Modern heroic fantasy/sword-and-socrcery remained mostly a niche genre for many years after it emerged in the period between the World Wars. That began to change when Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, originally published in the 1950s, became a pop-culture phenomenon in the late 1960s-early '70s. This had the effect of creating a much wider potential readership for heroic fantasy. Terry Brooks aimed at that market when he published The Sword of Shannara in 1977. He hit a spectacular bullseye with it. It was the first heroic fantasy book to hit mainstream bestseller lists.

Brooks went on to have a long career writing sequels and prequels to Sword--Elfstones of Shannara, Wishsong of Shannara, Shannara: The Phantom Menace, Desperate Housewives of Shannara, etc., etc. Only last year, having beaten a dead horse into a scattering of bone slivers, did Brooks publish what is promised to be the final installment in the Shannara saga.

I read Sword of Shannara in my early teens, shortly before Elfstones was published. I had already read parts of LOTR, and knew pretty much the whole outline and ending of it. So I was able to recognize a thorough-going rip-off of Tolkien when I saw it. A number of characters, incidents, and plot elements were obviously lifted from Tolkien's work. I didn't much care. I found Sword of Shannara a fast-moving, action-packed read, more accessibly written than Tolkien, and thus more fun to read. I read all through its 700-odd pages--easily the longest work I'd ever yet read all the way through. I seem to have had my fill at that point, though, because I didn't bother to read Elfstones of Shannara or any of the other sequels. The only other Terry Brooks book I've ever read was Magic Kingdom for Sale--Sold! I encountered this first of his Landover series--the only non-Shannara books he's really known for--in the 1990s.

By that time I'd done a proper full read-through of Lord of the Rings. Now I was mature enough to realize how superior Tolkien's work was, and to enjoy it on its own terms. By the mid-'90s I'd gotten burned out on epic fantasy, and on every other form of genre fiction. I'd come to realize that genre fiction mostly means telling much the same stories over and over again, and not always well. It's probably what Theodore Sturgeon had in mind when he characterized 90% of everything written in every genre as "crud." It can be enjoyable if you have a regular hunger for that genre, but I was fed up and felt like moving on. Since then I've overwhelmingly read nonfiction. When I do revisit genre fiction, it's usually an older work that carries some kind of historical interest.

All that said, awhile back I got the idea of re-reading Sword of Shannara, to see how well it held up...

...and found an old paperback copy, with the original Hildebrandt illustrations, just like that public library copy I read 40 years ago. Now I've gotten around to finishing it. Turns out, it holds up rather well. Sword of Shannara boasts lots of good descriptive passages and settings, characterizations that mostly make sense, and a generally sound handling of many characters and multiple plot threads. If it's essentially Tolkien fan fiction, it's professional-quality Tolkien fan faction. Terry Brooks had clearly put in many long hours practicing his craft before he published this. It's very readable and entertaining.

But I still find, having finished it, that I've now had my fill of Shannara adventures. I've read that Elfstones of Shannara and some of the other earlier follow-ups show that Brooks can do something other than Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off. I can believe that--Magic Kingdom for Sale--Sold! had some original ideas, from what I recall--but I just don't feel the need for more epic fantasy at this time.

Tolkien was to this sort of fantasy what Jane Austen was to romance--not so much an example of the genre as the great original who, endlessly and superficially imitated, did much to establish many of the genre's tropes. But the great originals are more than just batches of entertaining tropes assembled in a workmanlike manner. They have something to say. Tolkien's work, for example, is noted for its Christian applicability, in the way its characters struggle in a fallen world with an understanding that the evil they struggle against is ultimately only a small thing in the face of something even greater. The closest thing Sword of Shannara comes to a message, as nearly as I can tell, is "You gotta be persistent and believe in yourself!" Which is kid stuff.

I'll put it this way: Tolkien is a bit like one of the great landscape painting masters, such as Ruisdael and Constable. Brooks is more like the sort of contemporary painter who fills galleries with pleasant, well-done landscapes to sell to people to put in their living rooms. The works are just fine on their own terms. I've got stuff like that hanging in my own living room. But if you've taken a good look at the Old Masters, you aren't likely to confuse it with their work.

I sort of want to read this one...

I never read these despite people urging me to do so back in High School. I'm not sure I'd appreciate them, now. Unless it's something I read when I was younger I'm unable to connect with new genre fiction of any kind. I rarely even read these days, although it used to be second nature to me.

I remember these being popular, though. Like a lot of the Piers Anthony Xanth stuff, it just wasn't something I felt drawn to. Perhaps - even then - I was just averse to being told what to do and disliked reading anything I hadn't stumbled upon by chance, without outside influence.

Oooh, I disliked "The Sword of Shannara" when I read it, but I think I was too old for it at the time, and I had read the
Lord of Rings material, so it just felt like a shallow rip off. I was surprised that there were sequels.

I tried reading it years ago, but didn't get to far into it.

I remember being surprised after I became a public librarian to learn that they were still being cranked out. They cover a couple of shelves in our modest sci fi/fantasy section. There are 30 or so follow-ups, counting sequels, prequels, and an urban fantasy trilogy that was later retconned into being a part of the series' backstory.

"Shallow rip-off" is a pretty fair description of the original Sword of Shannara. But it was a very readable shallow rip-off, and I guess that was what I wanted at that stage as a reader.

Incidentally, according to the series' Wiki entry, the world of Shannara apparently emerges after our civilization undergoes a final collapse in the 2050s. So we've got about 30 years left before the End Times. Sounds about right, actually.

Never read this one, but I thank it for allowing the Brother Hildebrandt to create so much cool artwork from it --

I really disliked this book, but read it anyway because at that time - when I was 15 or so - I had read LoTR and was hungry for anything that was similar. Elfstones (which I also read, despite my antipathy for the first) turned out to be a bit more interesting because it had to take a different direction, but it was still so poorly written that I struggled to finish it. I gave up after that, so don't know if the series improved or not.

Yes, I did enjoy the artwork of The Brothers Hildebrandt, so some good came out of this series.

Pretty impressive, all right. The little mass-market paperback that I have only has the color cover and some very dimly-reproduced b&w images. I recall the b&w images being much clearer in the copy I read in the early 1980s. Either I could see things a lot brighter back then, or my current copy is a later printing with badly degraded illustrations. Seems like I remember that early paperback edition having a fold-out of the second color image you show there too, but it's hard to be certain.

Yeah, that was the thing. Other than LotR, there was just Shanara and the Thomas Covenant series at the time, iirc. The epic fantasy market wasn't glutted like it became just a few years later.

There were a couple of other series I read that aspired to be Sword of Shannara, if that gives you an insight into how bad they were. Sword was just so derivative, and at the same time Brooks' first novel, so it was really a slog.

Elfstones, and to a lesser degree, Wishsong, were probably the high point of the Shannara stories. Elfstones (spoilers for a 40 year old book) is kind of a tragedy, and even Wishsong showed inter-generational consequences to magic, and told a decent story. The writing improved a little, and the differences from LoTR became more pronounced (or started to exist, to be honest). The later stuff, which I only read sporadically, suffered from the inability to either create the same threat scale, existed as a prelude story arc, or postulated an interesting idea that wasn't big enough to support an entire book, let alone a series.

Still, to give the devil his due, Terry Brooks came up with 3 solid world ideas, and was able to mine those ideas for 40 years as a paid fantasy author, so while the genre greatly evolved, and left him behind both in terms of complexity, and of writing skill, he was good enough to pass one of the major tests...that of time. So he couldn't be all bad.

Just a case of "perfect time, perfect place" for the author, it seems. I thought this article I shared a couple years back in the Sword & Sorcery thread was a solid retrospective (with an amusing agenda) --


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And I absolutely LOVED the Thomas Covenant books. I am scarcely able to read them at all now, the hero is so self pitying and the prose so clumsy, but at the time they were the Grate One Evah, in mah heed.

Although there were the Conan stories, and especially Michael Moorcock's many different series - notably the Hawkmoon stories, all of which I devoured.

Julian May's Pliocene series was roughly that time too - although nominally science fiction, it's really fantasy, and really good. It still holds up today imo.

What is the thing she is trying for to say?

Same.

Oh, there were tons of Sword & Sorcery stuff out there in the REH/ERB vein. Not so much Tolkienesque high fantasy, though.

Yes, that's pretty good on how and why the Shannara books became popular. Makes me wonder whether maybe I should read Elfstones of Shannara sometime after all.

The landscape of fantasy was so sparce that the fantasy fans I knew then were reading the Xanth series by Piers Anthony, and it is pure garbo.

Shockingly, I agree. I read only one volume - The Source of Magic - and found it to be not good.

Then again, I happily read the first seventeen Gor novels so...there you go.