In the October 1939 issue of Unknown, editor John W. Campbell published a story called “The Elder Gods” by Don A. Stuart. Though not an especially well-remembered tale, (he co-wrote the piece with an uncredited Arthur J. Burks) it served one purpose splendidly. It set the rules for Campbell’s version of Heroic Fantasy. In the story a man named Daron is charged with challenging the gods themselves. The final effect of his quest is humanity breaks with unearthly beings and become rationalists. This was Campbell’s ideology and he passed it along to the other Sword & Sorcery writers in Unknown. With the exception of Fritz Leiber, who did his own wonderful thing, it was the manifesto of the magazine. Write Fantasy as it were Science Fiction.
Not everyone agreed with Campbell, as Poul Anderson proved in 1951 when he published The Broken Sword, a novel set in a Scandinavian world with elves and trolls. (Later in 1953, he did followed Campbell’s ideas in Three Hearts & Three Lions, but oh well…) Another of Campbell’s acolytes was L. Sprague de Camp who would win Fantasy fame as the editor and pasticher of Robert E. Howard’s Conan. But while Sprague was working to bring more Conan to the masses he also penned the novel The Tritonian Ring and with it he tried to shape the future of Sword & Sorcery.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 2: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.