Sifting Through a Sword-and-Sorcery Definition by Brian Murphy When Michael Moorcock asked readers in the May 1961 issue of Amra to “put a tag” on the style of fantasy he was writing with his Elric stories, he cast a wide net, letting it drag through a sea of stories that readers today would likely consider heroic fantasy, high fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery—or all of the above: We have two tags, really — SF and “Fantasy” — but I feel that we should have another general name to include the sub-genre of books which deal with Middle Earths and lands and worlds based on this planet, world which exist only in some author’s vivid imagination. In this sub-genre I would classify books like “The Worm Ouroboros,” “Jurgen,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Once and Future King,” the Grey Mouser/Fafhrd series, the Conan series, “The Broken Sword,” “Well of the Unicorn,” etc., usw. But, in the same essay Moorcock began refining these broad parameters, focusing on a subset of fantasy stories “which could hardly be classified as SF, and they are stories of high adventure, generally featuring a central hero very easy to identify oneself with …. tales told for the tale’s sake… rooted in legendry, classic romance, mythology, folklore, and dubious ancient works of “History.” These were quest stories, Moorcock added, in which the hero is thwarted by villains but against all odds does what the reader expects of him. He chose to exclude “alternate space-time continuum” stories, like Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, on the grounds that they lacked sufficient seriousness. In short, he was working out the parameters of a yet-to-be named subgenre. While he advocated for the term “epic fantasy,” nevertheless he was speaking of a nascent form of S&S: So, all in all, I would say that Epic Fantasy is about the best name for the sub-genre, considering its general form and roots. Obviously, Epic Fantasy includes the Conan, Kull, and Bran Mak Morn stories of R E Howard; the Grey Mouser/Fafhrd stories by Fritz Leiber; the Arthurian tetralogy by T.H. White; the Middle Earth stories of J.R.R Tolkien; “The Worm Ouroboros” by E R Eddison; the Zothique stories of Clark Ashton Smith; some of the works of Abraham Merrit (“The Ship of Ishtar”, etc.); some of H Rider Haggard’s...