Conan Of The Isles

INTRODUCTION

There is a kind of story laid, not in the world as it is or was, but as - to an armchair adventurer - it ought to have been. It is an adventure-fantasy, laid in an imaginary prehistoric or medieval world, where magic works and the scientific revolution has not taken place. Or perhaps it is in some parallel universe, or in this world as it will be in the distant future, when science has been forgotten and magic has revived.

In such a world, gleaming cities raise their shining spires against the stars; sorcerers cast sinister spells from subterranean lairs; baleful spirits stalk crumbling ruins; primeval monsters crash through jungle thickets; and .the fate of kingdoms is balanced on bloody broadswords brandished by heroes of preternatural might and valor. In such a world, men are mighty, women are beautiful, life is adventurous, and problems are simple. Nobody even mentions the income tax or the dropout problem or socialized medicine. Such a story is called 'heroic fantasy' or, sometimes, 'sword-and-sorcery.'

The purpose of heroic fantasy is neither to solve the problems of the steel industry, nor to expose defects in the foreign-aid program, nor to expound the questions of poverty or intergroup hostility. It is to entertain. It is escape reading in which one escapes clear out of the real universe. But, come to think, these tales are no more 'unreal' than the many whodunnits wherein, after the stupid police have fallen over their own big feet, the brilliant amateur - a private detective, a newspaper reporter., or a little old lady - steps in and solves the crime.

Heroic fantasies combine the color, gore., and lively action of the costume novel with the atavistic terrors and delights of the fairy tale. They furnish the purest fun to be found in fiction today. If you read for fun, this is the genre for you.

The heroic fantasy traces its ancestry back to the myths and epics of ancient times - to the stories of Odysseus and Rustam and Sigurd and Cuchulainn. Down the centuries, many civilized writers like Ovid, Firdausi, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Spenser, and James Stephens have collected these tales, edited or rewritten them, and composed pastiches based upon them.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stories of the supernatural were neglected in Europe. Then, however, fantasy re-entered the main stream of Western literature through three channels: the oriental fantasy narrative, which first appeared in the form of Galland's translation into French of the Arabian Nights; the Gothic novel, brought from Germany to England by Horace Wai-pole with his Castle of Otranto (1764); and the child's fairy tale, originally based upon the peasant tales written up and popularized by Andersen and the Grimm brothers.

At the same time, Walter Scott launched the modern historical novel with his Waverley (1814) and its many successors. Although people had long written stories laid in periods before their own - Homer's Iliad is an obvious example - Scott was the first to realize that the past had been drastically different in many ways from the present and that these differences of costume and custom in themselves had entertainment value, which a skilled storyteller could exploit. Scott's novels were so influential that they touched off a wave of British medieval romanticism.

In the 1880s, William Morris, the versatile British artist, decorator, poet, reformer, publisher, and novelist, created the modern heroic fantasy. In his pseudo-medieval novels like The Well at the World's End, Morris combined the antiquarian romanticism of Scott and his imitators with the supernaturalism of Walpole and his imitators. After Morris, Lord Dunsany adapted heroic fantasy to the short-story form early in the present century, while Eric R. Eddison composed his long Zimiamvian novels in the same genre.

The appearance of the American magazines Weird Tales in 1923 and Unknown Worlds in 1939 created new markets for heroic fantasy. Many notable tales of swordplay and sorcery appeared in them - notably those of Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, L. Ron Hubbard, and Fritz Leiber. The market for such fiction shrank after these magazines ceased publication (in 1943 and 1953 respectively) and it looked for a while as if heroic fantasy had become a casualty of the machine age.