{"id":4896,"date":"2019-05-08T21:21:26","date_gmt":"2019-05-08T21:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eidr.org\/?p=4896"},"modified":"2019-05-08T21:23:31","modified_gmt":"2019-05-08T21:23:31","slug":"the-engineers-room-of-swords-and-sorcery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eidr.org\/the-engineers-room-of-swords-and-sorcery\/","title":{"rendered":"The Engineer\u2019s Room: Of Swords and Sorcery"},"content":{"rendered":"
With the release this month of the J.R.R. Tolkien biopic, Tolkien<\/a> (2019) and the final episodes of HBO\u2019s Game of Thrones<\/a> (2011), our thoughts naturally turn in the direction of the fantasy sub-genre, \u201cswords and sorcery.\u201d The term was coined in 1961 by author Fritz Leiber to describe the work of pulp novelist Robert E. Howard and his Kull, Solomon Kane, and Conan stories:<\/p>\n I feel more certain than ever that this field should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n While the 1930s and \u201840s were the heyday of the sword and sorcery novelist, with Conan and its many imitators flooding the pulp fiction market, the 1980s were the heyday of the sword and sorcery movie \u2013 starting, appropriately enough, with Conan the Barbarian<\/a> (1982).<\/p>\n Now, to be precise, Tolkien<\/em> and Game of Thrones<\/em> aren\u2019t swords and sorcery \u2013 they\u2019re high fantasy, another of the fantasy sub-genres. The term was coined by author Lloyd Alexander in 1971 and is characterized by taking place in an alternate world where magic is real, good and evil are clearly drawn, and the characters have epic goals to achieve and obstacles to overcome[2]<\/a> \u2013 often involving the saving of the world or the preservation of the human race. Plus the occasional elf, dwarf, or fairy.<\/p>\n In contrast, sword and sorcery is often a personal tale or on a local scale \u2013 the stakes are high from the perspective of the participants, but they lack the grand scope of and epic stakes of high fantasy, such as Lord of the Rings<\/a> (1978). Also, the main character tends to be morally ambiguous, rather than clearly good or evil. (Conan is, after all, a thief by trade.) Or, at the least, some good fantasy movies featuring magic and a bit of mayhem.<\/p>\n
\nGiven the fact that most book stores and many movie Web sites blend science fiction and fantasy into one large melting pot, we cannot really expect them to tell the difference between sword and sorcery and high fantasy when it comes to selecting favorite films from the fantasy genre, so we\u2019ll forgive Flickchart’s<\/a> rather loose definition.<\/p>\nBest Sword and Sorcery Films of All Time<\/span><\/h2>\n