A Book Review of Lin Carter's *Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers* (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1976)

I've recently been reading Lin Carter's famous essay collection about the pioneers of sword and sorcery, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1976). It's a fun book, a relaxing read, but in terms of analysis, it falls short. It's more and less a biographical reference guide for a variety of heroic fantasy writers. I came to it specifically because of the chapter on Clark Ashton Smith. I'm trying to write a chapter in my dissertation about Smith, and locating basic biographical material has been difficult.

The most interesting essay in the anthology, I think, is the opening one: "The Sword of Faerie." In this essay, De Camp surveys imaginative literature from its mythical "origin" to its most recent incarnations. He effectively binds together the classical manifestations of heroic fantasy like Ancient Greek and Anglo-Saxon epic poetry to the modern manifestations, e.g. Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos stories, and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Further, he binds together the Gothic novel, the historical novel, the novel of romantic primitivism, in an attempt to portray imaginative literature as a kind of thread running through literary history.

Other essays are worth reading for their information but I was reluctant of some of the analysis. The one on Robert E. Howard offers an unsympathetic view of the writer's life and deals in suspicious armchair psychology. Of particular note is Carter's essay on J.R.R. Tolkien. He states that the The Hobbit comes close to "universal appeal" and rightly observes that "few works can be read with pleasure" by both adult and young readers (224). I completely agree. To corroborate Carter's idea, I'll say that The Hobbit was a profound experience for me as a young kid. I read it in the 5th grade and have had a habit of reading and re-reading it since. I return to the book often.

Carter also claims that Tolkien was what he calls a "rurophile," a worshiper of an idealized vision of nature. He states that, for Tolkien, "life in the Industrial Age had some of the qualities of life in prison" (234). I find that intriguing, this notion that a sense of the cruelty and inhumanity modern life shades Tolkien's work; however, Carter seems to criticize or at least poke fun at Tolkien for his apparent negative vision of modernity. There's a strange propensity in Carter's work to interpret or morally censure the personalities and lives of the writer's he is studying (writer's he ostensibly enjoys).

This is a classic text, I'd say, worth the money and the time; however, Carter's style of literary criticism is just strange. It hybridizes basic historical literary research with psychological case studies. At the same he's relating for you essential information about these writers--in bald "info-dump" fashion--he's also "judging" them, speculating about whether they were psychologically sound.

To an extent, as a literary criticism, it's kind of a parody of the Freudian psychoanalytical literary criticism that was vogue in the 40s and 50s.