This post is brought to you by the Swords of Fire anthology series, with the fourth book due this fall. Like the three previous collections, this one will feature four longer Sword & Sorcery adventures with one being 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 other two tales are a surprise for now. Look forward to this volume sometime in November. For the previous anthologies, go here.
1963 saw the first of the Sword & Sorcery anthologies, a volume called Sword & Sorcery: Tales of Heroic Fantasy edited by L. Sprague de Camp. It was followed by two more, The Spell of Seven (1965) and The Fantastic Swordsmen (1967), so it isn’t surprising to see someone else thought it might be a good idea to collect S&S tales. That person was editor, Hans Stefan Santesson, most famous for editing Fantastic Universe, a latter-day digest that published some of L. Sprague’s Conan revisions like “Hawks Over Shem” (October 1955), “Conan, Man of Destiny” (December 1955), “The Blood-Stained God” (April 1956) and “Conan the Victorious” (September 1957). Santesson was no stranger to Conan or de Camp.
In most respects Santesson did not reinvent the wheel. The one thing he did do that LSD did not, was to include previously unpublished material. Two Lin Carter Thongor tales had their first appearance in the pages of these two anthologies. The presence of Carter, de Camp himself as well as Byjorn Nyberg suggests that de Camp wasn’t opposed to these new books but a participant. De Camp only had one more volume left, Warlocks & Warriors (1970), which even duplicates some of Santesson’s picks with Zelazny’s “Bells of Shoredan” and includes a previously unpublished piece. Was this the last because Sprague no longer had the field to himself? Or were Sword & Sorcery anthologies no longer popular? We’ll look at that later.
Santesson has an introduction to both volumes. In the first he tries to set the stage for tales set in the imaginary past:
Sword-and-sorcery stories: extrapolations from the known and the half-known, recreations of long-forgotten worlds which we have reason to believe existed in the long distant past, bat of which nothing remains, nothing tangible, nothing which can be touched or felt or weighed in the hand. Nothing but that intangible something within the memory of the race which it is easy enough to dismiss as a folk myth if, in common with most people, you know nothing of history—yours and that of those who came before you.
We know by now that civilizations have risen and fallen and vanished into the mists of time on this world of ours. We know by now that the ancients, or those whom we call ancients, knew more about the past and those forgotten empires than we do, or will ever do. It is hard for us to face the possibility that ours is not the greatest civilization to have existed on this world. To acknowledge even the possibility of this demands a humility, and a sense of history, to which we are alien.
In The Mighty Swordsmen he gets off-track with a discussion of sorcery and how the Christians have flavored that word.
Sorcery is, in other words, an expression which is apt to mean precisely what it seems in the eye of the current beholder. What we must keep in mind is that it need not necessarily only mean the improper or even the evil exercise of strange powers over others. Nor need it necessarily mean the casting of spells, or what seems to others to be spells, intended to rob the victim of his strength, his will, his powers, his dreams, or his life. Nor need it necessarily mean the building of castles in the sty through the rooms of which the hero, or the victim, can wander at will, living out his dreams—or his fears.
Just as much as witchcraft has come to have another connotation, instead of being recognized as the surviving form of the original faith often driven into the woods by the neo-Christian occupiers of the country, sorcery—included in fantasy—has come to have what can perhaps be described as an equally anti-social meaning. You use sorcery to enslave, to entrap, to enmesh and to destroy. You use sorcery as a tool of evil, in order to strengthen evil, and in order to make this evil triumph.
In the first volume he dealt with the swords, and in the second, the sorcery. Now, let’s break down the choices that HSS made for his two classic Lancer paperbacks.
The Mighty Barbarians (1969)
“When the Sea-King’s Away” (Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, May 1960) by Fritz Leiber is one of the Fafhrd & Gray Mouser tales that Fritz wrote for Cele Goldsmith at Fantastic. She revived his career and these two swordsmen. By 1971, Fritz would win a Hugo for “Ill-Met in Lankhmar”.
“The Stronger Spell” (Fantasy Fiction, November 1953) by L. Sprague de Camp was one of de Camp’s Pusad tales that followed The Tritonian Ring (1951). He invests a strong John W. Campbell/Unknown vibe into Sword & Sorcery, making it slightly satirical.
“Dragon Moon” (Weird Tales, January 1941) by Henry Kuttner was the finale of the Elak saga that saw the last Sword & Sorcery tales in Weird Tales. De Camp used it in The Fantastic Swordsmen only two years earlier. The other stories of Elak were equally good. I’m surprised Santesson didn’t go for one of those.
“Thieves of Zangabal” (1969) by Lin Carter was original to this collection. Marvel Comics did an adaptation as a preamble to their version of Thongor of Lemuria in March 1973. The story was adapted by SF writer, George Alec Effinger. Jim Steranko, who did the covers for Santesson, shows up again.
“A Witch Shall Be Born” (Weird Tales, December 1934) by Robert E. Howard was one of the Weird Tales originals. For some reason Santesson liked to end each book with a Conan tale by Howard. It also appeared in Lancer’s Conan the Freebooter (1968). I suppose the rights were easy to get since Lancer was the Conan publisher. The editors might have seen it as a promo for their collections.
The Mighty Swordsmen (1970)
“Keeper of the Emerald Flame” (1970) by Lin Carter was another original Thongor story. By 1970, Lin would be shopping the novel series around again to the paperback houses. Having some new interest in the character couldn’t hurt.
“The Bells of Shoredan” (Fantastic, March 1966) by Roger Zelazny was another Cele Goldsmith Fantastic purchase. This was probably the best of the Dilvish tales. It certainly gets reprinted the most. Santesson was first. Gray Morrow is another artist associated with S&S.
“Break the Door of Hell” (Impulse, April 1966) by John Brunner is perhaps the one tale here that deserves more attention. The Traveler in Black was a series of five tales, first published in Britain but later collected. Sadly, these UK digests had no art in them.
“The People of the Summit” (1970) by Björn Nyberg & L. Sprague de Camp was another Conan tale to appear in a collection but after Lancer had gone bankrupt, in Conan the Swordsman (1978). Marvel was quick to use it in Savage Sword of Conan #3, where it was adapted by Roy Thomas.
The Flame Bringers” (Science Fantasy, October 1962) by Michael Moorcock brings Elric to Santesson. He had appeared in two de Camp anthologies already. James Cawthorn did the cover illustration. Around this time he was also drawing the first Elric comics.
“Beyond the Black River” (Weird Tales, May June 1935) by Robert E. Howard was a two-parter from Weird Tales that came from Conan the Warrior (1967) as well. Many feel it is one of Howard’s best.
Conclusion
I think any question of rivalry between Santesson and de Camp can be put aside. Both were published by Lancer, Santesson with these two anthologies, and de Camp with the popular Conan series that was at its high watermark in 1969-1970. The publisher seeing that de Camp had success with three previous anthologies wanted some of that action, adding more volumes to its growing S&S empire. Sprague would have been a fool to complain.
As for Sword & Sorcery anthologies becoming unpopular, nothing could be further from the truth. Robert Hoskins, Douglas Hill, Lin Carter, Eric Pendragon, Andrew J. Offutt, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Gerald W. Page & Hank Reinhardt and Roy Torgeson would all produce anthologies along this line in the 1970s. The 1980s and beyond would produce many more. What did happen during this time was the available material of previously published stories had been picked pretty clean by deCamp and Santesson, so most of these others created anthologies of new stories. Conan, Brak, Elric, Dilvish, Thongor would have to make room for new and exciting characters as heroic fantasy evolved.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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