Elric_ The Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock [13]
As de Camp showed in his “Exegesis of Howard’s Hyborian Tales” and as I did in my earlier and not nearly so complete article “Historical Fact and Fiction in Connection with the Conan Series” (Burroughsania, vol. 2, no. 16, August 1957), the names for characters and backgrounds in Howard’s wonderful series were nearly all culled from legendry. Most of Howard’s sources are easily traced, for he did not even change names. The same goes for The Broken Sword; and the Ring tetralogy is obviously based (only based, mind you) on Anglo-Saxon foundations.
This, of course, does not detract one iota from the stories themselves. In fact all the authors have done much, much more than simply rehash old folk literature—they have taken crudely formed and paradoxical tales as their bases and written new, subtler stories which are often far better than the ones which undoubtedly influenced them. Also, when I compare Conan with Beowulf and so on, I am not saying that these characters were the originals upon which Howard, Leiber, Tolkien, and the others based their own heroes and villains—I am simply trying to point out that the influence was there.
So, all in all, I would say that Epic Fantasy is about the best name for the sub-genre, considering its general form and roots. Obviously, Epic Fantasy includes the Conan, Kull, and Bran Mak Morn stories of R. E. Howard; the Gray Mouser/Fafhrd stories by Fritz Leiber; the Arthurian tetralogy by T. H. White; the Middle Earth stories of J.R.R. Tolkien; The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison; the Zothique stories of Clark Ashton Smith; some of the works of Abraham Merritt (The Ship of Ishtar, etc.); some of H. Rider Haggard’s stories (Allan and the Ice Gods, etc.); The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson; the Gormenghast trilogy of Mervyn Peake (it just gets in, I think); the Poictesme stories of James Branch Cabell (including Jurgen, The Silver Stallion, and others); and The Well of the Unicorn by Fletcher Pratt.
I would appreciate other suggestions for possible inclusions. Titus Groan and its sequels by Mervyn Peake actually do not have the form nor roots I have described but they have the general atmosphere and are certainly set outside of our own space-time Earth.
The question might be raised as to whether or not to include Alternate Space-Time Continuum stories such as de Camp’s and Pratt’s Harold Shea tales, Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur (obviously the main influence for many subsequent stories), L. Ron Hubbard’s Masters and Slaves of Sleep, etc., in which present day heroes enter worlds of legend and myth and don’t take the idea altogether seriously. The basic difference is in the treatment, I think. In the Epic Fantasy group the author more or less asks you to accept the background and so on as important because his characters consider it important, then take the story from there, respecting the laws and logic which are to be taken for what they are, and taken seriously.
In the AS-TC group the treatment is often humorous, the author having the attitude of a teller of tall stories who doesn’t expect to be believed but knows that he is entertaining his hearers—which is all that is required of him. Thus, although several of the AS-TC group could just about fall into the Epic Fantasy group, I consider it best to describe them as simply “Fantasy” (which I usually interpret to mean the kind of stuff which filled the majority of Unknown’s pages).
What do you think?
THE STEALER OF SOULS
For my mother.
This is the first of a new series of stories by a new author to our pages. Unlike many central characters,