Editor’s Note: Will sent me this a few weeks ago. It was right before my wife had knee replacement surgery (yes, I am now married to a cyborg) and at the beginning of teaching a summer class. My cyborg wife is well on her way to a full recovery, and I turned in grades today. I want to apologize to Will for taking so long to get this up. I’m sure what he has to say will generate some discussion, so take it away, Will.
The Golden Age of Sword-and-Sorcery, 1929-1949
By Will Oliver
Sometime ago, I ran across a list of the early Cthulhu Mythos stories, sort of a Golden Age of Cthulhu list. I took up the challenge of tracking down and reading all of the stories in order. It was an interesting experiment in seeing how the so-called Mythos developed during that era. As my interest lies more with Sword-and-Sorcery, however, I began wondering what a list of Golden Age S&S stories would look like. Finding none online, I decided to create one.
Starting with the well accepted premise that the genre, or sub-genre, known as Sword-and-Sorcery started with Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom,” I knew I had a starting point, August 1929. As a generation is approximately 20 years, that would take the end point of the list to August of 1949, or simply the end of 1949. This makes sense in that the date falls right before Gnome Press began reprinting the Conan stories in hardcover and well before the 1960s resurgence.
While I noted Brian Murphy’s detailed definition of what makes up a S&S story, I took a more liberal stance on what was included on the list. If the story emphasized one element (sword or sorcery) over the other, I still included it. Some of the stories had a slight issue with meeting the definition as they fell under other sub-genres, such as portal stories, but I included them if the majority of the story read like pure S&S.
Part of the motivation for creating the list was to see if there were any strong feelings one way or the other toward which stories were ultimately included on the list. And I wanted to see if there were any stories I might have overlooked during the timeframe in question. Finally, it is just nice to have a go-to reading list for anyone interested in reading every story from the Golden Age of Sword-and-Sorcery. Continue reading →
Let’s talk about cycles and rhythms of life, shall we? If you are fortunate to have enough stability in your life, then life will begin to develop cycles and rhythms. For example, it’s August. Summer classes are over, but the fall semester hasn’t started yet.
