A
pervasive element in the brew of Sword & Sorcery literature is
horror, but not the entirety of the horror genre, only certain
elements. After all, horror and S&S are doing different things,
so even with the same trappings they will end up with different
effects. But is the horror element a necessary one?
I
would say it is. After all, when we address the horror in S&S, we
are talking about a particular kind. Howard was a pen pal with
Lovecraft, and so it was that peculiarly Lovecraftian vision that was
worked into the alloy that made up the earliest Sword & Sorcery
fiction. S&S was a pulp form, and Lovecraft was highly
influential on pulps in general, but especially writers like Moore
and Leiber, who took up the S&S torch.
So
the feel and tropes of Lovecraftian horror were there from the
beginning, and they have stayed because they actually fit really well
into what the genre is trying to do. There’s not going to be
psychological horror – S&S is not by nature an introspective
genre, and that kind of inner landscape would not suit it so well.
You will also find a lot less of the old-fashioned ghost story,
because S&S is an action-oriented genre, and so does not lend
itself well to the slow build and intricate backstory you need for a
ghost tale.
But
Lovecraftian horror posits a universe of hidden races, monstrous
gods, and exotic antiquity. It plays on the unseen gulfs of time
that existed before history and our fears of what we might not know
about the world we see. It also, most importantly, depicts a
completely amoral universe. Lovecraft’s innovation was to invent
the idea of ancient evils that are mostly evil by being completely
alien. His monstrous gods don’t hate us, they just don’t care
either way. Interfacing even partially with these deathless entities
will drive a human being insane, simply because they are so different
from us.
All
of this fits in very well with the ideas and ethos of the Sword &
Sorcery tale. The gods of an S&S world must by necessity be
either imaginary or evil, and a kind of evil that has little to do
with the traditional philosophical/religious ideas. A lot of fiction
at the beginning of the century was trying to explore evil in this
new context divorced from rigid religious values, and S&S was no
different. Lovecraft made up an idea of gods that were not evil
because of the Devil or some such bullshit, but because they predated
such paltry ideas and concepts.
The
difference in the use of these tropes in S&S is that you can’t
use the same kinds of protagonists for them. Lovecraft’s narrators
were often pallid, bookish types who would faint at the sight of
blood, and were quite impossible to envision as the hero of a violent
action story. Also, while an aura of doom pervades a lot of S&S,
it is distinctly different from the nihilistic hopelessness found in
a pure horror tale. A Sword & Sorcery hero may lose the battle,
but he has to get a few good hits in first. More often, even if they
die, the S&S hero will win a kind of victory, or at least a
reprieve. And it is worth noting that no swaggering barbarian hero
will ever go mad just from the sight of the monster he has come to face.
Because
that is the difference with the horror elements in Sword &
Sorcery – the evil is there to be fought. The backdrop of
antiquity and prehuman horror creates an aura of danger and adds to
the feel of a grim, violent world unlike our own. It stacks odds
against the protagonist in the same way the ancient, deathless
monster does, but they are all there to provide a backdrop for
heroism. A Lovecraftian protagonist is never a hero, always a
victim, always mad and helpless and screaming. A S&S protagonist
is there to fight, to kill, to stand against the unkillable evil and
swear to kill it, or die trying.
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