This month RAGE machine Books is all about Sword & Sorcery. Jack Mackenzie has released his first of two collections about Sirtago & Poet, Blades & Alchemy. G. W. Thomas has continued his Bearshirt Series with The Beacon House and Other Stories, the fifth in the Arthan the Bear man saga (along with a free download from this book, “Green With Envy”). Both of these authors are Bronze Age Boys who grew up on purple-edge Lancer paperbacks and Savage Sword of Conan. Our commitment to publishing new works of Sword & Sorcery has produced three volumes in the Swords of Fire anthologies (with a fourth later this year). Heroic Fantasy is an action-packed sub-genre of Fantasy, that offers thrills but also dark worlds of the fantastic. We hope our books will satisfy that craving for the old-school crowd as well as new fans of the genre.
This post is the first of a series on “The Firsts” of Sword & Sorcery, fiction, films, comics, all of it. Do you know what the first true S&S tale was? When Conan made his debut? Who painted the first cover? Etc. Well, that’s what this one is all about, beginning in the Pulps where Sword & Sorcery was born. We will focus on 1929 to 1939.
First Sword & Sorcery Story
“The Shadow Kingdom” by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, August 1929) Fans of Robert E. Howard know that REH created Solomon Kane first with “Red Shadows” (Weird Tales, August 1928) but tales of the wandering Puritan were never quite Sword & Sorcery. They lacked the right setting to be included here. It was when REH applied the same kind of story to a mythological milieu, that of Atlantean times, that we get King Kull, the first S&S hero and his first adventure “The Shadow Kingdom”. This was also the first Howard story to be grafted into the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft with its Serpent Men. Nobody had any idea that a new sub-genre of Fantasy had been born. Kull didn’t even get the cover. That went to Gaston Leroux. Just a side note: the first Sword & Sorcery illustration also appeared here, by Hugh Rankin, who would go on to draw many Conan illos. (REH felt Hugh made Conan look too Latinesque. Conan was a proto-Celtic dude.)
First Sword & Sorcery Cover
“The Dark Man” by Robert E. Howard, painting by Curtis Charles Senf (Weird Tales, December 1931) This C. C. Senf cover is his usual thing, not very fantastical really. The story features Celt Turlough O’Brien discovering a statue of Bran Mak Morn, that calls the Picts to help in fighting some raiding Vikings. It’s too bad the artist hadn’t been J. Allen St. John, who had just finished a run of Otis Adelbert Kline covers.
First Conan Story
Conan is the superstar of S&S so it is appropriate we point out his origin over characters like Kull or Bran Mak Morn. “Phoenix on the Sword” by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, December 1932) was Conan’s first appearance but it wasn’t an easy birth. The tale started out as a Kull story called “By This Axe I Rule” that Adventure rejected then Weird Tales rejected. Thus ended Kull’s career and Conan’s began. REH revised the piece, setting it in the Hyborian Age and adding the first Hyborian Age monster. Jayem Wilcox gets the kudos for drawing the first image of Conan, too, showing the Hyena-Demon of Stygia. Oddly, Conan is holding an ax, not the phoenix-emblazoned sword.
First Conan Cover
“Black Colossus” (Weird Tales, June 1933) by Margaret Brundage. That first Conan tale didn’t get the cover but the next one did and many that followed. These were done by pastel artist, Margaret Brundage. In many ways, she set the pattern for future Fantasy art. Plenty of nekkid girls along with some hint of magic or torture. Brundage is consider kitschy by non-fans but loved by S&S fans. She is a forerunner to the Frank Frazettas of the 1960s and 1970s.
First S&S Fanzine Story
Fanzines and small press magazines would become the resting place of S&S after the professional magazines moved on. But long before the 1990s, fanzines were involved. “Gods of the North” by Robert E. Howard (Fantasy Fan, March 1934) was the first Sword & Sorcery tale to appear outside Weird Tales. It was rejected by Farnsworth Wright, perhaps because of the rapy elements or because it was too light on plot. Charles D. Hornig snapped it up for free when REH offered it to him. The story would get a re-do as “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” under L. Sprague de Camp’s editorial fingers and become a Conan story later. The original version got a comic rendition here.
First Female S&S character
Perhaps the most iconic female warrior in Sword & Sorcery is Red Sonja, a Roy Thomas comic book character from the 1970s based on various REH characters. Long before Red there was Jirel of Joiry from “Black God’s Kiss” by C. L. Moore (Weird Tales, October 1934) and several sequels. Catherine Moore was the first writer to pen a Sword & Sorcery tale other than REH. She, of course, chose a female lead. No steel bikinis here but Moore does make Jirel sexy and powerful and fascinating. She also does a lot of dimensional hopping, being a portal Fantasy character of sorts. She would even team up with Moore’s other famous character, Space Opera hero, Northwest Smith. (Nictzin Dyalhis beat her to the first S&S dimensional hop in “The Sapphire Goddess”, Weird Tales, February 1934.)
First Fan Legacy
P. Schuyler Miller corresponds with Robert E. Howard (March 10, 1936) about Conan’s career and a supposed outline. Howard kindly responded with a confirmation and a map that has become iconic for anyone who owns Conan paperbacks. Miller, who was a writer in his own right, solidifies a Howard fandom that began in the letter column known as “The Eyrie” in Weird Tales but would go onto include fanzines like Amra, many scholar books and a host of fans hungry for all things REH.
First S&S Novel
The Hour of the Dragon by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, Dec 1935/Jan/Feb/Mar/Apr 1936) Sword & Sorcery was dominated by the short story. It would be throughout the Pulp era. The 1980s would change that. Howard only wrote this one Conan novel, and might have done more if he hadn’t died so young. Again, written in hopes of selling it to Adventure, it reflects REH’s love of Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb. It is the first Heroic Fantasy novel written since E. R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses (1935). The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien would be the next important piece in 1937.
First S&S Pastiche
“Duar the Accursed” (Weird Tales, May 1937) was the first of three stories by young writer, Clifford Ball. Ball, in this tale, borrows from Howard and writes the first pastiche tale. Henry Kuttner would follow shortly after, and do a much better job, but the barn door was open. Howard was gone and fans of swords and monsters wanted more. C. L. Moore may technically precede Ball but she was working as an equal, not a follower of Howard. There is a slight difference here. The many S&S tales of characters like Brak, Kothar, and others are on the horizon.
First Campbell-style S&S
Flame Winds by Norvell W. Page (Unknown, June 1939) was the first novel written for John W. Campbell’s Unknown, a new kind of fantasy magazine. Campbell felt Fantasy could stick to hard-and-fast rules like Science Fiction did. With Robert E. Howard gone, Weird Tales dropping S&S for pure Horror only, Campbell had a chance to change the direction of Fantasy. Stories like the tales of Harold Shea, that poked fun at old Mythologies, typified the new attitude. (Imagine if Robert E. Howard had been inspired by Mark Twain instead of Harold Lamb!) JWC would later solidify his methods in “The Elder Gods” (Unknown, October 1939) but it was Pulp master, Norvell W. Page, author of the Spider novels, that got to try out this new attitude first with two novels about Wan Tengri. Campbell’s style of Heroic Fantasy would be continued on by L. Sprague de Camp in the years to come. When these two novels were adapted by Marvel Comics in Conan the Barbarian, Roy Thomas had to add monsters.
First S&S Buddy Tale
“Two Sought Adventure” (aka “The Jewels in the Forest”) by Fritz Leiber (Unknown, August 1939) was non-Campbell Sword & Sorcery in Unknown. Originally conceived for Weird Tales, Farnsworth Wright rejected the series as the magazine was changing gears. Wright would leave soon after and die from surgery, leaving Dorothy McIlwraith to run the show. Leiber was forced to look for another magazine for his new buddy heroes, Fafhrd & Gray Mouser. Campbell was no fool. He openly said the stories were really Weird Tales stuff but he took them anyway. Leiber reinvented the sub-genre with his sassy pair of rogues, inspired by writers like E. R. Eddison and James Branch Cabell, Fritz brought a new energy to Sword & Sorcery that rippled through the years to come…
Conclusion
In this first age of Sword & Sorcery, it is startling how fragile the new sub-genre is. If no one had followed Robert E. Howard after his death, then Pulp Heroic Fantasy might have been like so many other stories long forgotten. (For example, who really misses the Lefty Feep style of “Science Fiction”? I like Robert Bloch’s work but don’t miss Feep particularly. The Pulps were full of such series, popular for a blink of an eye but now relegated to the history books.) Sword & Sorcery proved to be more robust. It did have centuries of myths and legends behind it. But the next challenge isn’t finding its way through the Pulps but surviving the Fantasy desert known as the 1950s where Science Fiction will rule the roost.
Next time: 10 Firsts from the 1950s
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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