There’s something familiar about this fellowship.

I first discovered Brooks as a boy in the mid-’90s, just finishing up elementary school. It was my first real foray into fantasy after Tolkien. Disinterested in fantasy before I’d found Middle-Earth, my childhood was filled with all things science fiction: Tom Swift, Michael Crichton, Star Trek and Star Wars were my jam. But, when that fantasy mojo clicked, it clicked hard and I was left scrambling through my mom’s library—Hambly and Brooks, Donaldson, Kurtz, and McCaffery—for something that would fill the Hobbit-shaped hole that I’d never known existed inside of me. The Sword of Shannara was an easy fit. I didn’t want something new. With all the fervor and passion in my adolescent body, I wanted to start over and experience from scratch that same wonder I’d felt while reading Tolkien. I wanted hidden magic, elves, dwarfs, and a whole new fantasy world to explore. I was the absolute perfect audience for Brooks and del Rey: young, impressionable, and about to start a lifelong love affair with fantasy.

Reading The Sword of Shannara with a 21st century perspective can be any combination of frustrating, confusing, exciting, boring, and amusing.

Thirty five years after its publication, it’s difficult to read The Sword of Shannara for the first time and not feel like it’s one derivative cliche after another. An entire popular genre is built on the foundations laid by Tolkien (and his stories are build on the groundwork laid by ancient mythmakers ) and the bricks subsequently laid by Brooks, Donaldson, and del Rey. Reading The Sword of Shannara with a 21st century perspective can be any combination of frustrating, confusing, exciting, boring, and amusing. Like any foundational work that has been built upon for almost four decades, one should consider the context of when Brooks’ wrote the novel and consider a fantasy genre with little secondary world works besides Tolkien. It may look stodgy now, but at the time it was evolutionary and it opened the doors that Kurtz, McCaffrey, and Zelazny had been banging on for years. Following closely behind them were Katharine Kerr, David Eddings, Barbara Hambly, and Raymond Feist. After that, a floodgate opened.

Lord of the Rings is the most obvious analogue for Brooks’ novel, but in the annotated version of The Sword of Shannara, Brooks revealed several other famous authors who influenced him during its writing:

I drew on inspiration from the European adventure storytellers Sir Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Alexander Dumas, but it was only after reading The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien that I realized the fantasy genre held the grand tapestry I needed to tell the tale of The Sword of Shannara.

Art by Luis Melon

Where Brooks ultimately won me over as a young reader was his ability to take the elements that Tolkien introduced to modern literature and craft them into something accessible and fun: a rolicking adventure that suffered from none of Tolkien’s eccentricities. I loved Tolkien, but found his prose dry and his characters difficult to connect with emotionally. By melding the adventurous tone of Dumas and Doyle with Tolkien’s scope and approach to worldbuilding, Brooks introduced readers to a fantasy that was not only expansive and unusual, but stood on its own as a terrific piece of popcorn fiction. By eschewing depth for accessibility, Brooks blew the top off of the fantasy market. The Sword of Shannara was at once a novel that Lord of the Rings fans could dig their claws into and the perfect place for new readers to be introduced to fantasy. Where Stephen Donaldson — the Garfunkel to Brooks’ Simon — was marketed directly towards adult readers who were looking for something grim, introspective, and subversive, Brooks was waiting with open arms for readers of all ages and experience.

Brooks is oft-criticized (unfairly, in my opinion) for being juvenile and left in the dust created by the grittier fantasy that’s en vogue with many readers these days. What might have been, however, if Brooks’ original vision for The Sword of Shannara had been published? “Brooks [revealed] that the original draft for Sword was more tragic, with most of the main characters dying by the end,” Perschon notes in his review of the title. “Del Rey coached Brooks at this point, advising that readers ‘would not put up with having that many characters killed off.’” Oh, how things have changed.

While Brooks’ novels might not be tonally comparable to some of today’s popular movement towards grittier fantasy, the Shannara series has long been unsafe for its characters—good and bad—and almost all of the novels (with the exception, perhaps, of the latest published volume, The High Druid’s Blade) feature a body count that would make George R.R. Martin proud. This is not a fellowship of the nigh-invincible. There is a sacrifice and failure, death and nobility in all of Brooks’ stories. Your favourite character is never safe. Perhaps most notable is that Brooks doesn’t save dramatic deaths for the end of his books, and it’s not uncommon for integral characters to kick the bucket at the worst possible time, sending a seemingly safe plot off into the wilderness.

The Sword of Shannara was tamed by del Rey in this regard. However, looking back, I wonder how I would have reacted as a young reader if so many of my favourite characters — who’d I spent 700+ pages falling in love with — died? Would I understand the tragic undertones to Brooks’ story? I was gutted and proud when a certain troll made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure Shea Ohmsford could finish his journey, but I’m not sure if I could have handled a similar fate for Menion Leah or Shirl Ravenlock.