Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy" discussion

Hi. Rather new to GR and this group, but enough about me.

I'm keen on the works that predated those pillars of S&S such as Jack Vance, Robert E Howard, et al, but somehow shaped or laid down the foundational motifs and structure from which the greats may have drawn from.

The one I'm currently interested in is Harold Lamb. I'm reading and thoroughly enjoying:



What other authors and works of this era of antiquity might be of interest?

Vance had a boyhood appetite for Edgar Rice Burroughs. I believe the fierce creature of the Dying Earth, the erb, is named for Burroughs.

S&S follows from the tradition of adventure tales, especially those written for English schoolboys in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Besides ERB, there was H. Rider Haggard, best known for King Solomon's Mines, and Jeffrey Farnol who was the young Vance's favorite author.

I'm sure Vance also read Robert Louis Stevenson's swashbuckling adventures and probably Alexandre Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo and Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda. They were in every public library when he was a boy.

If you read all of those you'll be getting a good grounding in the kinds of stories that Vance and Howard would have devoured in their formative years.

Howard Andrew Jones occasionally visits here on occasion (he edited a Harold Lamb series). After many years of following him, I got to meet him in person at Gencon last month.

The Belgian author J H Rosny aine wrote a number of fantasy adventure novels in the 1910s. Many of them were set either in the Paleolithic Age or the far future.

One of his more well-known works is Quest For Fire, which is about various tribes of early humans. Not precisely S&S, but it definitely laid down some of the early themes of adventure fiction.

Rosny also wrote The Death of the Earth, about humans surviving in a bizarre far future world, kind of like Vance's Dying Earth stories.

There's also The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, publish in 1912. It's about a man mentally teleported to the far future where the sun has gone out, living the Earth in perpetual darkness. He has to leave one of the last sanctuaries of humanity- a miles high pyramid called the Last Redoubt- to journey across a land of monsters to find the reincarnated souls of his wife. It's a great setting, although the book is written in a weird pseudo-17th century style that makes it a little hard to read.

Thanks for the suggestions and anecdotes, I love obscure material like this. After I finish with Lamb I'm definitely going to dive into these others.

The comprehension gap is certainly showing. He uses a lot of nomenclature I'm unfamiliar with, and therefore I'm reaching for the dictionary as I go. This isn't particularly vexing, but I have the suspicion that these earlier works will task me similarly.

Welcome! And Lamb is great; I've read three of those Bison collections, and need to get around to the rest sooner rather than later.

I'll second recommendations of Burroughs and Haggard -- Haggard also wrote some great historical adventure novels, like Eric Brighteyes, which I just read for our Viking-themed group read. And there's also Talbot Mundy, most especially his Tros Of Samothrace series.

And Rafael Sabatini probably factors in there somewhere as well, although I admit I haven't actually read any of his stuff yet.

I'll add another that my capricious memory just called up: Leslie Barringer's Neustrian cycle, three novels set in a medieval France that never existed: Gerfalcom, Joris of the Rock, and Shy Leopardess.

Lord Dunsany. Not all of his work -- neither The King of Elfland's Daughter nor The Charwoman's Shadow are S&S precursors -- and even his short stories are mixed, but he's definitely a precursor in some of them.

Mary wrote: "Lord Dunsany. Not all of his work -- neither The King of Elfland's Daughter nor The Charwoman's Shadow are S&S precursors -- and even his short stories are ..."

Speaking of favorite writers I need to revisit soon ...

(And if you want to sample him with one relatively S&S precursor story, I'd recommend The Sword of Welleran. Conveniently, here's a link to the collection on Gutenberg.org -- it's the first story in the collection.)

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1...