Sword & Sorcery
Weird tales of heroic fantasy

Sword and sorcery, or S&S, is, in Lin Carter’s words―

… an action tale, derived from the traditions of the pulp magazine adventure story, set in a land or age or world of the author’s invention – a milieu in which magic actually works and the gods are real – and a story, moreover, which pits a stalwart warrior in direct conflict with the forces of supernatural evil.

― Flashing Swords! #1 (1973)

S&S proper began in the pulp fantasy magazines of the 1930s, although it is generally held that the term sword and sorcery was coined only in 1961, when Fritz Leiber suggested it to Michael Moorcock.

The subgenre’s roots are much older than this, however. It was also  influenced in its early years by comtemporaneous adventure stories and fantasy tales of other subgenres – often published in the same pulp magazines (mostly Weird Tales)!

Its precursors and cocursors include ―

• gothic fantasies such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820);
• the swashbuckling tales of Alexandre Dumas père – The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–45), etc. – and Rafael Sabatini – e.g., The Sea Hawk (1915), Scaramouche (1921);
• early fantasy fiction such as William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (1896),  Lord Dunsany’s The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth (1910), and E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922) and Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia (1935);
• fantastical adventures such as H. Rider Haggard’s Quartermain sequence (1855 onwards) and Ayesha sequence (1866 onwards), Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan stories (1912 onwards), Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels (1913 onwards), and Talbot Mundy’s The Devil’s Guard (1926 Adventure as “Ramsden”; 1926; vt Ramsden 1926 UK) and others;
• occult fantasies and supernatural horror stories such as Abraham Merritt’s The Moon Pool (novella, All-Story Weekly, 22 June 1918) and The Face in the Abyss (novella, Argosy All-Story Weekly, 8 September 1923), and H. P. Lovecraft’s tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: “The Call of Cthulhu” (Weird Tales 11 2, February 1928), etc.

Other early 20th-century fantasy fiction – such as Buroughs’s John Carter of Mars stories from 1917 onwards – has a similar feel to S&S, but, because authentic alien lifeforms replace supernatural entities and alien science replaces sorcery, is better described as science fantasy.

In dying-earth stories, science fantasy impinges again on S&S. Perhaps echoing Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law – any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic – these tales of the far future feature the resurgence of sorcery. They include: Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique sequence, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series, and M. John Harrison’s The Pastel City (and at least one of its sequels).

S&S is distinct from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and his heirs: what might be called epic fantasy or high fantasy. But these distinctions are not sharp, but rather fuzzy, and made more so by the lax usage of publishers and their marketing departments. All might be called heroic fantasy, although for some this is synonymous with S&S. And Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry and Wild Romance, which covers the broader spectrum, is subtitled A study of epic fantasy!

Further reading