Blood & Steel

Obviously, the subject of violence is kind of a big one in Sword & Sorcery fiction. The very roots of the genre are set it adventure fiction, with its swordfights, gun battles, narrow escapes, and chases, and the mold of the genre were set early by Howard and his rough-hewn, quintessentially violent heroes. S&S characters don’t solve their problems by talking them out, they solve them by hacking them up with axes and swords.

Howard was a product of the Texas borderlands, only a generation removed from the frontier days when men habitually went armed and real violence was a fact of everyday life. He also grew up during the oil boom, and saw up close how rough, lawless men handled disputes. As the son of a doctor he probably saw his share of blood and wounds, and he maintained a fascination with boxing and personal combat all his life. Violence was definitely in his blood, so to speak, and it found its way into the stories he told.

All subsequent S&S authors have included violence as an element in their stories, and it’s not like you can get away from it. Creators differ in how much they include, and in how they treat it. Leiber’s swordfights are much more in the tradition of theatrical duels, with a lot of technique and not a lot of blood. He often pitted his heroes against inhuman opponents, so their deaths would not be as gruesome. Several of his tales, feature very little express violence at all.

Moorcock was more liberal with his swordplay, but he always highlighted the essentially tragic nature of his worlds with it. The greatest incidents of violence in the Elric stories are always leavened with some kind of regret. Either this was violence the hero did not want to engage in, or it had some unintended effect that was only apparent afterward. Violence is never cathartic in a Moorcock story.

If you study Howard’s works, you often see how he employed violence with a deliberate precision at odds with his reputation. For a lot of his narratives, the violence is implied. It is spoken of, or the evidence of it is seen, but we don’t see it ourselves. But when he finally gets to it, he really goes after it with a zeal very few modern writers have ever matched. He didn’t candy-coat his fight scenes, and heads fly and entrails are spilled with no flinch from the author.

Some of the luridness of his approach was because he wrote characters that did not fear violence, but sought it out. Howard’s heroes are never reluctant combatants. They are barbarians, wanderers, outlaws, berserkers, and pirates, who all lust for action and never flinch from the clash of steel. It is, in part, this distinctly primitive attitude that makes his stories so vital and so vivid.

This invitation to violence in the genre has led to a lot of second-rate authors misunderstanding the place of violence and gore in their imitations of the masters. I have read plenty of stories that are eager to spill blood or engage in sometimes uncomfortable levels of torture or mutilation without considering what purpose the elements serve in the narrative. Like any other tool, violence must be used for a reason, and for a specific effect. Adding excitement is a perfectly valid reason to use it, but too often, this fails as well.

Because a fight scene has to have its own narrative, pacing, and story beats. You are telling, in effect, a smaller story inside the larger one. There has to be threat, rising action, escalating stakes, climax – all of it. A good fight scene does not just stop the story dead while we wait to see who won, it tells us more about the characters as they do battle. The label “Sword & Sorcery” is not a free pass to engage in pornographic gore and violence. Because you are dealing with such strong elements, they have to be handled with care, and ironically a very fine sense of taste, otherwise works are produced with bring down the entire genre.

The Pass of Bones

In the night of the year, by torchlight and the cold glare of the skyfires, men gathered for war. They came from many villages and hollows, from vales and riverside camps. They left their earthen longhouses, and they bore with them what weapons they had. Many carried the long bows of the northland hunters; others bore spears with iron heads etched with killing runes. The few true warriors among them wore their scaled armor and their iron swords. Shaggy horses bore them through the night under the burning stars to where the army gathered.

Druan was among them, here in the ancient meeting place called the Hada, where the fire of the goddess Ajahe was kindled and sacrifices made. The valley was strewn with the stone monuments of a vanished age of giants, and here stood the pillars that marked the turning of the year. The great chieftain Kaldun had set his tent here, and sent forth the call for men of war to come for a great purging, for the purpose of striking into the dark valley and destroying the heart of the evil that came from it.

Druan camped there among the few men of his old village who remained. Only six of them were unwounded and fit for battle; the others were too old or too young, or they still lay crippled from the attack. Bagan was one of them, and he was near death. Druan remained with him, tended his fire and kept him warm against the cold. It was plain he would not live much longer, as his wound was angry and eating him from within. He lay wrapped in furs, trying not to touch the hole in his belly packed with moss.

“How many have gathered?” the old man said, his voice weak. He could not eat any longer, only sip a little broth from a copper bowl.

“More than three hundred,” Druan said. He added more wood to the fire, wishing it was seasoned. The green wood gave off so much bitter smoke. “Perhaps fifty true warriors with armor and with swords. The rest are men like us.”

“I was a warrior, in my youth,” Bagan said. “I fought in blood feuds and for gold in raids. Those were the old times, not peaceful, when all men were against one another. I went south, into warmer lands, and fought wars for pay. It is a bitter life, to kill as a trade. I do not regret giving it up.” He took a heavy breath, put his hand down and touched the old bronze sword sheathed at his side. “You are a warrior as well, Druan. You fought and killed and took your wounds. You carry a weapon taken from the hand of a slain enemy. That is no small thing.”

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.