In 1937, long before Dungeons & Dragons, two friends began designing a board game set in the fantasy world of Nehwon (‘no when’ spelled backwards). They each wrote a story concerning two of this world’s adventurers; a giant northern barbarian called Fafhrd and his diminutive comrade, the Gray Mouser. The two friends were Fritz Leiber and Harry Otto Fischer and their characters of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were loosely based upon themselves, Leiber being tall and Nordic-looking while Fischer was somewhat smaller and darker.
It would be Leiber who would continue with the literary side of their adventures. The first short story featuring the duo to be published was Two Sought Adventure (later to be re-titled The Jewels in the Forest), in the August 1939 issue of Unknown. Leiber would pen over 30 stories concerning Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. In the beginning, they were only loosely connected without much in the way of continuity but, by the 1970s, Leiber had begun to put them in chronological order, ripe for publication as a set of volumes.
The first book in the collected saga was Swords and Deviltry, published by Ace Books in 1970. It’s comprised of four sections; a story each for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser before their definitive first meeting in the highly acclaimed tale Ill Met in Lankhmar. This is all preceded by Part I which is a brief taster called ‘Induction’ and is an alternate and context-light description of the first meeting of our heroes in the massive-walled and mazy-alleyed metropolis of Lankhmar.
Part II is the tale of The Snow Women in which Fafhrd’s youth in the snowy wastes of the north is recalled and the events that led to his departure for warmer environments. Originally published in the April 1970 issue of Fantastic Stories it tells of an eighteen-year-old Fafnir, a member of a matriarchal tribe of which his mother is a formidable elder. Despite the rage of his mother, Fafnir falls in love with Vlana, an actress in a travelling show and together the pair flee south.
Part III is the Gray Mouser’s turn in The Unholy Grail. First published in the October 1962 issue of Fantastic, we meet ‘Mouse’, a young apprentice of the exiled wizard Glavas Rho. After his master is slain, Mouse falls in love with Ivrian, the daughter of the duke who has outlawed magic in his realm. Captured by the duke and tortured, Mouse is presented with a choice; use black magic to escape with his life, or remain true to white magic and die.
Part IV is the Nebula and Hugo Award winning tale Ill Met in Lankhmar, which was first published in the 1970 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The mazelike warren of the city of Lankhmar is the setting where two members of the Guild of Thieves are ambushed simultaneously by Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Recognizing a kindred spirit in the other, the pair head back to the Mouser’s lodgings where Ivrian waits. On the way, they pick up Fafhrd’s girl, Vlana, and the four of them have a private party. After imbibing much, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser concoct a bold plan to rob the Thieves’ Guild.
Beginning his career in the wake of Robert E. Howard’s suicide, Fritz Leiber picked up the torch of sword and sorcery from its fallen titan and carried it forward, helping shape and define the genre. We even owe the label ‘sword and sorcery’ to Leiber who unknowingly christened it in a 1961 letter in the Conan fan magazine Amra, as a reply to a question posed by fellow fantasy writer Michael Moorcock:
“I feel more certain than ever that this field should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story—and (quite incidentally) from the cloak-and-dagger (international espionage) story too!”
Leiber and Moorcock would go on to become members of SAGA (The Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America), an informal gathering of like-minded writers who met for drinks after conventions and gave themselves outrageously pompous titles (Moorcock was The Veiled Thaumaturge of the Mauve Barbarians of Ningg). It was the efforts of SAGA and its anthologies like Flashing Swords! that promoted the genre in an era when it had largely been forgotten and are responsible for sword and sorcery being recognized as it is today. Leiber’s influence is highly notable in both sword and sorcery and high fantasy (his walled city of Lankhmar and its various guilds is clearly recognizable in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series).
pjthorndyke.wordpress.com 