Weird Tales Magazine No. 366: Sword & Sorcery Issue (eBook)

Sword and Sorcery:
Weird Tales and Beyond

by Charles R. Rutledge

In 1926, in a small town in the middle of Texas, a young writer named Robert E. Howard began a story called “The Shadow Kingdom” and, without meaning to, created the genre known as sword and sorcery. “The Shadow Kingdom” wouldn’t be the first S&S story published—that honor would fall to another of Howard’s tales, “Red Shadows”—but it was the beginning of something that had never quite been done before. Both of these seminal stories appeared in the pages of Weird Tales.

Howard was an avid reader of The Unique Magazine as well as other pulps such as Adventure and Argosy. He took his love of adventure fiction by such writers as Harold Lamb, H. Rider Haggard, and Talbot Mundy and melded it with supernatural horror. In reality, both “Red Shadows” and “The Shadow Kingdom” are important “firsts.”

Howard had already made several sales of horror stories and verse to Weird Tales, beginning with “Spear and Fang” in July 1925. The dour Puritan Solomon Kane arrived in August 1928 and two more stories, “Skulls in the Stars and Rattle of Bones,” appeared soon after. “Red Shadows” was the world’s first look at sword and sorcery, and it is a potent mixture of sword duels, exotic locales, and dark magic.

Solomon Kane’s adventures took place in a recognizable era of history, the 16th century, creating one of the main branches of the genre—historical sword and sorcery. Other REH creations like Bran Mak Morn and Turlough O’Brien would follow this path, and the next major practitioner of S&S to appear in Weird Tales would also set her stories in history, but more about that later.

The second and most popular branch of sword and sorcery, the “secondary world” version, began with another of Howard’s series characters, King Kull. Kull was a barbarian, exiled from fabled Atlantis who became King of the land of Valusia. “The Shadow Kingdom” tells of Kull’s conflict with a race of serpent men who attempt to usurp his kingdom using their shapeshifting abilities.

Kull was a brooding hero, perhaps Howard’s most introspective character. Aside from “The Shadow Kingdom,” Weird Tales published only one other Kull story, “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” in which Kull spent more time mulling the nature of reality than in standard S&S derring-do. He also made an appearance in the Bran Mak Morn adventure “Kings of the Night.”

Bran Mak Morn was a Pictish chief who appeared in three stories in Weird Tales and is referenced in others. The most well-known Bran Mak Morn tale is Worms of the Earth, in which Bran makes a pact with a race of subhuman underground dwelling creatures to aid him in his vengeance against a Roman governor. It is one of Howard’s most horrific tales, and a part of that is the influence of Howard’s fellow Weird Tales author, H.P. Lovecraft.

Howard had been reading Lovecraft’s tales of Cosmic Horror in WT and the two writers had become correspondents, trading long and involved letters back and forth. Lovecraft enjoyed inviting other writers to borrow from his invented pantheon of ancient extra-dimensional gods, The Great Old Ones, and to make use of the lore surrounding them, and to add to it.

The Solomon Kane story “The Footfalls Within” seems to be the first place Lovecraft’s influence is directly felt. Kane trails a band of slavers in Africa and finds a huge stone mausoleum sealed by a massive door. Inside lurks a shapeless, nameless horror that can best be described as Lovecraftian.

In “Worms of the Earth,’ Howard mentions the sunken city of R’lyeh and the god Dagon, both creations of Lovecraft. HPL returned the favor by referencing Bran Mak Morn in his story “The Whisperer in Darkness.”

Bran was mentioned in “The Dark Man,” one of two adventures of Gaelic warrior Turlogh Duhb O’Brien, aka Black Turlogh, to appear in Weird Tales. The titular Dark Man is a statue of Bran Mak Morn. Turlogh’s other WT adventure, “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth,” involves a shipwreck, a lost civilization, monsters, and sorcery.

King Kull, Solomon Kane, Turlogh O’Brien, and Bran Mak Morn were the capable heroes of Robert E. Howard’s early sword and sorcery stories in Weird Tales, but they would all fade into the background with the arrival of his next creation.

Conan the Cimmerian—or Conan the Barbarian as he is often known—is the most successful sword and sorcery hero of all time. He has appeared in books, movies, comics, games, and just about every other form of media. When the average person hears the term “sword and sorcery,” it is Conan that comes to mind.

According to Howard, “Conan simply grew up in my mind… when I was stopping at a little border town on the lower Rio Grande. I did not create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.”

This might be true of the character’s beginning, but chronicling Conan’s adventures would take a lot more thought than Howard indicated. The very first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” was a rewrite of an existing, unsold King Kull story called “By This Axe I Rule.” There are a lot of changes to character motivations, and an entire subplot added about the villainous sorcerer Thoth Amon.

And ultimately, though Conan and Kull are both barbarians who become rulers of civilized kingdoms, they are very different characters. Despite Conan’s “gigantic melancholies,” he isn’t as introspective as Kull. His adventures are faster paced. Another big difference is the settings. Kull’s Valusia is more of a fantasy world kingdom, where Conan’s Hyborian Age is pseudo history.

Howard once wrote, “There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction.” But at other times he explained that the research required so much time and effort he couldn’t make a living writing that sort of thing.

In inventing Conan’s world, he could write stories with backgrounds that echoed history without being concerned about anachronisms. He could write pirate stories or Cossack stories, or tales set in backgrounds resembling ancient Mesopotamia or the American Western frontier. Howard wrote an essay called “The Hyborian Age” in which he laid out the people and civilizations of his pseudo history, and he stuck to it for the most part throughout the saga of Conan.

Conan would be the most popular sword and sorcery hero to appear in Weird Tales, and while Howard would contribute other non-Conan standalone horror yarns to the magazine, he didn’t return to any of his earlier S&S characters. It was Conan all the way. Notable Conan tales include “The Tower of the Elephant,” “Red Nails,”

“Rogues in the House,” “The People of the Black Circle,” and “Beyond the Black River.”

Howard created the genre and set the tone. The first author to take up the challenge and join him in the pages of Weird Tales was Catherine Lucille Moore. C.L. Moore was the second significant writer of sword and sorcery and the first to use a female protagonist. Jirel of Joiry was the ruler of a small kingdom in medieval France.

Moore was certainly reading Robert E. Howard’s work, but her tales seem to have been more influenced by the stories of A. Merritt. They are full of lush imagery and dreamlike incidents. Not that the Jirel stories lack action. She is as quick tempered and unpredictable as a certain Cimmerian.

In Jirel’s first appearance, “The Black God’s Kiss,” WT August 1934, the lady of Joiry must defend her kingdom from invasion by seeking the aid of a dark god. But the supernatural help she sought comes at an unexpected and horrible cost.

Jirel would face sorcerers, the god of a pocket universe, a haunted castle, and other menaces in her adventures, all told in Moore’s dark, poetic style. Jirel even crossed over with another of Moore’s series characters, the space adventurer Northwest Smith, in a story written with her husband Henry Kuttner.

There are only six Jirel of Joiry stories, but they were extremely important to the sword and sorcery genre. Jirel would inspire and influence the heroic fantasy heroines to come. This would probably be a good place to mention Red Sonja, the better known “red haired she-devil with a sword.” Sonja wasn’t a pulp character, and she wasn’t created by Robert E. Howard, though she is often lumped in with his other characters.

Red Sonja was based on a Howard character, Red Sonya of Rogatino, a female soldier fighting against the forces of Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century who appeared in Howard’s historical fiction story “The Shadow of the Vulture.” Marvel comics writer Roy Thomas was inspired by the character to create Red Sonja of the Hyborian Age.

Robert E. Howard’s death in 1936 left a void in Weird Tales that couldn’t readily be filled. Clifford Ball tried with two stories, but it was Henry Kuttner who perhaps came the closest to REH-style sword and sorcery with his tales of Elak of Atlantis. Kuttner was too good a writer to just imitate Howard. Elak was more of a swashbuckler, armed with a rapier instead of a broadsword.

Elak also had a sidekick, Lycan, who acts as...