Haha! I meant to post these comments a couple months ago… well, better late than never.
Last summer, as an introduction to the Sword and Sorcery genre, I read a collection of Robert Howard’s seminal Conan stories, compiled in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. I had some marginally erudite thoughts on the subject, which were even noticed by an actual expert.
But last summer was carefree and this summer was stressful, and when I picked up Fritz Leiber’s equally seminal stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in the anthology Ill Met in Lankhmar, I wasn’t reading nearly as deeply or as carefully. I don’t mean for this to reflect negatively on the stories themselves.
Robert Howard is considered to be the “father” of Sword and Sorcery in much the same way that J.R.R. Tolkien presented High Fantasy to the world. But the signals are a little bit confused on this point; it was Fritz Leiber who actually coined the term “sword and sorcery,” and his imaginative, poignant, witty, and erotic stories of the ribald barbarian Fafhrd and the sullen thief Gray Mouser are every bit as original as the honest and violent Conan.
To be honest, I was more surprised by the similarities between the two writers than their differences. Howard’s affinities to H.P. Lovecraft are echoed in the almost alien intelligence operating in Leiber stories such as “The Jewels in the Forest” and “The Bleak Shore,” and both Hyperborea and Nehwon are fundamentally cynical worlds in which goodness and compassion are rare and underappreciated treasures.
If there is one clear difference that I can point to, is it that Howard’s “Conan” stories tend to take themselves more seriously, indicting contradictory moralities and, by extension, “civilization.” The Lankhmar stories promote the same message, albeit they are just as critical of barbarity as of settled life. But they also set a more playful tone. Even when stories turn deadly serious – and many are (“The Unholy Grail,” “Ill-Met in Lankhmar,” “The Howling Tower,” and others) – there is always something slightly tongue-in-cheek about the storytelling. Details are exaggerated. Life and death are approached as almost laughingly casual matters. Happenstance plays a significant role, and it is often difficult to find the point at which the protagonists’ skills end and their good luck begins. And even this good fortune typically leaves them alive and penniless…that is, exactly as they began except for their new scars and hard-won experience.
This lighter touch and lighter atmosphere might make Leiber a more pleasant read than Howard, although seldom more engaging. Rather than undermining serious moments – pain and loss and a sometimes tortuously directionless existence – such play gives the characters an additionally curious dignity. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are not free from bias, nor is the author (as the text would seem to argue).
At any rate, taking reflection with a grain of salt, a reader’s attention is more closely turned toward the external world. And what a world it is! Lankhmar, for all its corruption, has the sort of hypnotic allure of Paris or New York. Maybe a teeming New Orleans, given the city’s situation in the midst of the poisonous Great Salt Marsh. The lands that range around have strange names, but it’s in the details, the towers and caves that burrow into the hills and deserts in between – the blanks places of the map – that really capture the attention. As for characters, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are brilliantly realized, but not moreso than their ersatz mentors, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face. There is a profound correspondence in these relationships (see “The Prince of Pain-Ease”), as the stern Sheelba is matched to Mouser just as the loquacious Ningauble calls on favors from Fafhrd. It is a similar correspondence to that the protagonists share with their early paramours, Vlana and Ivrian, which is also significant. So this is a world of correspondences that are not parallels, not allegorical pairings or dualities, and that, too, is very interesting.