Ten years ago to the month (I started this in October), I wrote about Terry Brooks’ groundbreaking The Sword of Shannara (1977), and declared that the joy I got reading the book the first time around was something I couldn’t recapture. Time had opened a gap between the book and what I could take away that seemed uncrossable. Revisiting the book, yet again, I no longer think that’s completely true, but it’s not entirely false.

When I set out earlier this year on my journey through Tolkien’s writing, I decided to mix it up with several works clearly inspired by Tolkien, and particularly the Lord of the Rings. Bored of the Rings (reviewed here), was my first choice because it’s an explicit parody of the trilogy (and a brilliant one!).

Sword was an easy choice, as well, even if its origin story is complex and was touched by divers hands (well, six, to be precise, between Brooks and the Del Reys). I’m not sure Brooks set out to write a story that tracks so closely to the LotR in so many places, but that was result. It kicked off the mass-market success of quest trilogies featuring secret heirs in search of the foozle needed to bring down the Dark Lord in his isolated redoubt.

My wife (and editor), was surprised I decided to reread Sword. Part of me agreed. I thought I’d said everything I could about the book last time around and I have dozens (HUNDREDS!) of books I should be reading, instead. Nonetheless, as I worked my way through The Hobbit and then Lord of the Rings, I kept having images from Sword pop up unbidden. Sometimes, they were in conversation with the Tolkien scenes that had to have inspired them, but not all. Some were wholly original to Brooks and I thought I might still find something in the book I’d found there nearly fifty years ago.

The last time around, I unloaded a ton of snark on Sword. Its deliberate creation in an effort to replicate the publishing success of Lord of the Rings at the hands of wily editor Lester Del Rey seemed an artistic atrocity.

In an interview from 2012, Terry Brooks lays it all out.

Yeah, that’s right. The prevailing opinion in the publishing industry was that fantasy was a niche genre and you could sell five or ten thousand copies of a good book, but that was it. Except for Tolkien, but that was Tolkien and he was gone anyway, so there was no point in fussing about that, and everything else that was out there just wasn’t bestseller material. And Lester thought this was a lot of hooey. I found all this out years later—at the time I’m sure I thought that he just had great judgment about my book. But he basically set out to take a Tolkien-esque kind of story, put it out there as a fantasy, and sell it in bestseller numbers. And that’s what he did with Sword. And he told me that I was going to take it on the chin over this from many, many sides, that people were going to hate it, that people were going to say it was a rip-off, that people were going to this, that, and the other thing.

Part of me is grudgingly grateful for the del Rey’s success at turning fantasy into a viable literary genre, but I think we’d all be much happier if Lin Carter had been the editor to achieve that. Carter’s opinion of Sword was made explicit in his survey of fantasy from 1977. He wrote that it is “the single most cold-blooded, complete rip-off of another book that I have ever read,” and “Brooks wasn’t trying to imitate Tolkien’s prose, just steal his story line and complete cast of characters, and did it with such clumsiness and so heavy-handedly, that he virtually rubbed your nose in it.” At the very least, we might have been spared the raft of Tolkien clones that weighed down bookstore shelves for two decades.

In contrast to del Rey, I have less of a grievance with Brooks. His response to del Rey’s warning above is incredibly honest.

And I said, “I don’t care. I want to get my foot in the door and figure out how I can do this for a living.” Because that’s what I wanted to do, I wanted to be a writer, and I had no clue how to go about doing it. Here was somebody whose work I respected saying, “I can make this happen,” so I did it.

He was a young lawyer with a dream of telling a story that mixed the swashbuckling stories of writers like Dumas and Scott with the “magic and fairy creatures” of Tolkien. It’s a wholly respectable goal and if it had been achieved it would have been a much better book. It never develops the full-throated brio of Dumas and company and it rarely finds any of the fantastical transcendence of Tolkien. Last time around, I wrote Sword “talks when it should at least be trying to sing,” and I stand by that. Still, I find myself a little fonder of the book than I was then.

Del Rey and Brooks set out to write a story of action and adventure that rolled ever, juggernaut-like, forward. After several chapters of vaguely-plotted events, Sword finds its way and reaches that goal. I became caught up in the escapades of the assorted characters. From the moment the band of incipient heroes arrive at the ruins of an ancient city and meet a cyborg monster, things never let up. You might recognize more than a few elements from Lord of the Rings — ring wraiths, a multi-walled city under siege, a dark lord in a dark land, etc. — but Brooks was a storyteller, even back then. I’ve read a fair number of the sequels to Sword and they never really sing, either, but they possess an almost irresistible pull.

For those who’ve escaped this almost fifty-year old book, Sword tells of the quest of a doughty band of adventurers to recover the sword of Jerle Shannara, a long dead elf king. It was specifically forged to defeat the warlock lord, Brona. Centuries before the start of Sword, Jerle failed to kill Brona, only driving him into some sort of exile. Now he’s returned.

For the sword to work, it must be wielded by one of Jerle’s heirs. The only one remaining is Shea Ohmsford, an orphaned half elf living in the quiet town of Shady Vale alongside his foster brother Flick. Within a few pages of the first chapter, Shea meets the wandering Druid, Allanon (I’ll never not chuckle at that name) and learns he is in great danger and must seek flee his home and find refuge.

Before you can say Rivendell five times backwards, a party has been formed under Allanon’s leadership, consisting of the wizard, Shea and his brother, their friend, Prince Menion Leah, a dwarf named Hendel, another prince, Balinor Buckannah, and a pair of elven brothers, Durin and Dayel. For ages, the sword has been kept safe in the Druids’ tower, Paranor. On learning that it has been seized by Brona’s Gnome armies (gnomes are Shannara’s orc stand ins), Allanon plans a precision strike on the fortress to recover the sword before it can be moved. Alas, nothing goes as planned.

There are perils that must be overcome before Paranor can be entered. The first is an attack by an ancient killer cyborg. The cyborg attacks the party amidst the ruins of an ancient city.

Suddenly the road ended and the strange framework stood completely revealed, the great metal beams decaying with age, but still straight and seemingly as sturdy as the had been in ages past. They were part of a what had once been a large city built so long ago that no one recalled its existence, a city forgotten like the valley and the mountains in which it rested — a final monument to a civilization of vanished beings.

This description coupled with a few other passages in the book, make clear that Shannara is set long after an apocalyptic war. Trolls, dwarfs, and gnomes, we learned, are the results of assorted mutations (Elves were always there, but just in hiding). Later books in the series make it clear the setting is not just post-apocalyptic, but post-apocalyptic Earth. It remains the element of the book I still appreciate the most, even if it’s not as original as I once thought (I didn’t read Saberhagen’s Empire of the East until many years later).

The next great obstacle is a haunted tunnel under mountains that will allow the party to reach their destination in secret. It is filled with, well just the sort of things you’d expect it to be filled with.

Years ago, before the First War of the Races, a cult of men whose origins have been lost in time, served as priests for the gods of death. Within these caverns, they buried the monarchs of the four lands along with their families, servants, favorite possessions, and much of their wealth. The legend grew that only the dead could survive within these chambers, and only the priests were permitted to see that the dead rulers were interred. All others who entered were never seen again.

The assault on Paranor is a failure. Coming down out of the mountains from the Hall of Kings, Shea falls into a stream and is washed away. The sword has been spirited aways from the keep and

Allanon dies, seemingly, WHEN HE FALLS INTO A FIERY PIT FIGHTING A WINGED DEMON! Okay, there’re more than a few places someone should have been ashamed of allowing into print.

Escaping the keep and its gnome captors, the party members split up. Some go hunting for Shea and the others head toward the Balinor’s home city, Tyrsis, to warn of the impending invasion by Brona’s army of trolls and gnomes. Assorted familiar shenanigans ensue, including the appearance of a traitorous advisor and the siege of a great walled city built against a mountainside.

Shea’s adventure is easily the best part of the book. Captured by gnomes, he is rescued by a pike-handed, scarlet-garbed bandit named Panamon Creel and his companion, a troll named Keltset. Creel is in it, whatever it is, for the money, but in a Han Solo-sort-of way, and he turns out to be an ally of unsurpassed value. Keltset is a more mysterious figure, who emerges as the hero of his own story as Shannara races towards its end.

The trio’s march to the Warlock Lord’s tower is the most gripping and grim part of the book. As they cross the sere lands of Brona’s realm, Shea is tempted to madness. Nothing else in the book comes as close to having emotional weight.

Now, I’m going to spoil the ending, the ending of a nearly fifty-year old book. When Shea is finally confronted by Brona while wielding the sword, the first time I read the book, I expected some sort of brutal fight. Brooks is actually, for a rare moment, much more subtle. The power of the sword isn’t its ability to pierce a foes defenses. Instead, it forces whomever it touches to confront the truth about themselves. When he strikes the Warlock Lord with the blade, Shea perceives his true nature.

The touch of the Sword carried with it a truth that could not be denied by all the illusion and deceit of the Warlock Lord. It was truth against which he had no defense. For the Warlock Lord, the truth was death.

Brona’s mortal existence was only an illusion. Long ago, whatever means he had employed to extend his mortal life had failed him, and his body had died. Yet his obsessive conviction that he could not perish kept a part of him alive, and he sustained himself through the very sorcery that had driven him to madness….He was a lie that had existed and grown in the fears and doubts of mortal men, a lie he had created to hide the truth. But now that lie was exposed.

I loved that then and I love that now. There’s an element there of how the nature of fear and belief can shape the power of one’s enemies. It way too subtle for the book. Digging deeper into it is something Del Rey would have quashed with all his editorial power. Nonetheless, it points, if only a little bit, toward a better sort of storytelling.

In the past, I’ve described The Sword of Shannara as Lord of the Rings with training wheels, a book that talks when it should be trying to sing, a bereft of atmosphere. I think all those things hold true, and yet I won’t condemn the book as I once did.

It’s a fine enough young adult fantasy novel. That’s really what it is. Again hinting at what might have been, Brooks informs us that his original ending saw nearly every main character dead. Del Rey put the kibosh on that, at which point, Brooks realized, he should just write a book for all ages. That’s what he did, even if it does feel more like a rip off than just a pastiche of Tolkien.

What became clearer to me on this reading is that the book could have been the book Brooks’ notes in the annotated edition imply; a darker story, with more adult element and themes. One suspects the betrayals would have been more disturbing, the violence more graphic, and the casualties more devastating.

Once again, I will end by writing I don’t know if I’ll ever read The Sword of Shannara again. This time though, it’s not because I fear ruining some old memories. It’s because I’m nearly sixty and I don’t know if I’ll get around to it again. Besides, I’m a little curious about reading some of the sequels again, especially in the immediate aftermath of having reread Shannara. I’m really curious how Brooks’ writing and storytelling evolved. He would still be here almost fifty years later if he didn’t learn something over the decades.

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