"I live in a world of fire and sand. The crimson sun scorches the life from anything that crawls or flies, and storms of sand scour the foliage from the barren ground. This is a land of blood and dust, where tribes of feral elves sweep out of the salt plains to plunder lonely caravans, mysterious singing winds call travelers to slow suffocation in the Sea of Silt, and selfish kings squander their subjects' lives building gaudy palaces and garish tombs. This bleak wasteland is Athas, and it is my home."
— The Wanderer, Dark Sun
A subgenre of Heroic Fantasy, with which it is often lumped together, but having its own distinguishing characteristics. Coined by Fritz Leiber in the early '60s to define the style of his own works and those writers that inspired him, and to differentiate it from other works described as Heroic Fantasy, Sword & Sorcery is a genre of fantasy that is often considerably less glamorous and all about fast-paced action. Almost universally, Sword & Sorcery stories are about mighty warriors fighting supernatural horrors with blade in hand, either an Eldritch Abomination or Evil Sorcerer. Any political or criminal leaders are usually merely an Unwitting Pawn of a much darker power. Many victories will be by the skin of their teeth and usually won more through quick thinking and cleverness rather than physical might. There will be at least a few times where they cut their losses and bail on a fight, and they will have at least one Run or Die moment when they recognize that a threat is way out of their league. While they may have genuine allies here and there, they know better than to trust most people; as far as they are concerned, everyone they meet has a hidden dagger in their clutches until proven otherwise, and even then, they are usually still prepared for betrayal at some point.
Sword & Sorcery protagonists can usually be identified by three main traits, which separate them from most heroes from Heroic Fantasy:
- They are men (and occasional women) of action, larger than life and fighting evil through pure strength of will until their final breath.
- In some way or another the protagonists are outsiders, not having a real place in society even when among their own people. Quite often they are The Drifter and Walking the Earth.
- They are ultimately motivated by self-interest, offering their martial skills either for money, fun, or because doing so benefits them in another way.
Robert E. Howard is widely seen as the Trope Maker of the genre, with Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock being the Trope Codifiers a generation later. Many famous stories were first published in Pulp Magazines and short story anthologies are still a popular form of the genre.
If the heroes of a story are actually heroic and morally unambiguous, it's probably Heroic Fantasy. If there is only a low supernatural presence, it is most likely Low Fantasy. Can sometimes overlap with Dark Fantasy. See also Wuxia and Sword and Sandal, the Chinese and Bronze Age Mediterranean versions (respectively) of the genre, both with very strong overlaps.
Not to be confused with Sword and Sorcerer, which is a character duo trope.
Common tropes in Sword & Sorcery:
- Ambition Is Evil
- Anti-Hero
- Barbarian Hero
- Black-and-Gray Morality
- The Dark Arts
- Deliberate Values Dissonance
- Eldritch Abomination
- Eldritch Location
- Evil Sorcerer
- Good is Not Nice
- Human Sacrifice
- Humans Are Bastards
- Magic is Evil
- Proud Warrior Race Guy
- Rated M for Manly
- Thud and Blunder
- War Is Glorious
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Berserk, particularly in the Black Swordsman arc at the start of the story. Though it mainly veers straight into Dark Fantasy and Cosmic Horror.
- Claymore: The titular Claymores are warrior women who hunt monsters called Yoma but are shunned by humans for being part-Yoma themselves.
Comic Books
- Conan the Barbarian, naturally.
- Red Sonja.
- The Tales of the Jedi series is quite different in style from most Star Wars stories and has very stong allusions to Sword & Sorcery, being set 5,000 to 4,000 years before the rest of the Expanded Universe. Being the stories of the ancient Sith, it's full of demonic-looking evil sorcerers, their huge palaces and temples, and alchemy.
- The flashback stories featuring the prehistoric Avengers in Jason Aaron's The Avengers run.
- Cerebus the Aardvark started off as a parody of Conan, then became a more general Black Comedy Satire and then...something far stranger.
- The Goddamned has elements of the genre. A morally-grey Barbarian Hero with nothing but bones for weapons, Amazonian Beauties, a Sandal Punk setting full of giant beasts of dubious physiologies, barbaric Frazetta Men, giants, cults and cult-leaders, curses and the duality between faith in oneself and a higher power.
Film
- The 13th Warrior plays close to the genre, but eventually subverts it. All the magic and monsters turn out to be simply intimidation tactics by the savage warriors.
- Ator, the Fighting Eagle is a great example.
- It's sequel, The Blade Master is a great example on how not to write sword and sorcery.
- It's second sequel, Quest For The Mighty Sword, is another bad example.
- Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Conan the Destroyer
- Hawk the Slayer
- King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
- Mandy (2018) takes place in (a stylized version of) the real world in the early 1980s and adds elements of horror and psychedelia, but it qualifies. It's about a Barbarian Hero taking brutal but justified revenge against an Evil Sorcerer cult leader and his demonic mooks for murdering the woman he loves.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Aside from the unusual setting, the movies match the genre perfectly.
- The Scorpion King
- The Death Stalker movies are classic examples of '80s grindhouse sword and sorcery.
- The Beastmaster
- The Sword and the Sorcerer
- Conquest... sort of, if looking like it was made on several drugs still counts. Look, it's a Lucio Fulci movie, just roll with it.
- The Northman has been described as the story of Hamlet (more or less) told in the style of Conan the Barbarian. The sorcery elements are very much in the realm of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, but the characters certainly think they're real.
- Sorceress is another Conan imitator, with the twist that it takes much inspiration from The Corsican Brothers, featuring twin sisters raised as boys who have to prevent their own birth father, who's an Evil Sorcerer, from sacrificing the eldest to gain more power from his master, a dark god.
Literature
- The Barbarian and the Sorceress, a short story which is clearly in the original style of these, with a heroic wandering warrior having to fight an Evil Sorcerer. It subverts some conventions, though, as the hero has to be rescued by the title sorceress, who learned magic from the sorcerer's books without him realizing.
- Beowulf, as well as its many adaptations.
- Some of Edgar Rice Burroughs' pulpy Two-Fisted Tales provide formative early examples. Though the stakes are often high enough to push the stories more into High Fantasy territory, the magic — or, in the case of the Planetary Romance John Carter of Mars series, Psychic Powers — is limited enough to keep the focus more on swashbuckling action and swordfights. His heroes are principled and unambiguously heroic, but typically still have a little bit of Blood Knight in them. The Frank Frazetta covers many of Burroughs' books received later were a natural fit.
- Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian, Kull and Bran Mak Morn is the Trope Maker, if not Trope Codifier of the entire genre. It's almost impossible to find any sword and sorcery fiction that doesn't owe its existence to these stories in some shape or form.
- Howard's companion of the Lovecraft Circle, Clark Ashton Smith, has the Hyperborea and Zothique cycles. Of these, Hyperborea is more of a straight example, as it happens in Medieval Prehistory whilst Zothique is in the far post-apocalyptic future.
- Some of the short stories set in Glen Cook's Dread Empire universe fit here; the author explicitly cites Fritz Lieber as an inspiration. The full-length novels, however, which have much more epic scope and higher stakes, fall more into the High Fantasy side of things, albeit of a rather dark and gritty sort.
- The Eddie LaCrosse series is sometimes placed in this sub-genre, although it's sometimes closer to Low Fantasy than other works called sword-and-sorcery (depending a bit on exactly which book you look at).
- Michael Moorcock's The Elric Saga.
- The Eye of Argon is an infamously terrible novella that goes for this sort of tone, mostly trying to mimic the style of Conan. It tells of a Barbarian Hero named Grignr getting mixed up in the decadent city of Gorzom, running afoul of The Evil Prince, and rescuing a princess from being sacrificed by a cult. Its legacy as a try-not-to-laugh contest played at science fiction conventions is more than well-deserved.
- Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
- Fangbone! Third Grade Barbarian and its Animated Adaptation Fangbone!: Skullbania appears to be one of these with obvious inspirations from Conan the Barbarian and similar fantasy stories.
- Goblin Slayer is a grim Deconstruction of the genre that follows the bloody exploits of a man and his relentless quest to murder every goblin he comes across.
- The Iron Dream is a Deconstructive Parody of the genre by posing an Alternate History where Adolf Hitler became an author of pulp fiction in the mode of Robert E. Howard, where mighty Aryan warriors fight villains who are thinly veiled antisemitic stereotypes.
- Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore has probably the first female protagonist in these, which inspired many more Action Girl heroines.
- Kane Series by Karl Edward Wagner.
- Sword Sisters set in the Legend of the Red Reaper universe and published by Ragnarok Publications takes place in one such world.
- The Pusadian Series was L. Sprague de Camp's attempt at making a version of the Hyborian Age that matched better with the world's real history.
- Tales of the Black Raven by Seth Skorkowsky is a collection of stories about a master thief in a world of tombs, corrupt city-states, evil magic, and femme fatales.
- The Testament Of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz is a Tribal Fantasy about a Fantasy Counterpart Culture for the Comanche dealing with Cthulhuoid monstrosities and Human Aliens threatening their land.
- The Ties That Bind (Hayes) is set in a spectacularly grim and gritty world where the world's second-best swordsman has to deal with a lot of trouble from her male rivals. Thankfully, she has help.
- The Witcher: Monster hunter Geralt travels the land, killing monsters and lifting curses for coin, using swords, alchemy, and magic.
Live Action TV
- Hercules: The Legendary Journeys is the Spear Counterpart to Xena below.
- Xena: Warrior Princess is a staple of not only sword and sorcery, but Feminist Fantasy as well.
- Conan the Adventurer, naturally.
Music
- Heavy Metal band Eternal Champion's albums chronicle the adventures of Ultimate Blacksmith Rænon, and his forging of the Godblade against the Mad God Brakur.
- GWAR positively adores this trope - especially in their 2001 album, Violence Has Arrived.
Tabletop Games
- Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, a retro-clone of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
- Atlantis: The Second Age, which awards experience depending on how heroically you slay your enemies and revolves heavily around mechanics that require you to do outrageous and badass things the whole time.
- Barbarians of Lemuria.
- There have been plenty of Conan RPGs over the years, with another one currently being published by Modiphius Entertainment.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The game's roots are in this genre, with Gary Gygax claiming the game owes more to Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber and Jack Vance than to Tolkien.
- The Dark Sun setting specifically aims to emulate old pulp stories and is heavily influenced by John Carter of Mars, as well as Conan the Barbarian.
- As does On Mighty Thews, which even comes with a list of substitutions to make things more pulpy.
- Primeval Thule is a campaign setting set in the world of Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian and Kull (with a bit of the Cthulhu Mythos thrown in) but taking place in a time between them, on the tropical continent of Greenland.
Video Games
- Age of Conan, obviously.
- Bound by Flame: Even though the goal of the protagonist is to prevent the destruction of what little is left of the world, Vulcan keeps fighting the Ice Lords mostly out of self-preservation, rather than saving the world.
- Diablo: The first game more than the second and third, which grew more into Epic Fantasy.
- Disco Elysium has the book series Hjelmdallerman, the Man from Hjelmdall, which is a Stylistic Suck parody of the genre, with Hjelmdallerman himself being a blatant Conan-knockoff.
- Ecstatica: A traveller stumbles into a town ravaged by eldritch beasts, and must fight their way out using swords and magic.
- God of War is epic in scale and revolves around a war of the gods, but Kratos is really only out for revenge and nothing else, simply not caring for the cataclysmic destruction following in his wake.
- Heavenly Sword: A young warrior claims an ancient magical sword to rescue her father from the evil sorcerer and his monstrous henchmen, even though the spirits of the weapon are likely to doom her.
- Icewind Dale: A group of mercenaries sets out to find the power behind the monsters and unnatural winter coming from the mountains.
- Legacy of Kain: While lots of people are trying to convince him to fulfill his destiny and restore balance to the world, Kain really is only after personal power and revenge against those who got in his way. Raziel is somewhat more noble, but also mostly motivated by getting back at those who wronged him.
- The Witcher video game series (also includes Assassins of Kings and Wild Hunt), much like the books they are based on: A lone monster hunter hunting a sorcerer who stole the alchemical secrets from the witchers.
Western Animation
- Conan the Adventurer was a Conan-based Saturday Morning Cartoon with all the '80s camp. The much less well-received follow-up, Conan and the Young Warriors, was more Heroic Fantasy.
- Dave the Barbarian, an Affectionate Parody of the genre.
- Ralph Bakshi's Fire & Ice plays this so straight that the character designs were even by Frank Frazetta, who was the Trope Codifier for Sword and Sorcery art.
- He-Man and the Masters of the Universe is what you would get if you took a corny '80s sword and sorcery film and turned it into a kids' cartoon.
- Korgoth of Barbaria, which is kind of a straight example and a parody at the same time.
- Primal is practically a love letter to the entire genre.
- Samurai Jack combines the genre with a heaping helping of science fiction.
- Thundarr the Barbarian is another classic '80s action cartoon that is set in a post-apocalyptic future, that describes its setting as "A world of savagery, super-science and sorcery!".
