The strange ring he wore. Its sinister jewel glowed before her mind’s eye, impossibly large, intolerably brilliant, unthinkably evil. It shone through his mask, its malevolent gleam supplanting the blue murderlust that smoldered under his brow… The gem was alive, sentient! Its aura was creeping across the land, sweeping the entire Earth into its pulsating flames.

--Bloodstone, Karl Edward Wagner

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) began a draft of Bloodstone and its immortal protagonist Kane in 1960, while just a freshman in high school. It was five years after the hardcover publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King (1955), and five years prior to the unauthorized but widely circulated Ace paperbacks that would catapult the work into pop culture ubiquity.

Wagner finished the draft of Bloodstone in 1970 while enrolled as a PhD student in neurobiology. By then, Tolkien was everywhere—including, as I argue, in the published version of Wagner’s 1975 novel.

Possibly.

We don’t have a definitive statement from Wagner in which he lists Tolkien as an influence on Bloodstone or any of his other Kane stories. At least, I’m not aware of one (the lack of a proper Wagner biography or corpus of literary studies makes these types of essays particularly challenging). He may well have read The Lord of the Rings after Bloodstone was completed, rendering the following observations entirely coincidental. Or, it’s possible both authors shared another earlier, joint influence. There are many ancient and modern/pre-The Lord of the Rings works that employ magic rings. Plato, the Völsunga Saga, and stories from the Arabian Nights and Arthurian romance, all include rings of power. And of course, Richard Wagner—with whom KEW reportedly stated he was related to, perhaps in jest—and his The Ring of the Nibelung might be the inspiration for Bloodstone, not Tolkien.

Perhaps. But as this essay hopes to show Bloodstone seems to share much more in common with The Lord of the Rings than just a ring of power.

To think that Wagner—a voracious reader, and one of the horror and fantasy genres’ most shrewd critics and anthologizers—had not read The Lord of the Rings by 1970 is unrealistic. I believe he read it while Bloodstone was a work in progress. As this essay attempts to demonstrate, its presence is clearly if not unambiguously reflected in the text.

We know that Wagner read Tolkien. In a 1981 interview with Dr. Jeffrey Elliot published in Fantasy Newsletter, Wagner not only references The Lord of the Rings several times but demonstrates a reasonable familiarity with the book. The website from which I retrieved this reference, karlwagner.org, unfortunately contains a slightly broken transcript of Wagner’s words, however the interview demonstrates that Wagner not only read The Lord of the Rings, but also understood what set it apart from sword-and-sorcery of the era. For example, of what an S&S version of Tolkien would look like, Wagner stated cheekily: “You'd have to change the title to something like “Frodo and the Magic Ring” or perhaps “Frodo the Invincible.” Wagner was aware that high/epic fantasy had a greater commercial appeal than sword-and-sorcery by the early 80s. His short story “Neither Brute Nor Human” features a fictional sword-and-sorcery author whose works have been shelved by his publishing company, and to reignite his career his agent recommends he try high fantasy:

“Problem is that every paperback house that wants to already has one or two swords-and-sorcery series going. Do you think you could write high fantasy? That’s getting to be big just now. You know— lighten up a little on the violence and bare tits, give your imaginary world more of a bunch of fairy-tale atmosphere, maybe link in a bunch of Celtic myths and that sort of thing.”

“I can try it.” Harrington imagined Krystel Firewind stripped of sword and armor and a few inches of bustline, gowned in shimmering damask or maybe flowing priestess’ robes.

To be clear, Bloodstone is certainly no Tolkien clone, which by the 70s and certainly in the 80s were commonplace (see Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara, Dennis McKiernan’s Iron Tower trilogy, and Joy Chant’s Red Moon and Black Mountain). The differences between Bloodstone and LOTR are so vast they scarcely require further mention. The latter is the work of an academic, a professor of Old English, and a philologist, as well as a devout Catholic. Wagner meanwhile was a child of E.C. horror comics, Roger Corman films, and Gothic novels, though like Tolkien was also influenced by mythology. Bloodstone in comparison to the sprawling LOTR is a tidy (300 page) novel with the heritage of horror, pulp and sword-and-sorcery in its veins, not medieval romance. Some of the ways in which it diverges with LOTR—its absence of good vs. evil morality, its use of an outsider protagonist driven by self-serving ends and possessed of a fierce agency, and its lack of a world-altering conclusion that allowed Kane to partake in further adventure—are instructive in understanding what sets sword-and-sorcery apart from high fantasy.

I don’t believe Wagner was influenced by Tolkien thematically, but I do believe he sampled some of the plot elements, imagery, thematic concerns, and motifs from The Lord of the Rings, while also taking his story in very different directions. Bloodstone can therefore be read as a sword-and-sorcery response to Tolkien’s towering and influential work.

Similarities in plot, imagery

Bloodstone opens with a hunter finding a ring of power, unearthed by the fall of an uprooted tree. Beneath its roots lies the grave of a long dead warrior, whose effects include rusted arms and armor—and a great ring. It’s a humble and (seemingly) chance find, very much like the scene in The Lord of the Rings in which the hobbit-like Deagol, fishing with his friend Smeagol, finds the One Ring in a riverbed. Both rings are great talismans of power that have been lost for centuries.

The unnamed hunter sells the ring to a trader. Kane, in the employ of the bandit leader Hechon, ambushes the trader’s caravan, and recovers the ring in the ensuing confusion and melee. Kane is immediately and strangely attracted to the ring, just as we see in Tolkien.

In both stories those who covet the ring employ a similar appeal to fairness, and ultimately resort to violence to obtain it. In LOTR Smeagol/Gollum reminds his friend Deagol that it’s his birthday, and therefore he ought to have it. When Deagol refuses to hand it over, Smeagol, enraged, chokes the life from him. Kane meanwhile stakes his claim on the ring as a fairly earned spoil of war, and refuses to hand it over to Hechon. When the bandit chief threatens to take it, Kane slays him and his lieutenant. “The ring is mine!” he asserts, a phrase that should be quite familiar to readers of The Lord of the Rings.

Both stories shroud their respective rings in mystery, and in each, ancient texts must be consulted to determine their true nature. Kane visits the lonely tower of a demonic sorceress, Jhaniikest, “ageless offspring of a priestess of a vanished prehuman race and the winged god they had worshipped.” There he reads of its past in Alorri-Zrokros’s Book of the Elders. Kane learns the ring belonged to an ancient reptilian race of beings called the Krelan, an advanced species from beyond the stars who came to earth, only to meet with ruin. The Krelan were all but exterminated by another elder race, the Scylredi. Defeated, the Krelan diminish and regress, morphing into the frog-like Rillyti. These creatures still dwell in the great swamp of Kranor-Rill, mindlessly guarding their ancient technology still said to exist in their great and ruined city of Arellarti.

Despite the wildly fantastic and Lovecraftian/elder race elements of this sequence, there are again drumbeats of Tolkien here—if you squint hard enough. Troubled by some warning signs after it passes from Gollum to Bilbo and Frodo, Gandalf seeks to learn more about the ring. He embarks on dark journeys and long search to consult old books of lore and examine this shadow of the past. In the library of Gondor he finds a long-forgotten scroll, written by the hand of Isildur thousands of years ago. The scroll confirms Gandalf’s suspicions—it is the one ring, a ruling ring forged by the dark lord Sauron. It grants its wielder an immense power to control and subjugate. But as a creation of the dark lord it is inherently evil and corruptive.

Here again Bloodstone employs a similar conceit. Kane’s ring allows him to channel the power of a larger, sentient stone, the Bloodstone, from which the novel derives its name. Wagner describes Bloodstone’s power as “vampirish.” It creates “shadow slaves” to serve its ends, “dead creatures invested with a sham-life… hateful to the sight of true gods.” This certainly seems to echo Tolkien’s Ringwraiths, the twisted souls of great kings now living a shadow life as they serve the ends of Sauron. In a scene like a great battle out of The Silmarillion that saw great armies uniting to defeat Morgoth and his great chief Sauron, Wagner writes in Bloodstone that powerful elder races once had to unite to defeat Bloodstone and its chief servant, the master of the Krelan. This briefly mentioned and unnamed “master of the Krelan” invites comparisons with the chief ringwraith, the Lord of the Nazgûl.

The events of The Lord of the Rings take place in the Third Age of Middle-Earth, where the great powers, dwindling from their former seat of glory, meet in council and assemble a small Fellowship to bear the ring to the land of Mordor. They first consider an armed assault, but ultimately decide that secrecy, not military might, is needed to win through to Mount Doom. Kane likewise offers the Lord Dribeck of Selonari his services. He will lead a small band of men to Kranor-Rill, ostensibly to retrieve the ancient Krelan weapons for the Selonari in their war against neighboring Breimen. His true mission however is to activate the power of Bloodstone and leverage it for his own purposes.

The swamp of Kranor-Rill is described as “a festering abscess,” and a “rotting land” infected by a great evil at its center that exudes a “thick and ever present mist, a cloak of smothering vapor that clung to the morass.” This recalls both Tolkien’s Dead Marshes ("Mists curled and smoked from dark and noisome pools. The reek of them hung stifling in the still air”) as well as Mordor, a land of barrenness and ash and death, infected by the evil of Sauron. Kane loses a few of his men on the way in to Arellarti, victims of quicksand and huge predatory snakes. As they penetrate deeper into the swamp they encounter the frog-headed Rillyti, and battle erupts. In the midst of a confused melee the ring falls off Kane’s finger and into a brackish pool of slime. Though under attack and in a desperate fight for his life, Kane leaps after the ring with an “insane bellow,” neglecting his own safety. Banlid, Kane’s second in command, can’t believe the out of character actions of his ordinarily practical and cool demeanor-ed commander:

“Kane! Holy shit! Have you gone stark staring mad?” Banlid shouted in his ear, shook his shoulder, interrupted his concentration. “Kane, damn your ass! Kane! Snap out of it! We’re up to our ears in battle!”

As Kane emerges from the muck with the ring in his hand, “insanity blazed in his cold blue eyes.”

“All right… I found it,” he announced, in a low voice that held a harsh undernote.

This scene closely recalls Isildur, the powerful eldest son of Elendil, who scrambles for the one ring in the great river Anduin after it slips off his finger during a pitched battle with orcs. We know the One Ring “may slip off treacherously, but its keeper never abandons it.” Isildur learns of this treachery to his doom. Isildur leaps into the waters of Anduin to grab the ring, “but the Ring slipped from his finger as he swam, and then the Orcs saw him and killed him with arrows,” writes Tolkien.

Kane is able to win through to Arellati at the cost of his entire force, and cow the Rillyti with the presence of the ring.  Kane is not merely in possession of the ring, but possessed by it. He is drunk with the thought of using it to unlocking the massive Bloodstone itself in the heart of the city. “Before him lay the key to incalculable power; every atom of his energy must be directed toward unlocking it,” writes Wagner. The massive, towering dome at the center of Arellarti evokes some combination of Mount Doom and Barad-dûr, even appropriating some of Tolkien’s volcanic imagery: “Fired by the dying sun—or by Kane’s fevered imagination—the igneous stone blazed with volcanic hue, conjuring flame images of irresistible summons.”

Kane reactivates the machinery of the Bloodstone. Unlike LOTR in which Frodo uses the ring only when his life is in mortal danger, Kane uses the ring to fling power bolts at his enemies, scorching horsemen and blowing open city gates—a very sword-and-sorcery spin, if you will.

Fearing the looming threat of Kane and the revived and unified Rillyti, Dribeck decides to strike back. He attempts to recruit his bitter foes in Breimen, and also enlists the help of sorcery—the priestess Gerwein and her followers. Teres, a fierce Breimen warrior and daughter of the Breimen lord Malchion, joins forces with Dribeck and the Selonari.  Though at war, these ancient enemies realize that should they fail to defeat the Bloodstone, mankind shall be reduced to mindless slaves and even Kane will be its pawn. This ensuing epic battle perhaps shares something in common with the great battle at the Pelennor Fields, which sees the neighboring kingdoms of Gondor and Rohan, for decades suspicious of one another, unite to fight a common enemy.

As the battle rages the Bloodstone continues to grow in power and malevolence, and reaches beyond the stars to summon its brethren. But there it finds nothing. Its brothers have been destroyed in some eons-old war, and this realization drives it insane. “For all its malevolent soul, it had been designed as a machine by its creators,” Wagner writes. Kane finally reaches the realization he must destroy the Bloodstone. He smashes its gears and levers, and the sea, summoned by the priestess Gerwein and her followers, swallows the ancient city and its towering dome, a Mount Doom-like sequence of destruction. Kane escapes the fall of the city and will live another day.

Thematic similarities, differences

Both Bloodstone and The Lord of the Rings grapple with the theme of power, and warn that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In The Lord of the Rings the evil lord Sauron forges a ruling ring that allows him to control lesser rings of power. Into it he imbues a part of his life force, and a great deal of his power, leaving him vulnerable and dependent on the fate of the ring. The wielder of the One Ring is connected to the dark lord, and in using it will eventually succumb to his will. In Wagner’s novel the Bloodstone is likewise a sentient, Sauron-esque being of incredible power, and creates a similar link between ring and its bearer. Kane’s ring is a channel for Bloodstone’s power, and can be wielded only at great peril, for the Bloodstone seeks control over Kane and uses him as its pawn.

Much ink has been spilled on how the One Ring operates in Tolkien’s universe and the nature of evil in Middle-Earth. One view holds that there are palpable forces of good and evil operating in the world in opposition with one another, described by Tolkien critic Tom Shippey as “Manichaen” forces. Shippey also offers an alternative view of evil: That it is simply the absence of good, and because men are blank slates with no inherent good (or evil) qualities, their evil acts are choices. In this latter “Boethian” interpretation, “evil” is a weakness of character, committed by normal men who succumb to lesser instincts. Either interpretation of the One Ring and how it operates is valid. It is a powerful presence forged by a dark lord, but it requires a wielder through which it can channel its malevolence. Only the most powerful can resist, but most cannot.

The nature of Kane’s ring and the Bloodstone offer similar interpretations. The Bloodstone and its ring are sentient and evil, or Manichean, but also amplify what is in their wielder, and require a being of flesh to operate. By itself, the Bloodstone is powerless. Says Kane: “My link to Bloodstone is of a symbiotic nature. I can draw upon Bloodstone’s power, but without me—or more accurately, without the master of this ring—Bloodstone is only a lifeless crystal. For reasons that I cannot altogether comprehend, Bloodstone’s life force is a combination of two sources. Somehow it feeds upon the cosmic flow of energy that holds our universe in balance—in space as well as dimension. But it also requires the power of organic life.”

From this explanation Wagner takes his examination of power in a very different direction than Tolkien. Tolkien offers his readers relatively clear moral coordinates. The One Ring is unambiguously evil and there is no question what must be done with it: It must be carried to Mount Doom by the humblest of ring bearers, a hearth-and-home loving hobbit, and cast into the fires from whence it was made. In contrast, Kane’s use of the ring appears to be a valid option. Wagner’s fictional world of Kane lacks the moral hierarchy of value we see in Tolkien, where mercy, and pity, and selflessness, are rewarded. There is no clear-cut division between good and evil, so we find little to no commentary on the ethics of Kane’s unchecked pursuit of power. At one point Teres criticizes Kane for his lack of a conscience, but the lords of the warring kingdoms of Selonari and Breimen are grasping and squabbling and far from noble of motive. There is no lineage of great kings or figures worthy of restoration.

In short, Middle-Earth is worth saving, but it’s not clear whether Kane’s world is.

The protagonists of the two stories are also quite different. Unlike Frodo, Kane lacks what we might think of as a traditional morality, one that places duty and responsibility above self. Kane is driven by self-serving ends, desiring power to end his immortal ennui. When he tells the warrior-woman and love interest Teres of his plans to use Bloodstone to travel beyond the stars and master the secrets of the universe, and offers her eternity by his side, she recoils. Though Teres loves him, she calls Kane out for exhibiting a terrible selfishness:

“Mine will be power such as no man has ever held—not just the tepid pleasure of ruling over the conquered nations of mankind! I offer to place you at my side.”

“Your high opinions of another’s ethics bespeaks the obvious absence of your own conscience,” Teres coldly commented.

Kane’s fierce agency—he eventually sees through Bloodstone’s schemes and summons the will to smash the alien intelligence with his own hands—is considerably greater than Frodo’s. Frodo fails at his task, lacking sufficient will to cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom (though critically, his acts of mercy toward Gollum keep the creature alive, and enable the circumstances for the ring’s ultimate destruction). Kane meanwhile smashes the Bloodstone only after he realizes he has been played by a mad machine.

Although Bloodstone ends with the destruction of the Bloodstone and the razing of Arellarti, Kane’s world is relatively unchanged, and his adventures can and will continue. In The Lord of the Rings the destruction of the ring and the fall of Sauron precipitates the end of the Third Age of Middle-Earth, the decline of magic, and the beginning of a prosaic time of men. Frodo is irreparably damaged and must sail into the west. Nothing will ever be the same.

We can learn much from these sharp divergences of character, plot, and theme when considering what makes The Lord of the Rings a work of high fantasy, and Bloodstone sword-and-sorcery. And marvel at how much influence Tolkien’s story had on subsequent authors working in its long shadow, across subgenres of fantasy.

Brian Murphy is the author of Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (Pulp Hero Press). Learn more about his life and work on his website, The Silver Key.