Doom

Atmosphere is a very important component in Sword & Sorcery, and some of the greatest practitioners of the form were also really good at building the mood of their stories and the imaginary places where they were set. I do not think that is a coincidence. Howard was a storyteller of intense action and brutal violence, but a perusal of his tales reveals a knack for vibrant description and the clean evocation of both wilderness and decadent civilization. Moorcock was (and is) gifted at creating a powerful aura around his stories, when he wants to, and even Leiber as his most waggish created places that live and breathe with a strange feel and magic of their own.

One of the foremost elements of the atmosphere of the best S&S stories is a pervasive and often inescapable sensation of doom. That is – the idea that the characters, and perhaps their entire world – cannot escape a grim fate. Howard first to establish this, and he definitely drew somewhat on the Norse ideas of Ragnarok as well as his cataclysmic imaginary history to infuse his tales with a feeling of ultimate foreboding. There is always the sense that whatever is accomplished by his heroes will inevitably be destroyed someday. A parade of fallen empires and ruined cities attests that what men create will always fade.

It may be said – and has – that a man who shot himself at the age of thirty would have an outlook that tended toward the bleak, and Howard was certainly no optimist. Much of the suspicion and disdain for settled, civilized life on the part of Conan and Kull was his own, and he regarded the decline and fall of civilization – often at the red hands of barbarian invaders – to be an unavoidable future. That is not a common sort of attitude for an American, who at the time were prone to boosterism and hopes for progress. You might say it was a result of the Depression, but Howard’s outlook was in place long before the crash confirmed some of his more pessimistic ideas.

Other influential writers were just as prone to this fatalistic worldview. Moorcock’s Elric tales were textbook workouts in the Doomed Champion archetype, and his heroes all struggle mightily against their fates but cannot avoid them, no matter how they struggle. At most his characters can buy a few years of peace and happiness, before the world comes crashing down around them. Leiber’s characters struggled to find their way, only to end up as the pawns of gods or wizards, and things never ended up the way they wanted. For all his whimsy, Leiber’s Nehwon was pretty grim and unfriendly. Wagner’s worlds were even blacker, and needless to say Lovecraft’s own worldview was that we are all doomed to madness and death no matter what we do.

This all grows out of the roots of S&S in Noire fiction, with characters depicted as deeply flawed and trapped in a corrupt, unfriendly world where friendship leads to betrayal and love is fleeting at best. There are not many happily ever afters in this kind of story, and when you add the fantasy element to this, the whole thing can easily become woven into the worldbuilding as a fact: civilizations will crumble, empires will fall, cities will lie in ruins, races will die and vanish, and even the world itself may be brought down into destruction.

All of this does two things. For one, it creates an operatic aura of doom over all the stories and characters, because we see everywhere the evidence that everything dies and falls into ruin, so that even great struggles are placed against a longer perspective. And a big part of the evidence is the presence of ruined cities and temples and other remnants of things that have gone before. This creates a mood of antiquity that gives depth to the worlds, and also creates cool locations for treasure hunts and sword fights. A death duel in some ruined city is both a thematic element, and also more epic than if it happened somewhere else.

So it forms a kind of loop: atmosphere creating more worldbuilding which creates more atmosphere, and all of it adds a sense of time and the passing of ages to what could otherwise be quite plain action stories about mercenaries and barbarians. The pervasive sense of impending doom makes the worlds richer, and therefore makes the stories resonate more powerfully.