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happens, these rather poor tales influenced much better writers and there is little doubt that Byron, Shelley and other Romantics came, when young, under the influence of the Gothic fantasists and that the Gothic moods coloured their own ideas. It may be making an overlarge claim, but it is possible to imagine that we might not have had Childe Harold or even Idylls of the King without the first Gothic Romances. These Romances were much influenced by the stories of Arthur, Charlemagne and El Cid, as well as the Teutonic sagas and the later “fake” Romances such as Amadis of Gaul which Southey translated in the early part of the nineteenth century (see Introduction to this series). Compared to the haunted castle background, this theme was not, it seems, as popular, but it certainly encouraged Sir Walter Scott to write his Waverley Novels and in turn influence a huge body of historical novelists who doubtless, in turn, influenced the “sword-and-sorcery” writers of whom Lord Dunsany is recognizably the first.

Dunsany’s sword-and-sorcery tales are rarely reprinted, these days. They were written in the last part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries.

The Sword of Welleran is apparently one of the best, dealing with a youth who lives in a city once protected by a group of rather Charle-magnian paladins. When the city is attacked, he takes the sword of the chief hero, Welleran, and, disguised as the hero, drives the invaders back.

From my own limited reading of Dunsany’s tales, they seem to be rather slight, depending largely on a deliberately archaic style used to evoke a nostalgic, highly coloured mood which tends to pall in even the shortest of the stories.

Dunsany seems to have influenced two later writers—Clark Ashton Smith (who doesn’t have his demerits to quite the same extent) and J.R.R. Tolkien, who has Dunsany’s demerits but compensates for them with other merits of his own.

Smith would appear to be one of Robert E. Howard’s influences. Smith wrote of Hyperboria, Atlantis, of “prehistoric” civilizations of the past and civilizations of the future which seem exactly like them. His stories were, like Dunsany’s, anecdotal and slight. Otherwise, Howard was influenced by contemporary writers of historical and oriental adventure, who had, in turn, been influenced by Scott, Conan Doyle and other historical novelists.

Howard’s rough, erotic-exotic, violent prose had the archaicisms of Dunsany and Smith, but where they had built highly mannered “prose-poems,” Howard told stories. Howard’s style was a combination of the best and the worst in Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lovecraft and commercial hack-writers, filling the pulps of his day. His plots were involved, if not very original, and held the reader; in its rawness, its wildness and emphasis on physical strength and prowess, Howard’s work was more of an “American” type than the others. Its hero was not the sensitive, delicate, shadow-creature of Dunsany’s wish-world, but the virile barbarian, the iconoclast, the sneerer at authority and learning—in fact, Howard’s Conan is the idealized American frontiersman in quasi-mediaeval clothing, with a sword instead of a long gun. Yet Conan, too, is essentially an innocent.

Fritz Leiber was the next important contributor to the growing body of stories in the sword-and-sorcery vein. Originally in Unknown and later in Fantastic, his polished tales of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser owed influence to Howard, but harked back to Smith in their use of understatement and sardonic dialogue. These tales combine the best of both kinds and have a very distinct flavour which I find most palatable. If Conan was the “frontiersman,” then the Grey Mouser is the “sharp operator”—for me, a much more interesting and subtle character.

There is a quality which most of these stories share in their construction. Dominant in the Gothic Romances of the two previous centuries was the picaresque theme—the quest theme which has been used as an effective vehicle for storytelling since earliest times. It is still the dominant kind of plot in