Sword and Sorcery:
Weird Talesand Beyond

by Charles R. Rutledge

In 1926, in a small town in the middle of Texas, a young writer named Robert E. Howard began a story called “The Shadow Kingdom” and, without meaning to, created the genre known as sword and sorcery. “The Shadow Kingdom” wouldn’t be the first S&S story published—that honor would fall to another of Howard’s tales, “Red Shadows”—but it was the beginning of something that had never quite been done before. Both of these seminal stories appeared in the pages ofWeird Tales.

Howard was an avid reader ofThe Unique Magazine as well as other pulps such asAdventure andArgosy. He took his love of adventure fiction by such writers as Harold Lamb, H. Rider Haggard, and Talbot Mundy and melded it with supernatural horror. In reality, both “Red Shadows” and “The Shadow Kingdom” are important “firsts.”

Howard had already made several sales of horror stories and verse toWeird Tales, beginning with “Spear and Fang” in July 1925. The dour Puritan Solomon Kane arrived in August 1928 and two more stories, “Skulls in the Stars and Rattle of Bones,” appeared soon after. “Red Shadows” was the world’s first look at sword and sorcery, and it is a potent mixture of sword duels, exotic locales, and dark magic.

Solomon Kane’s adventures took place in a recognizable era of history, the 16th century, creating one of the main branches of the genre—historical sword and sorcery. Other REH creations like Bran Mak Morn and Turlough O’Brien would follow this path, and the next major practitioner of S&S to appear inWeird Tales would also set her stories in history, but more about that later.

The second and most popular branch of sword and sorcery, the “secondary world” version, began with another of Howard’s series characters, King Kull. Kull was a barbarian, exiled from fabled Atlantis who became King of the land of Valusia. “The Shadow Kingdom” tells of Kull’s conflict with a race of serpent men who attempt to usurp his kingdom using their shapeshifting abilities.

Kull was a brooding hero, perhaps Howard’s most introspective character. Aside from “The Shadow Kingdom,”Weird Tales published only one other Ku