SEX

There is quite a bit of disconnect between how the Sword & Sorcery genre is portrayed as regards to sex. In the wider popular mind it is a genre overflowing with naked flesh, bulging muscles, bare breasts and scantily-dressed women. It just would not fit the popular conception of the genre if it did not contain musclemen in loincloths and women in various bikinis made from things bikinis are not normally made from.

This is largely a concoction of the era when S&S moved out of literature and into the realm of comics and movies. The written form of S&S was not really a tremendously sexy genre, and in fact usually contained no sex at all, save for vague references and mentions of unclothed harem girls.

Howard himself was no fan of including a sex appeal element, and often he only included women at all because the publishers got on him about it if he didn’t. If he wanted to be the cover story, he had to put a sexy girl in the story for the artist to put on said cover and thus help sell magazines. He often complained about this in his letters, but he went along with it – resulting in Conan rescuing a succession of half-dressed damsels who he would ditch before the text tale.

Subsequent practitioners of the form did not really go farther with this. Leiber and Moorcock were both quite reticent at including sex in their stories, and this may have just been a function of the time period. The pulp era liked to flirt with sexy themes, but was constrained by censorship laws to keep it in the margins.

This all changed in the late 60s when the S&S resurgence took place. People were accustomed to much more explicit sexuality in their stories, and as the 70s progressed more and more barriers came down. There were fewer and fewer restrictions placed on authors as to what they could write, and the whole culture became much more accepting of sexual themes.

The art used to sell Sword & Sorcery also had a big impact. Frazetta famously included the now-obligatory scantily-clad slave maidens on his covers, and set a precedent no one was in a hurry to get away from. Book covers came to include oiled-up barbarians and naked girls almost by default, and the comics were not any better about this, skirting right along the edges of what they could get away with.

These sorts of images may have been in the original tales, but a visual depiction of a harem of naked women is a lot more visceral and explicit than just mentioning one on the page. The selling of S&S became bound up with lurid images of sex – mostly provided by naked or mostly-naked women. Even when female characters were given more agency or even placed in the lead role, they still had to adhere to the fanservicey tropes of chainmail bikinis and loincloths.

It introduced a degree of carnality to the genre that it has never quite gotten away from, and in fact some modern authors gleefully include scenes of rape or torture as a way to seem “edgy” without really considering what they are doing. The violence and sex sometimes rise to almost pornographic levels and rarely seem to add anything to the narrative. None of this is helped by the grimdark aesthetic of things like Game of Thrones, with the ubiquitous female nudity and casual rapeyness.

So should this element of gratuitous sex be considered a necessary part of the genre? I would say not. I feel like the sexual themes detract from the kind of lean and mean stories that make for the best Sword & Sorcery. I’m not being a prude here, as I have written something like 20 pornographic novels, and I know as much about that kind of story as anyone. I feel like the elements of barbarism the sexual elements are meant to evoke are fine, and can add to the feel of brutality that makes for a menacing world. But I don’t think sex is a good story element for what is essentially an action genre, and those who have delved heavily into it have done the genre – and themselves – a disservice.

The Horned Prow

When the ice closed in, the ships were caught. Thane Ranne’s wounded fleet lay close to a rocky shore, the ice too thick to force a way through. The half-dozen longships groaned as the ice locked them in and winter descended, coating their dragon prows with ice. The sky was low and heavy with snow, and the winds from the northern seas were bitter and hungry, seeking for blood.

Buran was a young hearthman, and this raid had not borne him the fruits he had hoped for. He huddled against the rail on watch, keeping his gaze on the ice. He could not see far in the dim light, and the haze of the low clouds made the world a place of shadow and darkness. This had been his first taste of war, and it had been bitter.

A dozen war craft had set out, planning a surprise attack on the shores of Hadrad. It was the closing days of autumn, and no one would expect a sudden attack in ill weather and cold seas. They had planned to fire King Arnan’s hall and then range along the shores and pillage settlements and the halls of lesser thanes. Then they would slip back north before the freeze and return home covered in glory and laden with plunder.

But the ice came early and slowed their passage southward. Arnan and his war-hound Crune had been warned, and when they went ashore they met a heavy force of steel-clad warriors that threw them back into the sea with a price of blood. Buran had taken a hard blow on the helm and been carried senseless back to the ships as they escaped. Two had been burned before they could put to sea, and the others were short of crew.

There had been other raids in the weeks since, ships going ashore to plunder for firewood and food, rather than gold. Ranne still dreamed of a rich strike to fill the ship holds with treasure, but there was nothing. The heavy autumn mists separated the longships and now they were only six, with many wounded and hungry men. Now the winter had come and trapped them, and they would have to remain here until the thaw came in spring. The men looked ahead to privation and hunger and long winter nights. Already there were bitter words and hidden anger.

Primal

Sword & Sorcery tales traditionally take place in a world that is either an earlier era of our own, or a fictionalized analog of that. There’s a reason why my site is called New Iron Age and not “New Atom Age”, because that would be a different kind of image conjured in your mind, a different feel. Feel is a nebulous term in fiction, but it has meaning, and carries weight. Feel is what tells you, without having to be told, what a story is about in its essence. What kind of world you are being told about.

We develop a shorthand for this that encompasses a lot of things: style, dialogue, image, diction. In fiction it can center around what kind of prose this is: is it elevated and/or archaic? That gives us clues about how we are supposed to relate to this story. What things are described in the first lines of the story? Are we being told about mountains and forests and a castle on a hillside? That tells us something, and we begin – even if unconsciously – to set our feet.

Titles are important as well. A story that says “dragon” or “sword” is sending us one kind of message about what is going on, while a title that says, say “divorce” or “football” is telling us something very different. When a reader comes to a new story, they have a lot of things that can begin to set the scene in their minds, and a good writer takes advantage of that.

These days, a reader will often come to a story after a lot of stage-setting has already been done. They have seen the movie or the show made from the book, they have seen the cover art and read the back cover copy, they have read reviews online. They know, before they read a word, what kind of story this is in at least a broad sense. They know it is a story about a king and a war, or a story about a ballet dancer and a hostage situation in a cab, or an earthquake.

Yet as the author you still have to consider your opening very carefully. You have to choose details that will form the unconscious background the reader is building in their mind. You have to set the scene. A lot of modern fiction does not so much do this. It is rather common to see a story – or even a novel – begin with a line of dialogue divorced from any context. The author thinks this will get our attention, when really, without knowing who is speaking or even roughly where they are, the line is meaningless and makes no impact on the story.

So in a Sword & Sorcery story, you have to start selling what kind of story this is right from the word go. You have to make sure every detail is not only dripping with mood and dark atmosphere, but that it grounds you in a physical place that is like a more primally dangerous version of whatever you are basing this off of. In S&S you never dwell on the mild or nice aspects of a place – you go for the throat.

A forest might be pretty, but you don’t say that. You talk about the dark shadows and the huge, towering trees. You suggest timelessness and the gulfs of history by saying how ancient the forest is, and how it doubtless stood for aeons before the rise of man. Mountains loom, sunlight burns, rain slashes, cold bites. Everything in an S&S world has to be the amped-up, dangerous, pulp version of itself.

And characters should be introduced in the act of doing something. There is a good pulp maxim that a character should always be entering a scene with information or leaving it with intent. Characters in a Sword & Sorcery tale do not stand looking into the mirror or lounge in the autumn sunlight. A character should be hunting, fleeing, fighting, or defying something. Everything should be described in concrete terms to make the world vivid: iron swords, mail armor, burnished helms, battered shields. The adjective is your friend in this kind of story.

And you should always reach for the primal. The characters should inhabit a stark, dangerous world that feels primitive and filled with hazards. They should do things that are archetypal, like characters from legend. A Sword & Sorcery character should be in action from the start, and that action should be something that has always been, something that people have always done and that can hark back to the older, harsher world the story is evoking. It should be primal, always primal.