What is Sword & Sorcery?

Of course, a completely valid question when constructing a blog dedicated to Sword & Sorcery fiction is: what is it, exactly, that makes a story part of the genre? Aside from obvious, tired cliches that I have already stated I am not going to rely on, what are the features of the genre, what are the necessary elements, and what are the notable requirements for a story to be considered part of it? In essence, what is this Sword & Sorcery thing all about?

Well, one thing we should dispose of is the shallow idea that trappings make for the underpinnings. You might argue that if there are swords, sorcery, and some degree of violence in a story, then it fits the criteria. This is the same as assuming a story is Science Fiction because it has spaceships in it, or that a story is a crime story because it has a criminal in it.

External trappings do not make for a genre. A real question to ask is not what a genre appears to be, but what it is trying to do. Genre cannot be reduced to a series of tropes or images, and that is a superficial idea of genre which I will dispense with right now. Yes, genres have certain elements that are a recurring part of them and their history, but that does not make them things that cause genre, they are, instead, a feature that keeps cropping up because they are an indelible part of what a genre is trying to accomplish. Genre is, after all, in part a tool a writer uses to better tell the kind of story they want to tell.

So, what is Sword & Sorcery, really? Well, it is a kind of adventure story, much more than a fantasy. Fantasy is about magic, and while magic definitely features in S&S (hence the ‛Sorcery’ part), it is not often the defining element. The skeleton of an S&S tale is adventure, and everything else is added on to it. Adventure is the bones of the genre.

Adventure Fiction means the stories will be fast-paced, action-oriented, and feature the heroes placed in physical danger. Most adventure stories are rather tightly plotted, and focus on a single protagonist or a small group of them. They are often isolated and placed in conflict from multiple angles. They will be pitted against more than one antagonist, and it is not uncommon for adventure stories to use nature as a go-to adversary. Many adventure stories are survival tales, with a protagonist and perhaps a few friends trying to survive a hostile environment. If you add in human enemies, or perhaps an angry tiger, then you have the makings of a great adventure story.

Sword & Sorcery takes this idea and places it in a ‛second-world’ fantasy setting of imagined lands and peoples, and this only gives the writer more freedom in building the story. No longer is the tale required to be set in the ‛real world’, but it can be anywhere. This gives as much scope and detail in the setting as the writer chooses to create, and it allows the easy insertion of one strongly defining element of the genre.

Magic.  Magic is almost always an element in a proper S&S story, but it is not the same kind of magic that appears in the more prevalent, Tolkien-inspired High Fantasy. In High Fantasy, the world exists in a state of decline from a more perfect and powerful Golden Age in the past – a highly Biblical concept. Magic in High Fantasy exists in both good and evil varieties, and the good must be called upon the counter the bad.

In a Sword & Sorcery universe, there is no anchoring, intrinsic metaphysic – no absolute good, nor evil. The characters are always drawn as human, often larger than life, but very human and very flawed. Their experience of magic is very different, because in S&S magic is a dangerous, primal force that can sometimes be harnessed for the protagonist and their goals, but always remains an alien, outside power that is better left alone. In a Sword & Sorcery world, magic is always dangerous, and always has a price. As in any noir universe, there is no good, no evil, there is only humanity pitted against the great primal forces of the world.

And therein lies another feature of true Sword & Sorcery, which is scale. In Heroic or High Fantasy, the scales and stakes are vast – kingdoms at the very least are at risk, and often the fate of the world itself hangs in the balance. The stakes in S&S are often much smaller. The genre often focuses on a single event in a character’s life – a battle, an escape, a heist, a duel – and leaves the wider world to its own devices. The stakes are personal, and while yes, there may be wider consequences from the acts of the story, they are left out of the main story, allowed to occur off-screen or to be left to our imaginations. The S&S tale focuses on that single moment of a character’s greatest trial, and brings it to life vividly.

Because the genre is so dark, we see actions depicted with great violence – like in crime fiction – and the violence is never meant to be glorified of romanticised. Violence in Sword & Sorcery is not the clean clash of arms from a story of King Arthur, or Greek Heroes. It is medieval violence shown fast and bloody as a WW 2 movie, with all the butchery, savagery, and horror that implies.

And horror is another significant part of the genre. Howard was very much influenced by his fellow Weird Tales writers like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith when he created Sword & Sorcery, and that skein of horror has remained embedded in the DNA of the genre ever since. The fantasy traded in has always been a particularly dark variety, featuring inhuman gods, dark powers, and races older than mankind.

So at its root Sword & Sorcery is a kind of dark adventure, survival stories set in a world even grimmer and less forgiving than our own. Heroes of the genre cut their way through a world of darkness and bloody violence, and the only morality exists on the edge of sword or axe. S&S protagonists don’t do what is right, they do what they have to, and it is this bleak, unforgiving aspect that gives the genre its power.