thomas’s judgement. (I find this a little hard to swallow as Conan fighting a monster versus The Hulk fighting a monster is pretty much the same thing on a story level, but whatever. That’s how Roy remembers it.) The comic would run for decades and spawn other publications like Savage Sword of Conan in black & white. The foundational S&S comic now exists and parodies and critics weren’t slow to follow.
Classic S&S Series Get a Make-Over: Fafhrd & Grey Mouser, Brak, Thongor, Elric
Fafhrd & Grey Mouser were born in the late 1930s. Brak, Thongor and Elric in the 1960s. With the success of paperbacks over at Lancer, other Fantasy authors felt it was time to collect, edit, introduce and otherwise “make-up” their scattered series into nice orderly collections with great covers by Jeff Jones. Thus the fan of the Conan Lancers could now collect these other great characters. Fritz Leiber got to organize what had been a messy series into books that began with the word “Swords”. Thongor got two rewrites from the earlier 1960s ACE paperbacks and four sequels. Elric was a little slower but with The Sailor on the Sea of Fate (1976), Michael Moorcock drew all of his characters into one series, a multiverse where Elric was only one avatar of a super character.
S&S Wins a Hugo
Sword & Sorcery and adventure fiction in general don’t win awards. (Not unless someone makes up a Hack’N’Slash award for heroic fantasy. Why haven’t we?) This trend came to an end in 1971 when Fritz Leiber won the 1970 Nebula Award and the 1971 Hugo Award for “Ill-Met in Lankhmar” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1970). Where the story appeared certainly didn’t hurt, as F&SF was a prestigious publication at that time. In 1969, Larry Niven’s “Not Long Before the End” (Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1969), took S&S to task for its tropes much as Harlan Ellison’s “Delusion For a Dragonslayer” (Knight, September 1966) had earlier. Fritz showed them all. Sword & Sorcery can win.
S&S Rock’N’Roll Led Zeppelin, Hawkwind, Uriah Heap
Fantasy tropes in rock music was one of the reasons the 1970s was a very cool time to be alive. (Viet Nam, the Energy Crisis and disco not withstanding.) One of the first to do this was Led Zeppelin with references to Gollum in “Ramble On” (1969) and Ringwraiths in “The Battle of Evermore” (1971). Other bands did entire fantasy-themed albums like Uriah Heap’s The Magician’s Birthday (1972) and Hawkwind’s The Warrior on the Edge of Time (1975) featuring Michael Moorcock. Not to everybody’s taste but prog rockers seemed to be drawn to it, with bands like Yes using the artwork of Roger Dean on their album covers and singing of wondrous stories.
S&S Parody at Novel length
Parodies of Sword & Sorcery were not new in the 1970s but they were many. John Jakes, author of the Brak the Barbarian series, wrote the first novel-length poke-in the eye. The Bored of the Rings (1969) by the Harvard Lampoon took on epic Fantasy but Jakes specifically targets S&S with Mention My Name in Atlantis (1972). This tale of Conax the Barbarian has all the usual tropes along with some rather confusing UFO stuff, another hot topic in the 1970s. It’s not a great book, but a weird counterpoint to Brak.
First S&S Anthology of New Novellas
In 1973, Lin Carter reinvented the S&S anthology which L. Sprague deCamp created as early as 1963. Carter’s Flashing Swords would feature only new novellas of at least 15,000 words. Carter had lots of great friends so these anthologies are star-studded affairs with Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, Andre Norton, John Jakes and Michael Moorcock for the first two. Later volumes added newer authors. What these novellas did was grow the series by these authors, with Jack Vance adding to the Dying Earth, Poul Anderson’s world of The Broken Sword, Leiber’s Lankhmar, Norton’s Witch World and de Camp’s Incorporated Knight universe. Sadly, Carter’s own additions in these books were the weakest. (One of the first two volumes had Frank Frazetta’s original Death Dealer painting, which had a life of its own, even becoming the official mascot of the U. S. Marines.)
S&S RPG
1974 is an important year for Fantasy fiction. Why 1974? because it was the official release of Dungeons & Dragons by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The role-playing game changed very little and yet some very important foundational things. The game brought the world of Tolkien’s elves to Robert E. Howard’s barbarians, and mixed them. Anyone writing Fantasy after 1974 had to navigate both of these giants where before that date, it was one or the other. Sounds kinda trivial but it wasn’t. AD&D truly made heroic fantasy of both camps one generic thing.
Now before we cry too much for our lost innocence, let’s also acknowledge that AD&D and later other games like Tunnels & Trolls, Pathfinder and many others for the good they did. The young fans of these games would grow up to become the new writers of heroic fantasy. Writers like Raymond E. Feist, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Steve Erikson, Margret Weis & Tracy Hickman, R. A. Salvatore and others began their imaginings in games then books. I can say this was the case for myself too, but not in Fantasy but Horror, being inspired by the Call of Cthulhu game.
First S&S Parody Comics
Since Conan the Barbarian didn’t appear until 1970, the Conan parodies had to wait too. (For Conan parodies, go here.) There were bits and pieces in the undergrounds like “Testicles the Tautologist” in Skull Comics #3, 1971, but it was the long-running Cerebus the Aardvark that rose above mere nastiness to a comic of actual content. Dave Sim, Canadian comics creator, began his own comic line, Aardvark Press to sell the adventures of an earth-pig reborn. This was largely possible because of the new Direct Sales model that allowed thousands of comic shops to appear across North America. You didn’t have to sell to Marvel or DC anymoe. You could do your own thing if people would buy it. The parody elements of Cerebus, based on the original Barry Windsor-Smith Conan faded as time went by, morphing into superhero parody and later Sim’s own take on politics . But before that happened, we got great characters like Elrod of Melvinbone, Red Sophia and Bran Mak Muffin.
S&S RPG Novel Andre Norton
The 1970s also saw the first RPG novel (I guess we can’t use the term LitRPG yet?). It wasn’t the 198os cartoon Dungeons & Dragons that did it first but Fantasy Grandmaster, Andre Norton. After a few game sessions in 1978 with Gary Gygax, she wrote Quag Keep, a tale of young adults in our world who are drawn into a fantasy RPG world. Jean Rabe and Norton wrote a sequel in 2006, Return to Quag Keep. This first attempt to write such a novel may seem clunky beside more modern examples, but remember Norton was sixty-two when she wrote this book. How many authors of that age would attempt such a newfangled idea?
First Shared World S&S
1979, just at the close of our decade, saw the first Thieves’ World volume published. Edited by Robert Lynn Aspirin and Lynn Abbey, it proposed a brave idea: create a fantasy world and let many writers create within it and share characters and locations. (An idea that borrows from RPGs.) Twelve volumes would follow to 1989 then a revival in 2002 for two more. Along with the fourteen collections were standalone novels by Janet Morris and others, a comic book and fat Science Fiction Book Club omnibuses. The idea was so popular it spawn a few others like Andre Norton and Robert Adams’ Ithkar and Emma Bull and Will Shetterly’s Liavek. None achieved the success of Thieves’ World, but the concept of the shared world remains. We did our own in The Devil’s Defile: Tales From Devil’s Gulch, a Weird Western shared world.
Conclusion
I know I left many things out. I may have to do another ten. Things like the first derivative Fantasy bestseller with Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara. The first Tolkien calendar by the Brothers Hildebrandt. DAW Books begins operation in 1972. The first collection of paintings in The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta. The first animated Sword & Sorcery cartoon in Wizards. Also the first Hobbit cartoon from Rankin-Bass. The first American magazine of European S&S and Sci-Fi, Heavy Metal. The first pastiche novels of a Robert E. Howard other than Conan. The list goes on and on. The 1970s was the bang that followed the lit fuse of the 1960s. During that decade, those in the know had their Lancer paperbacks, their Eerie comic strips, their underground comics. In the 1970s, Sword & Sorcery went mainstream. The Children of Conan could no longer be ignored.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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