Against Academic Elitism: On Brian Murphy's History of S&S

I've been meaning to blog about Brian Murphy's brilliant Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery for literally two months now .... but life happens. Better late than never, though!

Anyway, I can't recommend this excellent book highly enough. Given how greatly S&S has influenced modern non-Tolkienian fantasy, including folks like George R. R. Martin and Glen Cook, it's surprisingly hard to find good discussions of the subgenre.

Fantasy literature tends to be marginalized anyway , but S&S is so pulpish -- so full of icky "-isms" -- that, frankly, most fantasy scholars in academia are ideologically ill-equipped to understand why normal or decent people might love this kind of fantasy at all.

A ridiculously cool cover.
Artist: Tom Barber

That's obviously a problem for scholars. If you can't read a literature with sympathy, your critiques of -isms in that literature will always risk being toothless or superficial. It also means you won't be able to separate good S&S from bad S&S, at least not like how fans themselves can (and often do).

Brian Murphy, though, is a smart fan author, a non-academic, but he takes a scholarly approach to his subject that any of us should admire. Not only does he read S&S sympathetically, he also approaches the subgenre with a strong degree of critical distance. 

He covers the original Weird Tales, of course, and the resurgence of S&S in the late 1960s. before turning to the subsequent mid-1980s slough. For me, his seventh chapter on S&S's "decline and fall" was the most illuminating, particularly as so many discussions of S&S tend to stop with the Lancer paperbacks.

And Murphy demonstrates an admirable thoroughness. He cites ton of secondary research, many from out-of-the-way fan venues. His Works Cited includes tons of important sources I'd never even seen before. For instance, Lin Carter's "In Defense of Heroes" essay, wherein Carter asserts that "dialogue and characterization are unwelcome in sword-and-sorcery" (Murphy 172). As someone who's studied fantasy for years, I suppose that I didn't not know this, but I'd never before seen a primary source state this disdain for basic writerly skill so explicitly. It explains so much about Carter, who was perhaps the subgenre's biggest booster throughout the 1970s and 1980s..

Here's what gets me most of all: Brian Murphy's Flame and Crimson is absolutely invisible to most academic scholars of fantasy ... the one demographic who most need this book.

Seriously. A search of my university library doesn't pull up any hits, nor is Murphy's book listed in the MLA International Bibliography. Apparently,  books from -- *checks* -- "Pulp Hero Press" don't merit inclusion. In fact, there's not a single academic review of Flame and Crimson at all.

That's a burning shame, and I desperately wish I'd discovered this book back when Murphy first published it in 2019. If nothing else, I would have nominated it for the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award. Like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, it could have been a contender.

In fact, Flame and Crimson is so academically invisible, you wanna know how I did discover it? The Amazon algorithm. While researching for my fantasy fiction class, I bought a few books on Robert E. Howard, which triggered Amazon's algorithm for Murphy's book. That's literally the only reason I discovered this excellent resource.

So I guess that's today's lesson. Much as I am a big believer in academic elitism -- after all, peer-reviewed research is the gold standard for a reason -- you also can't ignore how, in some ways, the group best positioned to handle certain subjects is fandom. At least if the fandom in question isn't full of goofuses. Still, academia has its blind spots ... and one such blind spot is most definitely S&S.

A few random notes on Flame and Crimson:

• If any single thing established Murphy's credibility for me, it's him recognizing the importance of Glen Cook (pp. 204-205).
• Unfortunately, Murphy overlooks Cece Goldsmith's impact on S&S as the editor for Fantastic ... However, I only noticed this oversight because Murphy himself blogged about it later.
• Also, though, Murphy omits any discussion of Samuel L. Delany's Nevèrÿon series. Although not a fan of Delany myself (as I've blogged before), Delany does call Nevèrÿon "S&S". Given that Murphy tackles other borderline titles such as The Broken Sword (1954) and The Dying Earth (1950), missing the most famous black author to do S&S seems like a missed opportunity.
• Likewise, Murphy notes how Howard scholars deal with Howard's racialism by noting his time period, but this is where the limitations of Murphy's non-academic background most appear. He doesn't seem aware of either Helen Young's Race and Popular Fantasy Literature (2016) or Mark Jerng's Racial Worldmaking (2018). No academic scholar would have missed those important counter-views.

Nonetheless, despite a few quibbles, anybody who studies fantasy should really give this volume a go.