Who Dies First? Conan the Barbarian vs. The Bloody Nine
Fantasy writers, learn how to keep your fight scenes sharp with two classic examples of sword and sorcery
Epic fantasy is what you read when you want to lose yourself in a universe of archetypes strange yet achingly familiar, a chronicle that stakes the restoration of a wounded land upon the courage of the fallible and the powerless, a world rich with fellowships reflecting a panorama of human experience and ambiguity, whose choices petty and foolhardy may nonetheless topple empires, a mythopoetry that measures how we live in accord with eternal chaos, weighing the inevitability of darkness against the hope of healing, often reminding us that even that most inevitable of shadows is not a thing to be feared.
Sword and sorcery is what you read when you want to see a dude stab a giant scorpion in the face.
Rooted in the pagan epics of Gilgamesh and Achilles, by way of the historical swashbuckler, Victorian dino-fiction, and gothic horror, the fantasy subgenre of sword and sorcery1 traffics in the thrill of mortal combat2. It’s right there in the title: here be the sword to which sorcery shall be put.
It’s fantasy’s action-genre, John Wick with a broadsword. Pure, glorious melodrama, prizing spirit, spice, and the weird imagination.
The genre was born a century ago in the pulps, a medium that catered almost exclusively for marginalised readers, “adolescents, the poorly educated, immigrants, and labourers. […] Their taste for ‘trashy’ reading matter was cause for social concern. Cultural commentators throughout the 1930s and 1940s lamented that the proletariat read little else besides pulp magazines.”3
Sword and sorcery icons like Robert E. Howard’s Conan reflected the readership, the unbreakable underdog biting back against a conniving political class. The strong male body – prized as a vessel of labour – revolts against its master.
The genre’s scenes of combat express a certain rage, while the sword-wielder’s grace and swagger satisfy a craving for agency and control.
Violence is both a vital component and a core theme. Sometimes gratuitous, often aesthetic, always cathartic, sword and sorcery’s scenes of steel-on-steel struggle are exhilarating, terrifying helter-skelters of life and death, which grip the reader by the guts, tight enough to feel the creak of sinew behind every sword-thrust, an amoral spectacle to appease the lizard brain.
But prose isn’t moviemaking.
Blow-by-blow choreography looks fantastic on-screen, but it’s rigor mortis on the page. Authors who want to get pedantic about Liberi’s Full Iron Gate Guard stance or the merits of a zweihänder over an Iberian montante risk making their fight scenes feel like a visit to the library.
So how do we make swordfights work on the page?
Here are two brilliant fight scenes from two heroic fantasy classics. They offer an interesting contrast, written 75 years apart, either side of World War Two, one by a bestselling Brit, the other by the Texan pulpsmith who founded the sword and sorcery genre.
Please don’t expect a declaration about which example is best, which is more ethical or politically sound, which technique will score you more readers or contains the least calories.
Oh, how the internet loves to fixate on hierarchy and weird ‘rules’ about writing.
There are no rules, only tools.
A screwdriver is not ‘better’ than a saw, they just serve different purposes. Active voice isn’t ‘better’ than passive; showing isn’t ‘better’ than telling. Such techniques are simply tools to be selected depending on what you want your sentence to do.
But what of realism? The internet says writing must be authentic! It’s one of the ruuuuuuules!
As much as I love those YouTube videos in which experts rate the accuracy of sword fights and shark attacks in movies, I do find their premise a bit weird. That there are people who apparently need it explained to them that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings is not a documentary says a great deal about our current inability to distinguish reality from phantasmagoria.
As a general principle in fictional fight scenes, too much realism can be a buzzkill. Most tend to steer a middle-course between boring real-life and the borderline surrealism of a Zack Snyder movie. How much you value realism in your own combat scenes and how much you wish the reader to relish the hot kiss of arterial spray is up to you and your conscience.
Published in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales4, The Phoenix on the Sword was Robert E. Howard’s first published Conan story. It was a rewrite of a rejected King Kull tale, By This Axe I Rule, jazzed up with the kind of supernatural element favoured by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright.
Having seized the crown of Aquilonia, King Conan finds himself bored (“In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless.”). Conan shakes off his funk when he receives a dream-vision from the spirit of a centuries-dead sage, warning him that a crew of conspirators are presently sneaking towards his bedchamber, knives out.
Through the silence which shrouded the corridor of the royal palace stole twenty furtive figures. Their stealthy feet, bare or cased in soft leather, made no sound either on thick carpet or bare marble tile. The torches which stood in niches along the halls gleamed red on dagger, sword and keen-edged axe.
Howard’s omniscient narrator sees the skulking conspirators when no one else can. He emphasises their advantages, their weight of numbers (‘twenty furtive figures’), their ‘stealthy’ feet (Conan can’t hear them coming), their sheer variety of ‘keen-edged’ weapons.
It’s like the opening scene of a monster movie, showcasing the overwhelming force of the enemy. We get the ominous words ‘shrouded’ and ‘red’, promising death on the pages to come.
The conspirators hold back as Conan’s bodyguards are led to another part of the palace by an officer whose pockets have been lined with gold. Another layer of Conan’s defences is stripped away, leaving the hero vulnerable.
We get a little dialogue from the ringleader, Ascalante, a displaced Aquilonian statesman, who plans to take the crown for himself after he’s done away with his co-conspirators, among them a wild minstrel named Rinaldo.
“Aye, haste!” cried Rinaldo, his blue eyes matching the gleam of the sword he swung above his head. “My blade is thirsty! I hear the gathering of the vultures! On!”
Before we go any further, I’m well aware that Robert E. Howard isn’t Nabokov. This is not a glittering example of literary style. Howard’s prose is coarse and unruly and often in need of a polish.
But it matters not.
Refinement is not what the author needs. Inviting the reader to pause and marvel at the beauty of his syntax would only drain the momentum Howard is out to generate. This is melodrama not literary fiction and warrants different tactics and a different – equally laudable – skillset.
The novel is not ‘better’ than melodrama and vice versa. The forms are two different vehicles serving two different readerships and two different literary functions.
Anyway, back to those firelit halls…
Howard doesn’t give us too much information about that throng of nameless minions at Ascalante’s back. He focuses instead on the ringleaders who personify the attacking force and gives us just enough to distinguish them, so we’ll know who’s who when it all kicks off.
One of them – a bruiser named Gromel – smashes down the door to the royal boudoir, ‘with a snapping of bolts and a rending crash of wood,’ escalating the sense of threat even further. This guy alone would seem enough to bring down our hero. Momentum hits a high note and the assassins feel unstoppable as they burst into the room.
They stopped short. Conan faced them, not a naked man roused mazed and unarmed out of deep sleep to be butchered like a sheep, but a barbarian wide-awake and at bay, partly armoured, and with his long sword in his hand.
That abrupt three-word opening sentence (‘They stopped short.’) conveys the assassins’ jolt of surprise to find Conan awake and ready to engage in a frank exchange of views. The plot has kinked in an unexpected direction.
Howard’s omniscient narrator becomes a touch less neutral with the admiring word ‘barbarian’, promising the reader that Conan is more than just a ‘man roused mazed and unarmed’. He’s something else.
Howard’s narration teases, knowing more about Conan than both the assassins and the reader, perhaps even Conan himself. Now we want to see what Howard means by his dubbing this character a ‘barbarian’ and the combat promises to reveal something weirder and more conceptual than just the brute physics of hack and slash.
For an instant the tableau held — the four rebel noblemen in the broken door, and the horde of wild hairy faces crowding behind them — all held momentarily frozen by the sight of the blazing eyed giant standing sword in hand in the middle of the candle-lighted chamber. In that instant Ascalante beheld, on a small table near the royal couch, the silver sceptre and the slender gold circlet which was the crown of Aquilonia, and the sight maddened him with desire.
This neat little freezeframe gives us an overview or establishing shot that introduces the combatants – in the blue corner ‘the four rebel noblemen’ and ‘the horde of wild hairy faces’ and in the soon-to-be-blood-red corner, ‘the blazing eyed giant standing sword in hand’ – as well as the arena of ‘the candle-lighted chamber’ in which their battle will take place.
We also see what Ascalante wants – the crown – and it’s this objective that will drive him through the rest of the scene.
Conan’s own objective will be to survive the next twenty seconds.
“In, rogues!” yelled the outlaw. “He is one to twenty and he has no helmet!”
True; there had been lack of time to don the heavy plumed casque, or to lace in place the side-plates of the cuirass, nor was there now time to snatch the great shield from the wall. Still, Conan was better protected than any of his foes except Volmana and Gromel, who were in full armour.
‘True.’ Howard’s narrator is really showing himself now. He’s less an indifferent observer, more a playful presence, teasing us even more. How the hell can a half-naked Conan possibly be ‘better protected’ than a pack of killers wearing full armour? Jesus! Just how badass is this Conan guy?
Howard promises that we’re about to find out, adding a heady layer of suspense to the proceedings. This fight will be about more than just seeing who beats who.
Careful not to make his barbarian seem too mysteriously undefeatable, Howard gives us Conan’s confusion as he tries to figure out who the hell these intruders are, so the hero is even deeper on the back-foot when the assassins finally steam in.
With a yell that rang to the roof, the killers flooded into the room, Gromel first. He came like a charging bull, head down, sword low for the disembowelling thrust. Conan sprang to meet him, and all his tigerish strength went into the arm that swung the sword. In a whistling arc the great blade flashed through the air and crashed on the Bossonian’s helmet. Blade and casque shivered together and Gromel rolled lifeless on the floor. Conan bounded back, still gripping the broken hilt.
The anthropomorphic ‘charging bull’ and ‘tigerish strength’ dominate the paragraph, painting a powerful, impressionistic image. Howard doesn’t fuss over stances. Conan doesn’t execute a defensive inquartata, he just ‘swung his sword’. A plain and simple wind-up that lands with a kaboom of dynamic verbs: ‘flashed’, ‘crashed’ and ‘shivered’.
If we think of this fight scene as a narrative in miniature, Conan breaking his sword here is another turning point in the plot. Just as each scene within a story needs to begin with a ‘because’ rather than a monotone ‘and then’, because Conan hit this guy with everything he’s got, he’s now lost his weapon and must find another. That’ll be Conan’s mini-objective over the course of the next few paragraphs.
Sensing their advantage, the assassins swarm in…
A dagger point raked along his ribs between breastplate and backplate, a sword-edge flashed before his eyes. He flung aside the daggerwielder with his left arm, and smashed his broken hilt like a cestus into the swordsman’s temple. The man’s brains spattered in his face.
Howard doesn’t slow down by describing every cut and thrust. He doesn’t add an extra line to say Conan dodged a blow. More economically, he infers it with the raking of that dagger and the sword flashing before his eyes rather than killing him. Conan’s inhuman strength is also inferred (shown rather than told) when he flings the knife-man aside and punches another so hard that think-jelly squirts out of his ears (two moves in one sentence, by the way).
The dastardly Ascalante moves to guard the door. But instead of making a run for it, Conan re-arms himself with a perilously antique axe that’s been hanging above the mantelpiece for the best part of a century. These actions lend rhythm and character to the scene, a sense of ebb and flow, without which the combat would be nothing but a dirge, roll to hit, wound, roll to hit, wound, and so on.
Howard pauses a moment to re-set the scene in this opening sentence, before plunging back in for round two.
With his back to the wall [Conan] faced the closing ring for a flashing instant, then leaped into the thick of them. He was no defensive fighter; even in the teeth of overwhelming odds he always carried the war to the enemy. Any other man would have already died there, and Conan himself did not hope to survive, but he did ferociously wish to inflict as much damage as he could before he fell. His barbaric soul was ablaze, and the chants of old heroes were singing in his ears.
Like Tolkien, Howard harks back to antiquity, his narrator now in full Homeric flight. That sonorous sentence is the stuff of, ‘Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles.’ It conveys Conan’s euphoria, but also feels invocatory, like it’s summoning something from the Pit.
What makes Howard’s sword and sorcery tales work like dynamite is that he’s unafraid of cringe. He puts every ounce of feeling behind these moments of giddy abandon. He writes the way you wrote when you were a teenager, full of song and fire, before you were taught the multitude of ways in which you could get things wrong and embarrass yourself on the page.
Robert E. Howard’s writing is fearless.
Sword and sorcery demands its authors go all-in. For me, this is how the 2025 Red Sonja movie faltered. It felt uncertain, timid, apologetic. Melodrama demands you commit to the punch. Dare to be ridiculous.
As he sprang from the wall his axe dropped an outlaw with a severed shoulder, and the terrible back-hand return crushed the skull of another. Swords whined venomously about him, but death passed him by breathless margins. The Cimmerian moved in a blur of blinding speed. He was like a tiger among baboons as he leaped, side-stepped and spun, offering an ever-moving target, while his axe wove a shining wheel of death about him.
The plot of this battle-scene pivots again as it becomes clear the assassins have cornered not a man, but some kind of bestial god, Howard’s concept of the ‘barbarian’, inviting the reader to revel in his righteous, destructive power.
Howard paints an overall impression of force and struggle. In reality, ten men would have rugby-tackled Conan to the ground in seconds and punctured him like a microwave dinner. But reality isn’t what Howard is going for. This is pure romance.
Again the wolves swirled in and Conan’s axe sang and crushed. A hairy rascal stooped beneath its stroke and dived at the king’s legs, but after wrestling for a brief instant at what seemed a solid iron tower, glanced up in time to see the axe falling, but not in time to avoid it. In the interim one of his comrades lifted a broadsword with both hands and hewed through the king’s left shoulder-plate, wounding the shoulder beneath. In an instant Conan’s cuirass was full of blood.
‘Sang and crushed’ pretty much summarises Howard’s prose style at this point. He varies the sweeping action with that specific zoom-in detail of the poor hapless rascal trying to wrestle those preternaturally immovable legs, before the plot swerves again and Conan is gravely wounded.
Notice how the combat is constantly turning as fortunes change: losing a weapon, guarding the door, the barbarian revealed, then wounded. These beats create a melody that plays throughout the scene, instead of just two sides hacking at each other for page after page, ding-dong, ding-dong.
Howard’s operatic narrator takes his voice down a notch as Conan’s exhaustion takes over and the assassins rally, wounding him again and again.
Conan reeled back against the wall, blood spurting from between the fingers which gripped his wound.
“In, now, and slay him!” yelled Ascalante.
Conan put his back against the wall and lifted his axe. He stood like an image of the unconquerable primordial — legs braced far apart, head thrust forward, one hand clutching the wall for support, the other gripping the axe on high, with the great corded muscles standing out in iron ridges, and his features frozen in a death snarl of fury — his eyes blazing terribly through the mist of blood which veiled them. The men faltered — wild, criminal and dissolute though they were, yet they came of a breed men called civilized, with a civilized background; here was the barbarian — the natural killer. They shrank back — the dying tiger could still deal death.
Howard’s narrator is back in Homeric mode with a vengeance, celebrating Conan’s unearthly endurance and defiance, revealing something uncanny, more than just a warrior facing his last stand.
There are three strands at work in this scene: 1.) the assassins out to kill Conan, 2.) Conan trying to kill as many of these wretches as possible before he dies, 3.) Howard revealing something weird and monstrous and awe-inspiring about Conan himself. That third strand allows Howard to add an extra layer of suspense, not only teasing us as to who might win the battle, but making us wonder what exactly is Conan? Adding that extra layer helps vary the melody and allows the fighting to be about more than just dudes hitting each other.
Conan sensed their uncertainty and grinned mirthlessly and ferociously.
“Who dies first?” he mumbled through smashed and bloody lips.
And that’s got to be the most punch-the-air line in all of sword and sorcery.
Lancaster-born fantasy novelist Joe Abercrombie is best known for his First Law trilogy: The Blade Itself (2006), Before They Are Hanged (2007) and Last Argument of Kings (2008). His most recent book, alt-historical adventure The Devils(2025), has been acquired for adaptation by James Cameron.
Abercrombie’s fantasy novels are influenced as much by Westerns and crime fiction as they are by Tolkien and Dragonlance. His books are compulsive, funny and as unpredictable as a rattlesnake on meth.
Their cynical humour helps convince you of their setting, a world more renaissance than medieval, dominated by the machinations of a mercantile middle-class, though primordial magic still lurks in the margins. But Abercrombie’s books are less interested in worldbuilding than in building vivid characters and examining the human cost of war and violence.
Bored by the formulaic epic fantasies he read in the late 1980s, Abercrombie fell back in love with the genre upon reading George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones (1996), which brought a tighter, more realistically ambiguous focus to the Tolkienian epic.
“[Game of Thrones] was also interesting from a technical standpoint – Martin uses the third-person limited approach, as it’s called, with the events always narrated from ‘inside the head’, if you like, of one of the main characters. All the action is seen powerfully close-up, coloured by the personality of the narrator. For me, fantasy went suddenly from being all about the huge, the spectacular, the sweeping wide-shot (following on from Tolkien’s approach) to being about the experience of individuals. You feel the sweat, the pain, the fear, the blood, you understand the motivations. You see how no-one is a villain in their own mind, even if they are in everyone else’s. The great achievement of Martin’s books, for me, is that they cover vast, epic, immense events, but never lose that sense of tight involvement with the characters. It wasn’t a new approach in wider fiction – I guess Tolstoy was doing something similar in War and Peace – but it was the first time I’d seen it applied so rigorously and effectively in fantasy, and it seems now to have become pretty much the standard method of narration in the genre.”
Influences, Ideas, and A Game of Thrones (Joe Abercrombie, 2008)
Abercrombie’s gallows humorous and morally ambiguous take on chivalric fantasy has itself coalesced into a genre perpetrated by other ‘grimdark’ authors5, including Mark Lawrence (Prince of Thorns, 2011), Anna Smith Spark (The Court of Broken Knives, 2017), Ed McDonald (Blackwing, 2017) and Anna Stephen (Godblind, 2018), though, as Martin and Abercrombie found, once a story-type has achieved a recognisable genre, then it’s probably time to break it once again.
The First Law novels are epic fantasy rather than sword and sorcery, more concerned with bigger-picture ‘civilisation’ than life and death struggles on the primal frontier. But they do involve a sword and sorcery icon: the barbarian, namely Logen Ninefingers, who’s actually a pretty sweet guy, when he’s not succumbed to his berserker alter-ego ‘The Bloody-Nine.’
“Logen was my take on the fantasy staple of the man of violence. Violence has this glamour, this attraction, especially for men, but in reality is utterly destructive both for victim and perpetrator, and even for those on the periphery. So Logen became a way of exploring that gulf between the heroic ideal you often see in epic fantasy and the dark realities of being a man of violence.”
Joe Abercrombie, interview with Andrew Brooks for SFRevu
Logen answers not only the question ‘What would Conan be like if he were an actual person?’, but also ‘What would it be like to be him?’
The following scene comes from a third of the way through the second novel, Before They Are Hanged, from the chapter Among the Stones. Logen has joined a party of adventurers to retrieve a magical relic from the edge of the world, but a band of mercenaries loyal to a rival power have them cornered on a rocky plain.
Like Howard, Abercrombie opens by establishing his arena of death (a windswept hilltop not unlike that of the Battle of the Mounds in John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, 1982).
The first traces of dawn were creeping over the plain. A glimmer of light on the undersides of the towering clouds and along the edges of the ancient stones, a muddy fare on the eastern horizon. […] None of them had slept last night. They had spent the long, cold hours in silence, sitting in the wind, peering into the dark for shapes out on the plain, and waiting. Waiting for the dawn.
No glorious sunrise, no stark, dramatic moonlight; it might as well be the view from an office carpark. ‘Creeping’, ‘towering’, ‘muddy’, ‘cold’, ‘dark’. There’s no omniscient narrator here to valorise the characters’ last stand. Those looming clouds and that horizon make this place feel exposed and defenceless.
Ninefingers frowned at the rising sun. “Almost time. Soon they’ll be coming.”
“Right,” muttered Jezal numbly.
While Howard wants his reader to relish the coming combat, Abercrombie wants you to feel terror. This is why he places us in the head of the scene’s most terrified character, Jezel dan Luthar, a preening nobleman and a deft touch with a rapier, but hopelessly out of his depth here in the wild.
Like Martin, Abercrombie has gone for third-person limited. No room for the god-like pronouncements of Robert E. Howard here.
Sensing the smaller man’s fear, Logen tries to keep him focused on tactics, but Jezel barely comprehends. There’s only three of them left who can handle a blade and the mercenaries outnumber them at least four to one. And did I mention they’re on horseback?
All Jezal can think about is the unfairness of dying so young. Logen tells him to shout for help if he needs it. And if help doesn’t come, well, it’s probably because help is dead.
“I’m scared,” said Jezal. He hadn’t meant to say it, but it hardly seemed to matter, now.
Ninefingers only nodded, though. “And me. We’re all scared.”
You know the situation is serious when even the baddest bastard among you is frightened. This feels like more than just steep odds. It feels like certain death. The only one among them who isn’t scared is Ferro Maljinn, a feral bow-woman with demon-tainted blood and quite possibly insane.
“Right,” muttered Jezal. The sight of the buckle on his own sword-belt, of the grips of his own steels, so proudly polished, made him feel sick now. He swallowed again. Damn it, but his mouth had never been so full of spit.
We notice what a character who feels helpless would notice; we feel what a character who feels sick would feel.
There follows an intimate exchange of dialogue as Logen encourages Jezal to focus on those he loves, anything that might get him through the hell that is almost upon them. But Jezal, supercilious shitbag he’s been his entire life, can’t think of a single person who might mourn him.
Logen assures him…
“You don’t pick your family, you take what you’re given and you make the best of it.” He pointed at Ferro, then at Quai. “You see her, and him, and you?” He slapped his hand down on Jezal’s shoulder. “That’s my family now, and I don’t plan on losing a brother today, you understand?”
Those who cherish the radiant chivalry of Tolkien often regard grimdark authors like rampaging yobbos, pissing and scrawling graffiti all over the cenotaph of fantasy. But that’s certainly not the case here.
Abercrombie doesn’t take his characters’ courage for granted. Instead, he forces them to dredge resolve from the depths of each other’s souls in the face of existential dread.
Their courage feels earned.
It makes me wonder how much Abercrombie has been influenced by modern war journalism like Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down (1999) or Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (2004). This exchange between the barbarian and the soldier isn’t macho propaganda or a hymn to Homeric valour. It feels embedded and intimate. Abercrombie values humanity just as much as Tolkien, though he finds it in the mud rather than the stars.
These characters value life and family just as much as we do, a precious spark of humanity we don’t want to see stamped out, though it seems Fate is on its way with big hobnail boots.
The fight doesn’t start with a fanfare. The mercenaries don’t herald their arrival with bared blades and operatic death threats. Ferro crouches with her bow, watching them casually dismount, tighten their gear, straighten their weapons. They’re more like builders pulling up to give you an estimate on a new roof.
Ferro manages to shoot a couple of them and we’re off, the combat alternating between short punchy paragraphs, each from the differing viewpoints of Logen, Ferro and Jezal.
Ferro scurries away to find another vantage point, leaving Logen to fight for himself. Abercrombie keeps things exciting by keeping his barbarian on the back foot throughout. Logen’s internal dialogue establishes his mindset; he’s scared but experience has taught him to keep it together. He waits behind a stone to bushwhack one of the mercenaries.
Logen held his sword by his right side, fingered the hard metal of the grip, clenched his jaws together.
The feel of the sword’s grip and the clenching of Logen’s jaw convey his tension.
He stepped out with a fighting roar, swinging the sword round in a great wide circle. It chopped deep into the man’s shoulder and opened a huge gash across his chest, spraying blood into the air, lifting him off his feet and sending him crashing down the hill, flopping over and over.
“Still alive!” Logen panted as he sprinted away up the slope.
This is far from the romance of Howard. This is realism, brutish and ugly. There’s nothing beautiful about bodies ‘flopping over and over’ like tossed binbags. It feels mundane. Abercrombie gives us combat as labour, not a Vegas floorshow.
Logen stepped round one of the stones and found himself looking straight into a face, close enough almost to feel its breath on his cheek. A young face. A good-looking one, with clean skin and a sharp nose, wide open brown eyes. Logen smashed his forehead into it.
Like Howard, Abercrombie varies each encounter. This time the minion comes with a startled face, but Logen slaughters him without hesitation. The barbarian’s internal dialogue humanises the man with a nickname, ‘Brown Eyes’, and the violence hinges on Logen making a choice, one that reveals who he is. This is character expressed through combat, as Logen tells himself…
A choice between killing and dying is no choice at all. You have to be realistic about these things.
Even for one such as Logen, killing comes at a cost. He notices those brown eyes turn glassy in death. A description from the PoV of a true psychopath wouldn’t have included that detail at all.
The heroes continue picking off the besiegers one by one, the narrative zigging and zagging with the variety of opponents and situations, Abercrombie upping the difficulty setting with each of Logen’s opponents.
He was a big bastard, this one. A great, fat giant of a man, half a head taller than Logen. He had a huge club, big as half a tree, but he threw it around easily enough.
Again, as in Howard, we get overwhelming force vs. disadvantage and vulnerability, as Abercrombie establishes the strength and ferocity of the bigger man vs. Logen’s awkwardness on this treacherously rocky ground.
We get more back and forth with this combat, Logen taking a punch that knocks him dizzy, then a blow from that tree-like club that almost takes him off his feet.
[Logen] staggered against one of the stones, squawking and dribbling and grimacing from the pain, fumbled his sword and nearly stabbed himself with it.
Logen lacks the godly perfection of Howard’s superheroes. His actions here are frantic, human, his clumsiness isn’t just funny and relatable, it’s lovable. Again, character expressed through combat.
When the coup de gras comes and Logen thrusts his sword into the big boi’s belly, followed by a dagger in the neck, the blow lands with plain, unspectacular verbs. ‘Stabbed’, ‘sliding’, ‘pulled’ don’t call attention to themselves and slow down the pace. The lack of ornament lets the sentences swish like sword strokes.
Logen eventually faces his final boss, the mercenary captain, Finnius.
Finnius moved this way and that, dancing around, light on his feet. He had a big square shield on his left arm, a short, thick sword in the other hand. He twirled it around as he moved, watery sun flashing on the edge, grinning all the while, long hair flapping round his face in the wind.
Logen was too tired to move much, so he just stood there and caught his breath.
There it is again: overwhelming force vs. disadvantage and vulnerability. Finnius’s energy and agility vs. Logen’s exhaustion. Abercrombie varies the combat this time by giving the two fighters a threatening exchange of dialogue, giving this encounter even greater dramatic significance.
[Finnius] came on fast and hard, the shield up in front of him, herding Logen through the stones, jabbing and chopping quick with the sword. Logen stumbled back, short of breath, looking for an opening but not finding one.
We get proper tactical details here, a sense of a cunning mind and a character behind Finnius’ feints and parries. This doesn’t feel like a whirlwind Frazetta painting; it feels up-close and real (despite being completely made-up).
Abercrombie also frames the combat from an unusual angle. When Finnius draws blood, he dances back, waving his sword and laughing, “One to me!” It feels more like a tennis match than the cliched death-dual we’ve come to expect from this sort of thing. That similarity also helps us visualise these two battlers bounding and grunting, each striving to nail the other.
The battle rages for several paragraphs, much longer than the others. Finnius has the cover of a shield, while Logen is leaking like a squished satsuma. Like Conan seeking to re-arm himself after smashing his sword over someone’s head, Logen’s mini-objective over this span of the plot is to get rid of that shield.
He chooses to feign weakness, drawing Finnius into open ground where Logen can generate a decent overhead smash, then rushes in, hacking Finnius’ shield to splinters, then chopping away his sword before delivering a devastating underarm serve.
[Logen’s sword] sliced clean through the greave on Finnius’ shin and took his foot off just above the ankle, splattering blood into the grass. He dragged himself backwards, started to scramble up, shrieked as he tried to put his weight on his missing foot, dropped onto the stump and sprawled on his back again, coughing and groaning.
“My foot!” he wailed.
This uniquely horrible injury reminds me of advice from master thriller-writer (and Pulitzer-winning movie critic) Stephen Hunter about choosing the right gory detail when it comes to writing meaningful, realistic gunfights.
“It’s always helpful to try to invent one little detail that hasn’t been seen before or at least isn’t so common it’s become banal. The classic is the scene [in The Godfather] when Michael head-shoots two enemies in a restaurant, a puff of atomized blood arises behind each. Wow. Sam Peckinpah never thought of that one! The billowing mist cements the image into your brain.”
6 Rules for Writing Meaningful, Realistic Gunfights (Stephen Hunter, 2019, CrimeReads)
Logen sends his one-footed opponent back to the mud without ceremony, though Abercrombie – as with every other one of Logen’s kills in this sequence – pauses to describe the actual moment of death. The passing of a life – along with all the potential for good or at least not-bad it might have contained – gets just as much airtime as descriptions of flying entrails.
If you’re here for the gore, you need to be here for this as well. Are you not entertained?
[Finnius’s] eyes bulged, he opened his mouth wide but all that came out was a gentle wheeze. The dagger dropped from his fingers and fell silently into the grass.
These moments feel necessary, reverent, weirdly sacred.
Logen stood, and blinked, and breathed. The cut on his arm was starting to sting like fire, his leg was aching, his breath was coming in ragged gasps. “Still alive,” he muttered to himself. “Still alive.” He closed his eyes for a moment.
Two fight-scenes, both alike in dramatic dignity in the fair fantasy genre. The House of Howard wants awe, his Conan becomes a vessel through which the reader beholds something weird and divine, very much the endgame of fantasy. Abercrombie feels more akin to horror, his combat scenes feel like you’re being chased by Leatherface.
There’s no ‘best’ approach to writing sword fights, no universal rules, just tools and tactics. You’re wrestling the smoke-monster of your own ideas, trying to pin it into something real on the page. It’s a fight that requires adaptability and being alive to the movements of your foe. So be water, my friend.
Pick a vantage point that gives you the best view of your intended target, that is, what you want your reader to feel: Awe? Terror? Disgust? What game you playing? Or do you believe this sort of thing shouldn’t be a game at all? What tone after you after, Wagner or The Sex Pistols?
Maintain overwhelming force and keep your hero at a disadvantage. Make them vulnerable. Give them no way out and see if they have what it takes to survive.
The clash of steel on steel sure gets repetitive after a while, so make it about something more than what it is. What does this combat symbolise? How does it reveal character? What tactics would these particular combatants choose? Give them a sequence of mini-objectives that might let them gain a winning advantage or at least survive long enough to maybe think of one.
Combat is the continuation of narrative policy by other means.
Don’t stand still, dodge and weave by varying each encounter and each round of combat. Keep your sentences smooth so they slide in like an assassin’s blade.
Read widely. Check out the fight-scenes in The Winter King (1995) and The Last Kingdom (2004) by Bernard Cornwell, Scaramouche (1921) and Captain Blood (1922) by Raffael Sabatini, Gates of Fire (1998) by Stephen Pressfield, Catherine Moore and Molly Tanzer’s Jirel tales and Charles Saunders’ Imaro.
Richard Cohen’s By the Sword (2010) is an excellent book on the history of people stabbing each other with long pointy objects. Oh, and the knife-fight between Paul and Feyd in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) is also a banger.
Add your favourite fictional duals and brawls in the comments below…
Stay sharp. Stay fearless.
And stay weird.
Before They Are Hanged remains copyright of author Joe Abercrombie. Passages are quoted here under terms of fair use for the purposes of criticism and review.
You can find out more about Joe Abercrombie’s work on his website and follow him on BlueSky @joeabercrombie.com
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For an exhaustive look at the genre’s literary history and cultural reach, go read the excellent Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword and Sorcery by Brian Murphy (2019).
How the Other Half Read: Advertising, Working-Class Readers, and Pulp Magazines (Erin A. Smith, 2000)
The term ‘grimdark’ comes from Games Workshop’s original Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader from 1987, the tagline for which is ‘In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.’
You're so right about the "rules". REH could break every one of them, but he's a master storyteller and there's no formula that can make a writer that. I often cite the opening page of "Rogues in the House" to anyone who aspires to write a tale that grabs you from the word go.
(Btw I also thought at first that Howard was speaking figuratively when he says that Conan was better protected than most of his foes, but on second reading it's literal -- they're unarmoured assassins -- some in bare feet, indeed -- as they expected to find their target asleep.)
Conan wins by a sword's blade, for Crom's sake. -500 odds vs. any takers!