The Stealer of Souls Read Online Free PDF Page B

deal with Middle Earths and lands and worlds based on this planet, worlds 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 Gray Mouser/Fafhrd series, the Conan series,
The Broken Sword
,
The Well of the Unicorn
, etc.
    Now all these stories have several things in common—they are 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. For the most part they
are
works of escapism, anything else usually being secondary (exceptions, I would agree, are
Jurgen
and
The Once and Future King
). But all of them are tales told for the tale’s sake, and the authors have obviously thoroughly enjoyed the telling.
    The roots of most of these stories are in legendry, classic romance, mythology, folklore, and dubious ancient works of “History.”
    In a recent letter, Sprague de Camp called this stuff Prehistoric-Adventure-Fantasy and this name, although somewhat unwieldy, could apply to much of the material I have listed. PAF? Then again, you could call it Saga-Fantasy or Fantastic-Romance (in the sense of the Chivalric Romances).
    What we want is a name which might not, on analysis, include every book in this category, but which, like “Science Fiction,” would give readers some idea what you’re talking about when you’re doing articles, reviews, etc., on books in this genre. Or for that matter it would be useful to use just in conversation or when forming clubs, launching magazines, etc.
    Epic Fantasy
is the name which appeals most to me as one which includes many of these stories—certainly all of the ones I have mentioned.
    Most of the tales listed have a basic general formula. They are “quest” stories. The necessary sense of conflict in a book designed to hold the reader’s interest from start to finish is supplied by the simple formula:

    A) Hero must get or do something;
    B) Villains disapprove;
    C) Hero sets out to get what he wants anyway;
    D) Villains thwart him one or more times (according to length of story); and finally
    E) Hero, in the face of all odds, does what the reader expects of him.

    Of course E) often has a twist of some kind, to it but in most cases the other four parts are there. This is not so in
Jurgen
nor in White’s tetralogy admittedly, but then
Jurgen
is definitely an allegory, while in
The Sword in the Stone
and its sequels it is the characters which are of main importance to the author.
Jurgen
only just manages to squeeze into the category anyway.
    Also, it can be argued that this basic plotline can apply to most stories. Agreed, but the point is that here the plotline tends to dominate both theme and hero, and is easily spotted for what it is.
    Conan and the Gray Mouser generally have to start at point A), pass wicked points B) and D), and eventually win through to goal—point E). Anything else, in the meantime, is extra—in fact, the extra is that which puts these stories above many others. The Ringbearers in Tolkien’s magnificent saga do this also.
    Now, the point is that every one of these tales, almost without exception, follows the pattern of the old Heroic Sagas and Epic Romances. Basically, Conan and Beowulf have much in common; Ragnar Lodbrok and Fafhrd also; Gandalf and Merlin; Amadis of Gaul and Airar (of
The Well of the Unicorn
). And I’m sure many of the unhuman characters (elves, orcs, wizards, and such) and monsters these heroes encounter can trace their ancestry right back to the Sidhe; Lord Soulis; Urganda the Unknown; Grendel; Siegfried’s dragon; Cerberus; and the various hippogriffs, firedrakes, and serpents of legend and mythology.
    As de Camp showed in his “Exegesis of Howard’s Hyborian Tales” and as I did in my earlier and not nearly so complete article “Historical Fact and Fiction in Connection with the Conan