My Tribute to Sword & Sorcery

This short article is a companion piece to How a short story started (and almost ended) as a film project, a brief summary of the troubled production of my (as of yet) unproduced short film Greywolf, which I later adapted and published as a short story.

A small selection of my ever-growing collection of Sword & Sorcery paperbacks.

DISCOVERING THE SWORD & SORCERY GENRE

I have been a fan of fantasy stories most of my life, something which undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that I was nine years old when the first film in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy was released in theatres. Like most geekily-inclined millennials, Fantasy has been a part of my life ever since, but it was only a few years ago, while I was preparing for my Norse Fantasy short film The Wild Huntsman, that I properly discovered the Sword & Sorcery genre and it is no exaggeration to say that I have since absorbed as many books in this gritty and vibrant genre as I can get my hands on.

Now, I'd naturally heard of Sword & Sorcery before, it was hard to avoid, especially growing up in Norway. Up until just a few years ago you could hardly enter a gas station or kiosk without finding a Conan the Barbarian comic present on the comic/magazine rack. Now, its hard to say why I steered away from these as a kid, though the often present "intended for a mature audience" label might have scared me off a bit. Besides, I had plenty of Fantasy and Sci-Fi to suit my needs at the time. In recent years, however, while I was trying to broaden my literary knowledge, it did not take long before it dawned on me how much more there was to this genre than the often over-the-top heavy metal-inspired comic art and Hollywood movies starring former bodybuilders that I associated with the genre had previously suggested.

A common sight in Norwegian grocery stores, gas stations and kiosks throughout the 90s and 2000s.

My search also coincided my another recent obsession of mine; old pulp stories, specifically from the 1920s and 30s. I was, as often is the case with S&S newbies, quite surprised to find that even the character of Conan had his origins in pre-WWII short story magazines, specifically Weird Tales magazine, and that his creator, Robert E. Howard, was a contemporary and correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft. Like many I used to associate Conan with pulpy paperbacks and the Marvel comics from the 70s, though in his original, undiluted form, he has much more in common with classic heroes like, say, Tarzan. Forget about Arnold Schwarzenegger, I'm talking about the real Conan here, the original Conan. Not that I dislike the 1982 film, but that's an entirely different beast altogether. And don't get me started on its cheap imitators. There's a good reason why the S&S genre has garnered a bit of a bad reputation as cheap shlock in the last four decades. 

MY OBSESSION WITH AUTHOR ROBERT E. HOWARD

What started as a mere curiosity and an intent to read just a few Conan short stories just for the novelty of it quickly evolved into a bit of an obsession. Not only were the thirty or so short stories and novellas Howard wrote about Conan in his tragically short career (he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 30 in 1936) good, classical adventure stories, not only did they contain one of the first truly realised fantasy worlds in literature (pre-dating Tolkien's Middle-Earth), and not only was Conan one of the more unique antiheroes I'd read, but the gritty, dark poetic prose present in even the simplest of the stories were unlike anything I'd read before. I quickly worked my way through Conan, then moved on to Howard's other famous S&S characters, such as King Kull and Solomon Kane.

The original depictions of Conan were a far cry from our current mental image of the famous barbarian.
Photo by Ståle Gismervik.

If you are not familiar with Howard, it is important to stress that there's a lot more to his work than just Conan and Sword & Sorcery stories. He also wrote historical adventures, westerns, detective stories, comedies, and, very relevant to me, horror. Among his greatest works in this genre are stories like Worms of the Earth and his southern gothic tale Pigeons from Hell, which Stephen King once referred to as one of the all-time great American horror stories.

Within the first year or so of me reading Howard I managed to amass enough books to fill out an entire shelf of books, and I hadn't even expanded into later Sword & Sorcery authors yet. I was soon to begin exploring the works of authors like Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner and Michael Moorcock as well, though I have to say, none struck a cord with me quite like Howard did.

SO WHY IS GREYWOLF SET IN THE 1970s THEN?

If I'm so fascinated by Robert E. Howard and the original 1930s version of his characters, why then did I choose to set my own short story in the 1970s? The simple answer to that is because I wanted to do a tribute to the genre as a whole, and the genre did not properly take off until the 1960s when Howard's work was pulled out of relative obscurity, and thanks to the now famous cover art by Frank Frazetta, was catapulted into the mainstream. By the late 70s bookstores were filled with copycat literature, some quite good, most of it pretty lousy—if anything the covers were generally better than the books. 

It was actually these now iconic covers that served as the main inspiration for Greywolf. There is just something very special about those vivid and bold illustrations that seemed to leap out of the paper and pull you into the fantastical worlds within (especially the Frazetta ones).

It's also worth pointing out that Greywolf, as mentioned above, started its life as a short film script and I knew from the start that I had to keep the story fairly simple, so focusing on an author and not placing it too far into the past made more sense from a technical and budgetary standpoint. And although it was tempting to have my fictional author get drawn into the book he was writing, ala The Page Master or The Last Action Hero, keeping the budget in mind again, it made more sense for me to reverse this idea and have Greywolf enter the "real" world instead. After all, on some of the best Frazetta covers it quite literally looked like the characters were getting ready to leap out and attack you (the cover for Dark Crusade especially springs to mind). 

Likewise, my fictional author remained English as the film was originally supposed to be shot in the UK. Besides, as I started writing the story, I did find a certain amusing contrast in having a shy, intellectual Englishman confronted by a brash Viking warrior, and being half-English myself, when writing the short story version, I quite enjoyed playing with the stylistic contrasts between the heroic, larger-than-life style of Robert E. Howard—himself a burly, no-nonsense Texan—with the more loquacious and slightly tongue-in-cheek prose so common in British literature, especially those with a more comedic bend. What started as a tribute to a genre, technically evolved into a tribute to two contrary ones that actually worked surprisingly well together. And, when taking into account such authors as Michael Moorcock, the creator of Elric of Melniboné—who inspired the antagonist of my story—there is a strong precedent for S&S in the UK as well as the US.  

It was looking at striking S&S covers like these that inspired me to write Greywolf.

If you haven't read Greywolf and would like to do so you can buy it here for only $0.99. You can also read the first chapter here.