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 the eBook here for only $0.99 (also available in paperback). You can also read the first chapter here.

How a short story started (and almost ended) as a film project

 

In the early months of 2022, while my Norse-myth inspired short film The Wild Huntsman was going through the film festival circuit, I felt so motivated by a recent buying and reading spree of Sword & Sorcery literature that I decided to use this as the basis for my next film project. Although I always intended for it to be more ambitious, complex, and on a much larger scale than the micro-budget two-day shoot of my previous short, I none-the-less quickly settled on a premise that which I knew wouldn't break the bank and chose therefore to tell a magic realism story focused on a Fantasy author rather than attempt my own Conan the Barbarian-style short film. I even set most of my story in a single room—the author's private study, again, for practicality and budget reasons. Granted, it wasn't long before I realised that I did need to let the audience see something in a proper Fantasy setting, so I figured that my author's Conan-inspired Viking warrior, Greywolf, should be allowed a little mini-adventure within a forest early in the story, where some eerie lighting and a few relatively simple props would do the job while still be doable on a small budget.

The script was finished relatively quickly—it is no exaggeration to say that I was riding on a bit of a Fantasy high at the time—and I set about finding people interested in helping me bring the project to reality before spring was over. Confident that some of the people I had worked with before at the London Film Academy would show some interest, I had already set the story in the UK and it was not long before I had a producer who knew their way around the film industry in London. 

This luck would not last, however, and the problems quickly began piling up. Granted there is no such thing as a film production without its hurdles—if anything I've learned that filmmakers tend to get a little anxious if everything runs smoothly. I had been quite disappointed when my first choice for Greywolf turned down the role, but my producer and I merely shrugged off the bad luck and began searching for alternatives. After all, London is a big city. Casting the author, in contrast, was a cinch, and by mid-summer I had my leading man on standby. Where the real source of our mounting troubles truly lay was in a budget that seemed to grow in size day by day. Despite my precautions, the cost quickly proved too big for a private investment (as had been the case with my previous shorts) and we were forced to look for funding from without, something which is never easy with short films. To put it succinctly, there is rarely any money to be made in shorts, so few people are willing to invest in them as there is a slim chance for financial returns. However, by the start of autumn we were still in a positive mindset and continued looking for alternatives.

Eventually autumn turned to winter, and all the steam that had kept the project chugging along seemed to have vanished. Shortly before Christmas my producer, who had already juggled far too many projects at once, was forced to leave what even I had to admit had become a sinking ship.  

Proof-of-concept art commissioned during the pre-production phase of the short film project.

In the following months—it was now early 2023—I tried to revive the project locally in Norway, hoping that maybe this project could prove more of a large fish in a small pond-type situation when compared to London, but lacking any real contacts in the local film industry I struggled to find people that were interested. In an attempt to poke a hole in the budget that had previously ballooned out of control, I also re-wrote the script so that my author character, though still an Englishman, had moved to Norway in an ill-fated attempt at reconnecting with his Scandinavian roots in order to inspire his writing. This way I would not have to spend money having to dress things up to look like we were actually in England, and I would only have to cover the travel expenses of my leading man.

By spring I discovered that there were ways to acquire financial help via a local government film fund, though this proved to be more of a hurdle than a solution to my problems and only ended up swallowing up more time. You see, in order to obtain funding you have to follow a set of very strict rules to prove that the project will be a benefit to the Norwegian people (it is government owned after all). Not only does a majority amount of the cast and crew have to be Norwegian citizens (fair enough), the story also needs to have some connection to Norwegian culture (well, I figured Greywolf is a Viking after all), and, the most frustrating aspect of it all, you need to have proper "qualifications" in order to apply in the first place, something which was not made very clear until the rejection letters arrived. Despite running my own independent company, as well as having written, produced and directed several short films, including a few through the London Film Academy, I was simply not professional enough according to their rules as I had never worked for a proper film production company or have a proper university degree.

Feeling quite defeated I felt that I had no other option but to shelve the whole Greywolf project indefinitely.

Not wanting to waste another year I tried to put the whole ordeal behind me and went back to novel writing and by December of 2023 I had finished and published the first book in my new Professor Korrigan paranormal mystery series; The Starseed. At the start of 2024 I felt that I needed a bit of a creative change of pace before I started work on the next installment in the series, so I decided to make a brief return to Sword & Sorcery. Not wanting to let the plot of Greywolf go to waste, I made the decision to adapt the screenplay into a short story. Freed from the constraints of budgets, casting, and government regulations, I was now free to tell the story as I wanted, albeit in a very different medium. Greywolf was published as a Kindle Short Read in July 2024.

Of course, I still very much wish to make Greywolf into a short film as originally intended, and who knows, maybe now that the story is "out there," this is more likely to come to fruition one day. 

If you haven't already read the short story version of Greywolf and would like to do so you can buy it on Amazon Kindle for only $0.99 or as a paperback for $5.99. You can also read the first chapter here.