Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Knight and knave of Lankhmar

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are the heroes of Fritz Leiber’s famous series of picaresque sword-and-sorcery tales.

As with Elric I came to these rather late, in about 1986, a few years after being introduced to the characters through my FRPG-playing friends at University. The stories are regarded as defining the genre and remain some of my favourites!

The first story – “Two Sought Adventure” – was published in Unknown in August 1939, introducing the two colourful rogues born in the correspondence between Leiber and his friend Harry Otto Fischer (1910-1986) in the 1930s:

• Fafhrd – a tall (6' 11") barbarian from the Cold Waste (loosely based on Leiber himself, 6' 5"/1.95m tall), who wields a great sword, Graywand, and was trained as a singer and tale-teller;
• the Gray Mouser – a small (5' 4"), mercurial and wily thief (Fischer, only 5' 3"/1.60m tall), who totes a blade, Scalpel, and a dagger, Cat’s Claw, and who was trained (none too successfully) as a hedge-wizard’s apprentice.

One of Leiber’s original motives was to have a couple of fantasy heroes closer to true human stature than the likes of Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian or Burroughs’s Tarzan.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are both rogues through and through… but theirs is a decadent world where you have to be a rogue to survive.

They spend a lot of time drinking, feasting, wenching, brawling, stealing, gambling, and are seldom fussy about who they hire out their swords to. But they are humane and – most of all – relish true adventure.

Leiber created two characters who are truly iconic… Avatars of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser turn up in Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic as Bravd and the Weasel, and in Roy Thomas’s early Conan the Barbarian comics as Fafnir and the Black Rat.

Newhon and the city of Lankhmar

The tales are set in the mythical world of Nehwon – an anagram of “no-when”, just as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon was an angram of “nowhere” – and many of them in and around its greatest city, Lankhmar, City of the Black Toga.

Lankhmar is a marvellous city – at least for rogues like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: full of mystery, danger, and death, yet also with a full measure of beauty, excitement, and adventure.

Lankhmar is a wonderful creation with its eccentric Overlords in the Rainbow Palace to the north of the city, the Silver Eel tavern between Dim Lane and Bones Alley, the Thieves’ Guild, exotic pleasure-areas like the Plaza of Dark Delights, and the countless warring temples in the Street of the Gods (with a nice distinction between these “Gods in Lankhmar” and the feared, unworshipped “Gods of Lankhmar”).

Most of all, there’s the city’s general sense of sleazy, colourful inexhaustibility.

Oh… and Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork bears more than a passing resemblance to Lankhmar…

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