Amazing stories like “The Sword of Welleran,” “The Hoard of the Gibbelins,” “The Sword and the Idol,” “Carcassonne,” “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth,” “In the Land of Time,” and his amazing novel “The King of Elfland’s Daughter,” are all fantastic examples of proto-S&S (that is, sword-and-sorcery decades before the genre was invented by Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith in the pages of WEIRD TALES). Few authors, then or now, evoke that grand legend of sword-upon-shield in a world steeped in mystic wonder as well as Dunsany.

Another book that should be included in this list of E.R. Eddison and his classic “The Worm Ourobouros.”

Finally, there are literally dozens of stories by S&S master Darrell Schweitzer which rival anything ever written in the genre, as well as his “Mask of the Sorcerer” and “The White Isle” novels. One of the genre’s most under-apprecaited champions.