Know, O sword-brothers, that—between the Golden Age of Sword-and-Sorcery, when Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Elric and Kane stalked the earth, driving all before them; and our present age, when Sword-and Sorcery may be found with but a click—there was a Great Dying. Few withstood that literary famine upon the land. Then, at the dawn of the Twenty-First Century, a mere handful of True Believers strove mightily to bring back Sword-and-Sorcery and infuse new blood into what had become a decadent and dying thing. This is their tale.

In my opinion, the true 'Golden Age of Sword-and-Sorcery' stretched from about 1966 to about 1986. During that period, you saw authors from the First Dynasty/Mythic Era of S&S--such as Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber--get republished with success far beyond what was seen in the 1930s. In addition, new S&S heroes like Elric, Cugel the Clever and Thongor first appeared to varying degrees of success. The late '60s explosion of interest in Conan was a rising tide that lifted all manner of swordly and sorcerous boats.

The 1970s and early '80s witnessed an unprecedented flowering of Sword-and-Sorcery. DAW Books led the charge on the paperback front, but Marvel Comics--filling the Conan-shaped void created by the collapse of Lancer Books--kept the Robert E. Howard boom rolling, with sales of Conan the Barbarian eclipsing nearly every other title in the Marvel stable. Mike Grell's The Warlord was a damn good seller over at DC. Almost every book publisher with a toe in the fantasy pond took a stab at exploiting the S&S market.

"Exploit" is the operative term. Most editors appear to have had little clue as to what constituted quality S&S. A lot of substandard Sword-and-Sorcery got published as a result. It created a glut. Readers possessed only so much tolerance for ill-wrought variations on the theme of "kill a monster, grab a tit".

By about 1984, it was pretty obvious that any prestige and interest that Sword-and-Sorcery had garnered heretofore was rapidly waning. The Ace Conans and the pure pastiche Tor Conans were doing well--and the Elrics were hanging in there--but the overall trend was away from gritty, tightly-plotted, combat-centric fiction. For various reasons, bloated door-stopper epics were in ascendance.

By 1990, the Great Dying of S&S was pretty evident. David Gemmell would forge on through the next decade, seemingly oblivious to whatever forces worked against his fellow S&S scribes. Perhaps his English background helped a bit. The UK also gave us Black Library/BL Publishing in 1999. Their first release was William King’s Gotrek and Felix novel, Trollslayer. Black Library would go on to publish many more quality S&S novels, albeit mostly under the radar of us Yanks.

Meanwhile, Tor Books were cranking out forgettable Conan pastiches--which obviously made money--every year. Baen Books courageously published the "REH Library" series, which got Solomon Kane, Kull and Cormac Mac Art back in paperback. Michael Shea would see two Nifft the Lean novels published by Baen in 1997 and 2000. Maybe that was a harbinger...

Another harbinger, without a doubt, was Marcelo Anciano creating Wandering Star Books in 1997. Originally just a showcase for Solomon Kane, the Wandering Star ambit grew larger from year to year. By 1999, Wandering Star had published The Ultimate Triumph in conjunction with Frank Frazetta. That edition used various artworks from across Frazetta's career to illustrate S&S yarns by Robert E. Howard.

The Ultimate Triumph, despite its high price tag, sparked wide-spread interest. Perhaps what is most telling is from whence the title was derived. At the end of the classic Conan yarn, "Beyond the Black River", one Aquilonian ranger states, "Barbarism must ultimately triumph." The foremost ambassadors of Sword-and-Sorcery--Robert E. Howard and Frank Frazetta--had joined forces once again, if but for a moment.

The tribes were gathering, beyond the firelight, in the Outer Dark.

Into this almost formless void, pregnant with possibilities, stepped a few stalwart fans of Sword-and-Sorcery. Daniel E. Blackston, David Pitchford, Jason M Waltz, Howard Andrew Jones, John C. Hocking, C.L. Werner and William King: those men stood up to be counted. Their story will be told over the course of the next three days in DMR Books' "21st Century Sword-and-Sorcery" series of blog entries.

Strap yourselves in, sword-brothers. It's gonna be a wild ride!

The late, great Steve Tompkins covered roughly the same ground I have for the blog entry above—but in his own inimitable style— in his acclaimed essay for The Cimmerian, “After Aquilonia and Having Left Lankhmar: Sword-and-Sorcery Since the 1980s”.