Jack London, the Frontier, and Sword-and-Sorcery

February 18, 2020 Brian Murphy

For the last few years my reading has consisted almost entirely of sword-and-sorcery fiction (small wonder, and shameless plug, as I just finished Flame and Crimson). In need of a palate cleanser after a steady diet of loinclothed barbarians and scantily-clad wenches, I picked up my old hardcover volume of Jack London Stories.

And quickly discovered I never really left sword-and-sorcery. Or, maybe I just took my sword-and-sorcery addled brain with me. Hear me out.

We know that Robert E. Howard was a huge fan of London. Howard referred to London in letters as “this Texan’s favorite writer,” and boasted that London “stands head and shoulders above all other American writers.” A spinner of rugged wilderness adventure fiction, London did not write sword-and-sorcery, but the thematic material of his novels The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, and The Star-Rover are evident in Howard’s stories.

Unlike Howard, London lived in age with a living frontier in which to set his stories: The Klondike, Yukon territory up in northwest Canada. London experienced North America’s last frontier first-hand, when in 1897 at age 21 he took part in the gold rush in search of fame and fortune. His adventures in this vast, unforgiving, awe-inspiring expanse of wilderness informed the remainder of his writing career. For more on this phase of his life check out this nice piece by True West Magazine, “Jack London’s Alaska”.

In the last chapter of The Call of the Wild, “The Sounding of the Call,” John Thornton, Buck and their companions embark on a long overland voyage in search of a lost mine, pushing the boundaries of the gold rush into uncharted lands. This point of the novel reads almost as though the characters have left reality and entered the land of myth. It’s a hunt for treasure in a dangerous, fantastic world, not so far from the likes of Conan and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser as you might think. London’s language here is heightened, rarefied, almost otherworldly:

When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine, the history of which was as old as the history of the country. Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland. But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River, passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the backbone of the continent. John Thornton asked little of man or nature. He was unafraid of the wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge into the wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased. Being in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his dinner in the course of the day’s travel; and if he failed to find it, like the Indian, he kept on travelling, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later he would come to it. So, on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the limitless future.

Note the capitalized “East,” the reference to a treasure house waiting to be looted, and nuggets of gold unlike any known grade of gold in the North. We’re in Holy Grail territory here, or perhaps the land of the Jewels of Gwahlur (and good lord, how much do we all want to indulge in straight meat diets, and punch a time-card drawn upon the limitless future? I’m in).

Once literal places, “frontiers” particularly to the American mind have become part of our mythic history, symbolic of something broader: New possibilities and the potential to start anew. I believe frontiers are vital to the health of our minds and souls, and never more so than now. The man weary of his desk job and the commute to and from suburbia needs the possibility of somewhere else to relieve his trammeled existence. Lacking reliable space travel we turn to fantasy. As Ursula Le Guin observed in “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists,” fantasy offers somewhere else, a vision of other worlds that dispel despondency. “The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives, and therefore offers hope.”

Born exactly 30 years after London, Howard lived in a world in which the frontier, at least in the continental U.S., had closed. In 1906, the west was only recently settled but was settled nonetheless. The days of Indian raids were over and had become the stuff of stories and tall tales, which Howard ate up with relish. The new “gold rush” took the form of oil companies setting up shop in Texas and pumping the land of black gold, leaving broken bodies and despoiled land in their wake. Faced with this unsatisfying reality Howard turned his typewriter to stories set in the world of fantasy, where a frontier of the mind could still be found.

Howard took his preference for the frontier life and its freedoms, and his knowledge of its history and stories, and spun new myths. The Hyborian Age is Howard’s impossibly ancient re-creation of the western, when the entire world was still a frontier to be explored, great plains and vistas of wild lands to be traveled and settled, forgotten cities and their riches waiting to be discovered and plundered, and decadent cities and civilizations ripe for treading under the sandaled feet of barbaric races.

As has been well documented, late in his life Howard began to turn toward stories of the old west. Perhaps his greatest work would have been a great American western novel. Pure speculation, of course, but not unfounded. The west was in his blood, as were the stories of Jack London.

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