In our post-Game of Thrones world, Fritz Leiber’s Swords and Deviltry, and his Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser tales in general, seem much like today’s dark fantasies. Amoral Lankhmar, with its streets of prostitutes, whispering spies, and conjurers beckoning bloody demons to kill at a distance, seems like the progenitor of King’s Landing, though Leiber plants the undead under the corrupt city and not miles away behind a frozen wall.
While Leiber is most famous for creating Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, he was not only a genre writer, but a genre creator. Leiber would dub both Swords and Deviltry and Game of Thrones “swords and sorcery,” a term he created and defined to describe the epic scope of short fantasy stories like R. E. Howard’s and his own, and which has come into disfavor, possibly due to readers’ associations of that genre, usually tied to painted covers depicting a brawny Adonis scowl-smiling as he shields a simpering, buxom, damsel. You probably have negative associations with “swords and sorcery” as well, and if I really want you to read Swords and Deviltry, I should never call it “swords and sorcery”, but instead say it’s “like Game of Thrones.”
While Swords and Deviltry‘s three stories are ordered by time as it passes in Fritz Leiber’s fictional world Nehwon, Leiber decided this chronological order not when he wrote the stories, but as an afterthought, when he was compiling the paperback edition. Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser’s adventures originally appeared, without much thought to chronology, in pulp fiction magazines of the thirties through seventies, and only later collected into paperbacks, the first of which is Swords and Deviltry. Of the three stories in Swords and Deviltry, Fafhrd’s origin, “The Snow Women” (1970), though written later, precedes Gray Mouser’s “The Unholy Grail” (1962), and is then followed by the Hugo and Nebula-winning coda, “Ill Met in Lankhmar” (1970).
The Snow Women: Man-Chaining Women and Optimistic Hedonism
“The Snow Women” introduces Fafhrd, a boyish and bear-ish barbarian youth–while his skald-trained voice quavers with dulcet feminine tones, he lusts like a wild animal, and kills like a man with many deadly weapons, the sharpest of which is his scheming mind.
The linchpin of Fafhrd’s origin story is his lust for Vlana, one of a troupe of entertainers from warmer climes that seeks to amuse and titillate the men of Fafhrd’s tribe. The women, who are not allowed to attend these burlesques, extend a chilly and vengeful disapproval not only to their titillated husbands but to the titillating entertainers, and it is this generous loathing of any titillators or titillatees that earns the Snow Women the title of this story. And while this is set up as a joke, the Snow Women are no joke; they pummel drunks with ice balls, sometimes to death, and conjure snow and ice to punish the adulterous. Vlana’s permissive and promiscuous nature is refreshing to young Fafhrd, who hasn’t the sense to stay away from her, even though Mara, his pregnant girlfriend, would prefer him dead to faithless, and Mor, his mother, has already killed his father for straying. Fafhrd wants to escape the emasculating stranglehold of the Snow Women, not only romantically, but literally—though he may be drunk on Vlana, he’s more intoxicated by the idea of traveling to the southern city Lankhmar.
Fafhrd may be the hero of “The Snow Women” and the co-protgaonist of seven of Fritz Leiber’s compilations, but this hero is no angel; not only was his first motive for leading the adventuring life to “escape this stupid snow world and its man-chaining women,” but he also left “man-chaining” Mara with child and never looked back. Which makes it hard to root for this ‘hero’ at times. I sympathize with his desire to determine his own life, to be liberated from the cold influence of The Snow Women and their power to freeze men’s hearts and loins, but when Fafhrd’s free will and libido prove to be irrepressibly thawed, and he proves two-faced and cruel in his treatment of Mara, I also sympathize with the desire of the Snow Women to pin him down.
Perhaps due to his optimistic and jovial nature, readers often ascribe more virtue to Fafhrd than he deserves. For instance, in Deities and Demigods (pg.81) , TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons gamesters assigned the moral alignment “Neutral Good” to Fafhrd, forgiving him for the many vices that he shared with The Gray Mouser. Any close reading of these tales, however, starting with the first one, paint a picture of an adventurer that may be more jovial and good-natured, but is no less the skulk, the thief, the man-slut, the con man, and the killer than his smaller and more pessimistic friend. If we’re determined to redeem them from the evil alignments of AD&D, then they’re Chaotic Neutral at best, with Fafhrd a Chaotic Neutral Optimist and The Grey Mouser a Chaotic Neutral Pessimist1.
But while Fafhrd’s optimistic hedonism looks like heroism, and makes The Grey Mouser’s pessimistic hedonism look like opportunism in contrast, these cohorts in thieving and wenching are complicit in every shared crime. And the Mouser’s absence in “The Snow Women” makes it easier to see the young snow barbarian’s starkly hewn appetites.
The Unholy Grail: Mouse’s Moral Alchemy
“The Snow Women,” for all its menace, is a bawdy and upbeat tale, especially compared to The Gray Mouser’s downbeat debut in “The Unholy Grail.” When Duke Janarl brutally slays the hedge wizard Glavas Rho for violating the witchcraft ban, Rho’s apprentice, Mouse, returns to find his master dead and his home destroyed. Moreover, the crestfallen Mouse can’t look at Ivrian, his girlfriend and the Duke’s daughter, without thinking of the hated Duke. Feeling cornered and without recourse, Mouse blasts the Duke from afar with black magic. While this death spell is by no means the end of the tale, it marks the start of The Grey Mouser’s career (it also foreshadows the next story in this book, “Ill Met in Lankhmar,” in which someone else The Grey Mouser cares about dies from long-range sorcery).
If not for Mouse’s adoration of his master Glavas Rho, the allure of “the magic which stemmed from death and hate and pain and decay, which dealt in poisons and night-shrieks, which trickled down from the black spaces between the stars,” would have seduced him long ago. And when Mouse works black magic to avenge Rho’s death, he fulfills the call of his nature, as well as a prophecy made by his master:
You are a middling dutiful scholar, but secretly you prefer swords over wands. You are more tempted by the hot lips of black magic than the chaste slim fingers of white, no matter to how pretty a misling the latter belong – no, do not deny it! You are more drawn to the beguiling sinuosities of the left-hand path than the straight steep road of the right. I fear you will never be the mouse in the end but mouser. And never white but gray.
No sooner than Glavas Rho is slain, Mouse embraces the dark desires that he has denied, and for several pages, seems so committed to evil as to be a black hearted villain quite unlike the doomed dualist described in Glavas Rho’s prophecy. When Ivrian finds Mouse on the verge of death—for the death spell cuts both ways, and runs the risk of killing Mouse as well as the Duke at its conclusion—she begs him to abandon his revenge, and he mocks and villifies her, accusing her of colluding with her father. Only through her persistence does he relent, though as this also marks the moment that he is captured and tortured by the Duke, he never comes back to himself. The moment that Mouse ‘dies,’ and The Gray Mouser is born, is probably when he is only able to achieve his revenge on the Duke and escape by focusing a new death magic through his love, Ivrian.
And so while “The Unholy Grail” is a much shorter story than “The Snow Women,” more is at stake in the Gray Mouser’s beginnings; while both young men risked their lives and changed their futures, in “The Unholy Grail,” Mouse’s soul was on the line. When Good warred against Evil in Mouse’s nature, Good, Evil, and Mouse were the casualties, and The Gray Mouser the survivor.
Ill Met in Lankhmar: Horror in the Enchanted Land
In “Ill Met in Lankhmar,” Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser bushwhack two jewel thieves, and the Thieves’ Guild’s sorcerer unleashes death magic upon the Mouser’s love nest. Smoke and a swarm of rats consume not the book’s heroes, but their lovers, and the sight of the women’s vermin-eaten corpses spurs the men to vengeance that very night.
Though many don’t know it, when they prefer ‘dark fantasy’ to ‘high fantasy,’ they’re really preferring the Nehwonesque to the Tolkienesque. While in Narnia and Middle Earth, talking beavers and hobbits are prepping epic breakfasts, and the main vices are overindulgence and a pipe, in Nehwon the vices and evils are at best sordid, and at worst, so unmentionable as to be referenced in circular prose. And this darkening of the fantasy genre even extends to its protagonists; sometimes even Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are so dark as to be unlikable, people with whom we wouldn’t share a beer let alone travel with to worlds of adventure. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are more the templates of the Lannisters of fantasy fiction than the Starks. Not that there are any as benign as the Starks in Nehwon, not to mention breakfast-making beavers or ringbearing hobbits.
That the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories meet or exceed the trope requirements of the Dark Fantasy genre is obvious in the many deaths and that the heroes of this land of enchantment are themselves disenchanted, leaving murderous mothers, dead masters, and beloved bones in their wake; moreover, certain of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories–such as “Ill Met in Lankhmar”–also hold up well next to the works of short fiction horror writers such as Poe and Lovecraft. Leiber, a noted fan of Lovecraft and student of philosophy and religion, was no doubt full to the brim of dark truths that spilled out into his stories.
Jumping into the domain of one neighboring genre isn’t enough for Leiber, who also uses the tools of detective fiction in communicating to the reader what happened to Vlana and Ivritan before the drunken heroes arrive home to that famous grisly scene in “Ill Met in Lankhmar.” And that Leiber’s communication to the reader is written only symbolically, and using the language of sorcery as it is understood in his fantasy universe, again crosses over into the area shared by the horror and fantasy genres—that of supernatural evil. Leiber was brilliant in recognizing that black magic is horror, and hence can’t be properly described without mastering the language of the horror genre.
Leiber’s vision for sword and sorcery was more broad and encompassing than how it is currently understood. So while the Nebula and Hugo award winning “Ill Met in Lankhmar” is one of the defining works of sword and sorcery, and one of the seminal moments of dark fantasy, in a genealogy of tales that branches out, one day, to Game of Thrones, this story, and Lieber’s Nehwon, owes as much to the dark cosmos in the horror genre as it does to anything in fantasy. And when he transcends the fantasy genre to use tools from horror and detective fiction, it is only that he doesn’t care whether excitement, horror, or wonder shakes the reader, so long as the reader’s spine shivers.
No Modern Women in Nehwon: Misogyny in Swords and Deviltry
While 2017 Barnes & Noble possesses a wealth of child warfare fantasies, an outpouring of urban fantasy, and fairy tales that got the redux treatment ad nauseum, if you were to visit my childhood bookstore, Cheshire Books, circa 1983, the three shelves of fantasy books, and some of the science fiction, owed a recognizable debt to a handful of writers: Lord Dunsany, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Robert E. Howard, and Fritz Leiber. Not that there weren’t many unique and distinct voices, but even some of the strongest of those, such as Michael Moorcock or Ursula K. LeGuin, were strongly influenced by or strongly reacting against these literary godfathers. Even today this is true, with the genre so mired in sexism that its writers and fanbase don’t notice, until a questionable scene gets more or less faithfully translated to film or television and engenders a massive outcry from those less familiar with the timeworn tropes of fantasy.
While Leiber’s tales seem to have more modern sensibilities than the other fantasy godfathers, and Nehwon often seems a modern fantasy setting, with amoral heroes, sexual innuendo, and only its titular characters spared death in its fatal tapestry, there are no modern women in Nehwon.
Vlana, Ivrian, and Mara have Cinderella complexes (though Vlana is a more skilled conspirator and manipulator of her men) in their inability to win without male proxies; Vlana and Ivrian depend on men for their rescue; Vlana uses men in the implementation of her vendetta, and Mara works her ill will on Fafhrd through the cooperation of her brothers. Mor and the Snow Women as a whole are more independent from men due to their magical agency, but in their preference to see their husbands and offspring dead rather than unfaithful and true, they exhibit the Medea complex. While she still wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test2, due to her obsession with manipulating men, Mor is the most emancipated and effective woman in Swords and Deviltry. You may point to Vlana’s machinations, and puppetry of Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser for her own ends, but a few pints make both men impervious to her wiles and her fate is to dangle from a sorcerer’s demonic threads. Not that Mara outlives her for very long, as her death offstage (with Mara and Fafhrd’s firstborn) is reported in “The Circle Curse” (Swords Against Death, pg. 14)3:
Unfortunately for the women characters, they are more alike than not. In a narrative that celebrates the liquid libido of its men and their far-ranging wanderlust, four out of four women are killed in their residences, and three of the four die in their home towns.
Footnotes
1Though neither of them have taken an altruistic voyage in order to save all of creation from being extinguished by dark gods—more than once–like the supposedly Chaotic Evil Elric of Melnibone (The Sailor on the Seas of Fate).
2To be fair, it is a long way from here to The Last Unicorn’s Molly Grue, or the mighty unicorn that would rather die than be the powerless Lady Amalthea.
3“In the Cold Waste they sought for Fafhrd’s Snow Clan, only to discover that it had last year been overwhelmed by a lemming horde of Ice Gnomes and, according to best rumor, massacred to the last person, which would have included Fafhrd’s mother Mor, his deserted girl-bride Mara, and his first issue if any.”
