Jeweled Skulls: Fantasy Meets Horror in Fritz Leiber’s Swords Against Death

Abstract

The sometimes horrifying, sometimes funny, and all-times strange adventures of twentieth-century American speculative fiction author Fritz Leiber's most enduring creations, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, have left an enduring influence on fantasy and popular culture from Dungeons & Dragons to Discworld to Game of Thrones. Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories belong to a critically understudied genre known as sword-and-sorcery: a kind of heroic, swashbuckling, and brooding fantasy pioneered by Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories and later named by Leiber. One of Leiber’s most underappreciated achievements is his trailblazing fusion of horror and fantasy via sword-and-sorcery. With fundamentally vulnerable protagonists and a conscious, innovative engagement with contemporary horror tropes, horror becomes the focus of Leiber's early sword-and-sorcery tales, allowing them to touch on profound themes like the inescapability of death, the power of the irrational, and the loss of agency in the face of overwhelming forces beyond comprehension. Analyzing three of Leiber's earliest Fafhrd and the Gray stories collected in Swords Against Death, "The Jewels in the Forest," "The Bleak Shore," and "Thieves' House," this article investigates the close relationship between fantasy and horror in Leiber's sword-and-sorcery and proposes that Leiber's early inclination toward horror marks his work as some of the most mature and fully-realized of its kind.

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Mike Perschon