Sword & Sorcery as an idea never existed back in 1936. I chose that date because it was the year Robert E. Howard killed himself. The man who created the idea wasn’t even aware of it as we are today. He never named it. All that came later…

Smith, Lovecraft and Howard…The Big Three

The three greatest Fantasy writers to come out of Weird Tales were H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. That’s a big claim but I base it on influence and vision. Lovecraft is renowned in horror circles but he also wrote The Dreamlands stories (influenced by Lord Dunsany) that were part of his over-all concept of other realities. Clark Ashton Smith did not have the followers that Lovecraft did but of the three he seems to be the one gaining the most critical supporters today. Only Jack Vance was able to take the brilliantly-hued visions of Smith and create something worthy in his The Dying Earth stories. Howard is the easiest of the three, for his Conan stories in particular, spawned an entire Fantasy boom, placing him beside J. R. R. Tolkien in the Halls of Fantasy.

But all that came after. Back before 1936, the Big Three dwelt is a less defined milieu of Fantasy and Horror that allowed these authors to pen a terror tale, an adventure tale, a fantastic tale, and sometimes all at the same time, as in the case of Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” (1927), Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” (1929) or Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Tale of Satampras Zeiros”(1929). Fantasy included the weird and terrible and wasn’t the province of Victorian fairies in English gardens.

C. L. Moore

Clark Ashton Smith is hard to classify. Unlike C. L. Moore who wrote the excellent Jirel of Joiry stories at the same time Howard wrote Conan, Smith’s fantasies have another feel altogether. (Moore is worthy to stand beside these men as the creator of female Sword & Sorcery that has sadly devolved into Red Sonja.) Smith’s style is one factor, ornate, bejeweled, byzantine, even incommensurable! (Those familiar with Smith’s style know what I was doing there.) Smith never used a five-letter word when a twelve-letter one was available. There are those who claim this style destroys the fiction but others say it is the very reason Smith works. Lovecraft had similar accusations of wordiness but remains well loved all the same. Howard by comparison is lean, modern and often under-valued as a writer because of it. Howard had a verbal magic that could convey excitement and vision that none of his imitators ever captured, as he did in “The Queen of the Black Coast”. Smith’s florid prose may have been directly counter to Howard’s but both strived to accomplish similar goals, visions of worlds that never existed.

Clark Ashton Smith wrote over a hundred stories and many of them qualify as fantasies. But are they Sword & Sorcery? Like Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales, Smith’s Fantasy fiction may not be what one would call S&S today. This depends on your definition, of course. If you define S&S as Fantasy with some horror in it, then Smith qualifies easily. Stories like “The Charnal God” or “The Collossus of Ylourgne” would stand beside any Conan tale. But there is more.

Art by Bruce Pennington

Clark Ashton Smith created much as an evil god might create. He stands high above his Fantasy worlds and he laughs. He laughs at the poor souls who must suffer his realms of terror and beauty. His is a sardonic humor that torments and feels no kinship with those who suffer under his machinations. Robert E. Howard, by contrast, makes you feel the hero’s skin, let’s you live inside it as Conan or Kull or Bran Mak Morn feels the hatred of the enemy, the bite of swords, the wickedness of evil. (This is also the essence that separates Tolkien from Howard, the immediacy of the hero, where Tolkien mediates them with hobbit in-betweens.) You cheer for the swordsman who must face the evil world. Smith’s heroes (characters really) are like Lovecraft’s (though not as wimpy perhaps) and equally as doomed. All of the Big Three held a fairly bleak world view, Lovecraft with his cosmic insignificance, Smith with his inescapable, fin-de-sicle malaise, and Howard with his ideas that all civilization is a fraud and only the barbarian is truly free. Each offered up these dark domains in his own style.

Artist not known

Is Clark Ashton Smith Sword & Sorcery? Who cares? His work is part of that triumvirate that could be renamed “Weird Tales Fiction”, the dark and beautiful fiction of the Big Three. Why restrict such visions with titles like “Sword & Sorcery”, “Cthulhu Mythos” or some unnamed Smithian label? The whole experience is so much bigger than that. Read all three them, enjoy their dreams, and laugh along with Clark Ashton Smith, the master of the ornate and rigorous sentence. Be brave, be wary, be gone…

A word on Clark Ashton Smith’s magazine illustrations. Since Smith wrote so many stories for Weird Tales, he had all the big names illustrating his work. But he also illustrated seven of his own stories. Only C. L. Moore can make this claim, having done the image for her “The Dark Land” in the Jirel of Joiry series. Smith did his own strange line work for stories in and around 1933-34.

The (More) Sword & Sorcery Tales of Clark Ashton Smith

“The Last Incantation” (Weird Tales, June 1930)

“Sadastor” (Weird Tales, July 1930)

Art by C. C. Senf

“A Rendezvous in Averoigne” (Weird Tales, April 1931)

“A Voyage to Sfanomoe” (Weird Tales, August 1931)

Art by Joseph Doolin

“The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (Weird Tales, November 1931)

Art by Amos Sewell

“The Door to Saturn” (Strange Tales , January 1932)

Art by C. C. Senf

“The Monster of the Prophecy” (Weird Tales, January 1932)

“The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” (Weird Tales, June 1932)

Art by T. Wyatt Nelson

“The Maker of Gargoyles” (Weird Tales, August 1932)

Art by T. Wyatt Nelson

“The Empire of the Necromancers” (Weird Tales, September 1932)

Art by T. Wyatt Nelson

“The Testament of Atthammaus” (Weird Tales, October 1932)

Art by Harold S. De Lay

“The Double Shadow” The Double Shadow & Other Stories (1933)

Art by Jayem Wilcox

“The Isle of the Torturers” Keep on the Light (1933)

“A Night in Malneant” The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (1933)

Art by Jayem Wilcox

“The Ice-Demon” (Weird Tales, April 1933)

“A Vintage From Atlantis” (Weird Tales, September 1933)

“The Witchcraft of Ulua” (Weird Tales, February 1934)

Art by Clark Ashton Smith

“The Charnal God” (Weird Tales, March 1934)

Art by Clark Ashton Smith

“The Death of Malygris” (Weird Tales, April 1934)

“The Tomb-Spawn” (Weird Tales, May 1934)

Art by Clark Ashton Smith

“The Collosus of Ylourgne” (Weird Tales, June 1934)

Art by Clark Aston Smith

“The Seven Geases” (Weird Tales, October 1934)

Art by Clark Ashton Smith

“Xeethra” (Weird Tales, December 1934)

“The White Sybl” The White Sybil (1935)

Art by Clark Ashton Smith

“The Dark Eidolon” (Weird Tales, January 1935)

Art by Vincent Napoli

“The Flower-Women” (Weird Tales, May 1935

Art by Virgil Finlay

“The Black Abbot of Puthuum” (Weird Tales, March 1936)

Art by Virgil Finlay

“Necromancy in Naat” (Weird Tales, Jul 1936)

Art by Virgil Finlay

“The Death of Ilalotha” (Weird Tales, Sep 1937)

Art by Virgil Finlay

“The Garden of Adompha” (Weird Tales, April 1938)

“Mother of Toads” (Weird Tales, July 1938)

Art by Hannes Bok

“The Coming of the White Worm” (Stirring Science Stories, April 1941)

Art by Margaret Brundage

“The Enchantress of Sylaire” (Weird Tales, July 1941)



“The Maze of Maal Dweb” Lost Worlds, Arkham House (1944)

Art by Boris Dolgov

“Quest of Gazolba” (Weird Tales, September 1947) and its longer version “The Voyage of King Euvoran”

Art by Clark Ashton Smith

“The Weaver in the Vault” Genius Loci (1948)

Art by Lee Brown Coye

“The Master of the Crabs” (Weird Tales, March 1948)

Art by W. H. Silvey

“Morthylla” (Weird Tales, May 1953)

“The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles” (aka “The Powder of Hyberborea”) (Saturn Science Fiction and Fantasy V1 #5 March 1958)