THE LARGE AND THE SMALL

 Responding to an online comment to my reprinting CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY on a forum:

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 I'd agree that there's no way to know what subgenre has intrinsically greater variety-- one can always imagine infinite variations on any theme-- so I might modify my statement to say that there was the *perception* of epic fantasy having greater variety, just because of the difference in *scale* between the oeuvre of Tolkien and that of Howard.  

"Scale" is a tough thing to define, but it might be more accurate overall. I did an antonym-check on both the word "epic" and the emotional tonality it usually carries for me, that of being "expansive," and almost all the antonyms to both make the thing opposite look rather crappy, with the most value-free ones being things like "humble" or "restrictive." 

We know, though, people started calling Tolkien "epic" simply because the RINGS story involves a ton of characters and moving parts in comparison with less "expansive" fare like Conan. But one has to be cautious about implying that there's nothing "epic" about Conan. The REH story "People of the Black Circle" sets up the Cimmerian to defeat a circle of evil mystics out to conquer the world. I'm re-reading DC's 1970s barbarian-comic CLAW, and after three or four episodic stories someone unleashes a destructive demon on the world, and it's up to hero Claw and his sidekick to find the mystic items that can expel the critter. So really the only thing "small-scale" about a S&S story is usually that it involves fewer starring and supporting characters than the "large-scale" kind. At the same time, being "small-scale" allows a hero, or pair of heroes, to get involved in comparatively small-scale conflicts, like Good Ol' Conan Brown trying to plunder a great tower and releasing an enslaved entity in "Tower of the Elephant." Is an "epic fantasy" short story even possible?

In FLAME Murphy quotes from the prologue of an S&S collection, SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC, in which the editors made a very limited comparison to the two famous epics of Homer, saying simply, "If high fantasy is a child of THE ILIAD, then sword-and-sorcery is the product of THE ODYSSEY." This is a fine insight because even though we call both Homeric poems "epic," clearly ODYSSEY is just dealing with the struggles of one man and some supporting characters (the family back on Ithaca) facing an epic array of entities, while in ILIAD one might call Achilles the central character but the story devotes almost equal space to twenty or so "support characters," including Odysseus. Murphy then takes the editors' insight in some untenable directions, but nothing that demolishes the validity of the original idea.

Of course, even calling S&S "small-scale" doesn't define that much. As you point out, Jack Vance's Cugel books, which I haven't read for many years and which Murphy also cites, don't contain much swordplay, focusing on a "hero" who often outwits enemies rather than outfighting them. For that matter, there are a lot of fantasies that no one would term "S&S" that are also "small-scale," like literary fairy tales: PINOCCHIO, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Yet a few folktales involve pitched combat, like the folkloric "Jack the Giant Killer." A lot of knights-in-armor fantasies of the medieval era have the same plot structure as barbarian stories-- solitary hero rides around getting into trouble-- and don't involve major "epic" actions like finding the Holy Grail, and I wondered which if any of these Howard might have read, even in bowdlerized forms. 

On top of all that, having lots of characters doesn't mean a story is more complex. I read the first three SHANNARA books over 20 years ago, and I remember nearly nothing about them, while by comparison I recall a lot more incidents even from simple "Clonan" books by writers like Jakes and Fox, not because those books were great but because this or that incident held visceral appeal.

I may amuse myself trying to think of neologisms for "stories with many pivotal characters" and stories with few pivotal characters," but there's probably no new term that will ever change the status quo.