I know, it's an old book...but it's not as old as I am, so it counts as a new book. Actually, I have read it before; I read it when I was about eleven or twelve, so it was about five years old (and in paperback). But it wasn't the first Terry Brooks book I read; I read The Elfstones of Shannara first, so I was a bit out of sorts until I realized that it was a sequel to another book. So, since I really liked the Elfstones, I decided to see what had come before.
Now, most people today know that The Sword of Shannara is basically a shameless ripoff of Lord of the Rings; I've seen videos on YouTube about the many, many parallels between the two tales. But here's the thing: I read Sword before I read Fellowship. So it didn't feel like a ripoff to me, because I hadn't read the story it was ripping off yet. I didn't read LotR for another three or so years, and I have to be honest, I didn't feel like I was reading the same story.
Alright, so this is Brooks' debut novel, published in 1977; he's gone on to a very successful writing career since then, but a lot of people still complain that he is the reason that fantasy became almost entirely LotR ripoffs in his wake. In some ways, that is true; Sword was very successful, and showed every publisher and writer that LotR pastiches would go over very well with the reading audience. So, that's what they gave us. And so, for a long time, I figured that this was the entire breadth of the fantasy genre; I hadn't heard of Burroughs, Merritt, Dunsany, or Leiber, and I hadn't read Lovecraft or Howard at all.
I've mentioned all this in a long-ago post, discussing Abraham Merritt's The Moon Pool and its disappearance from public notice. But I just finished re-reading Sword after many years, and I thought I'd give my thoughts on it.
First of all, it's a quick read, much quicker than Lord of the Rings, since it's just one book. And while I can now recognize the parallels (since I've had several reminders of them over the last few years), there are enough of Brooks' own ideas to give the discerning reader a fun story that can stand on its own. Yes, it's still a ripoff of Tolkien, but it's also its own thing. And Elfstones proved that Brooks was more than a pastiche artist.
Anyway, Shea Ohmsford is the sole remaining heir to a now-defunct line of Elven kings, and the only man who can use the legendary Sword of Shannara. Allanon the Druid comes to fetch him to go collect the sword so he can use it to defeat the fearsome Warlock Lord, Brona. Shea and his step-brother Flick, along with Shea's friend Menion Leah, travel through terrible peril to the safety of Culhaven, where Allanon tells them more about the Sword and the threat from the Warlock Lord. A motley group of companions joins Shea and Allanon to go find the Sword in the druid fortress of Paranor, but Shea is separated from them and falls in with a pair of unlikely companions, the one-handed thief Panamon Creel and the mute Rock Troll Keltset. They end up chasing a crazed gnome who actually has the Sword, all the way into the Warlock Lord's kingdom where they have even more trouble. Meanwhile, Allanon and Flick seek to rescue the missing elven king, Eventine, so he can lead his armies to help the beleaguered human forces of Callahorn in the city of Tyrsis, where the noble Balinor hopes to lead the famed Border Legion in a successful defense of the city while they wait for the elves and for Shea to destroy the One Ri--I mean, the Warlock Lord. Shea eventually succeeds, the evil armies are routed, the Warlock Lord is ash, and everyone rejoices...except Hendel the dwarf, who was played by Sean Bean.
Okay, so the story is pretty basic. I've learned over time that this wasn't actually how Brooks originally envisioned the story; instead, it was his publisher, Lester Del Rey, who made him dig into the Tolkien well and give the story a heavy coating of Middle-Earth. Still, Brooks did give the story its own personal touches, which helped make the book so successful. Neither Menion nor Balinor are Aragorn clones; the elven brothers are not all that much like Legolas, and Hendel is definitely not Gimli. Brooks has his dwarves friendly and allied with the elves, and they are pretty much all claustrophobic and hate being underground due to having been stuck there after some ancient cataclysmic war.
One thing I didn't realize when I first read these books is that Brooks set this in the distant future of Earth. This became much more obvious with the Genesis of Shannara series, which is set in our very near future. So the cataclysmic war was nuclear, and humanity barely survived, evolving into dwarves, gnomes, and trolls as well as humankind. The elves are a separate story that gets more detailed in Elfstones. Anyway, the ancient, ruined world does get a few nods here and there; one of the nasty monsters they encounter is an ancient survivor of those wars, and the party encounter it in the skeletal ruins of an ancient city. I know, a lot of 'ancient' in that sentence. So, I'll give Brooks kudos for doing a post-apocalyptic fantasy story in a Tolkienesque style. That can't have been easy to juggle, especially at editorial demand.
So, what did I think of the book? As I said, I have read it before, albeit a long time ago. And I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun and a pretty quick read, with vivid descriptions that nevertheless don't achieve the Tolkien effect of feeling like every single blade of grass and flower petal needs a paragraph of description. And that is a good thing. Even knowing the story, the pace is good, the characters are pretty well-developed (except the elven brothers, who get the shortest shrift in the book), and the climax is genuinely different. The power of the Sword of Shannara is real, but not what one might expect, and it gives the best indication of Brooks' talents as a writer. The characters that feel the most like Brooks' own creations are Panamon Creel and Keltset, neither of whom feels like a port from LotR. Creel is an unapologetic thief, and Keltset has his own motives for what he is doing, and he is definitely more than he seems.
In short, I like this book. I still like Elfstones better, partly since it was the first of the series that I read, and partly because it doesn't have the same Tolkien pastiche feel that Sword invented. I recommend it for younger readers who are just getting into fantasy fiction and haven't started with the heavies like Tolkien; it's a gateway drug for fantasy, and the rest of the Brooks' oeuvre has plenty of merits of its own.
If you're interested in my own fantasy writing, I invite you to check out Apprentice, an initiation into a fantasy world of my own devising, that doesn't have a whole lot of Tolkien influence. But it's still a fun read.
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