That Other American Tolkien

When I was a child, the novels of Fritz Leiber were way more important to me than The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. If anything Tolkien was the British Leiber

A detail from the iconic cover of Swords and Ice Magic, by Michael Whelan

Twenty years ago I was working at Time magazine and feeling like we weren’t covering enough genre fiction, and A Feast for Crows was coming out, so I wrote an essay about George R.R. Martin calling him the American Tolkien.

Is it true? What is truth really? Who among us can say for sure. The point is, I really admire Martin. And I think he found it amusing.

But there’s another writer who that phrase brings to mind, someone whose name doesn’t come up much anymore: Fritz Leiber. Though in a way that’s not really fair to Leiber, because back in the 1980s, to my 10-year-old mind, it would have been a massive understatement. Obvs I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and obvs I loved them, but Leiber was the writer whose books I read and reread to literal pieces, specifically the ones about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, starting with Swords and Deviltry.

Really quickly, for those who don’t know: Fafhrd was a northern barbarian, the Gray Mouser was an urban sophisticate. They were buds and had adventures together. Or here’s how Leiber describes them:

Fafhrd’s origins were easy to perceive in his near seven-foot height and limber-looking ranginess, his hammered ornaments and huge longsword: he was clearly a barbarian from the Cold Waste north even of the Eight Cities and the Trollstep Mountains. The Mouser’s antecedents were more cryptic and hardly to be deduced from his childlike stature, gray garb, mouseskin hood shadowing flat swart face, and deceptively dainty rapier; but somewhere about him was the suggestion of cities and the south, the dark streets and also the sun-drenched spaces.¹

Verbal excess was part of Leiber’s style. He was a heaper of phrase upon phrase.

The books are set in a world called Nehwon, and in particular in the vast, seedy, smoggy city of Lankhmar, which is surely one of the most well-realized of all fantasy capitals—”the massive-walled and mazy-alleyed metropolis of Lankhmar, thick with thieves and shaven priests, lean-framed magicians and fat-bellied merchants—Lankhmar the Imperishable, the City of the Black Toga.” (I don’t think the Black Toga ever becomes an actual plot point, but I always loved that detail.)

Fafhrd and the Mouser climb Nehwon’s frozen mountains, wander its jungles and deserts, scour its dungeons,² sail to its distant shores and dive to the bottom of its oceans. They’re mostly looking for money, but in one of the early stories they both lose the loves of their lives, and that loss haunts them for the rest of the series—greed pulls them forward, but grief and boredom and despair are always nipping at their heels.

You would never mistake Leiber for anything other than a pulp writer—he’s not Shakespeare, or even Tolkien—but his prose is always smart and self-aware, so much so that I was shocked to learn that the first Fafhrd/Mouser story appeared in 1939, only two years after The Hobbit. He feels like the product of several generations of evolution past Tolkien. Here are our two heroes meeting, after being caught up in the same street-fight:

Fafhrd stopped, again wiped right hand on robe, and held it out.

“Name’s Fafhrd. Ef ay ef aitch ar dee.”

Again the Mouser shook it. “Gray Mouser,” he said a touch defiantly, as if challenging anyone to laugh at the sobriquet. “Excuse me, but how exactly do you pronounce that? Faf-hrud?”

“Just Faf-erd.”

“Thank you.” They walked on.

“Gray Mouser, eh?” Fafhrd remarked. “Well, you killed yourself a couple of rats tonight.”

It’s typical of Leiber to call out the silliness of his own heroes’ names.

I don’t know much about Leiber’s life, but I do know that his family were Shakespearean actors, and that shows up in his fine fingertip-feel for language. I learned a lot of words from Leiber—"widdershins” comes to mind, and I never hear the word “coolth” without thinking of Fafhrd in “Trapped in the Shadowland,” where he uses it to describe the damp and shadowy realm of Death.

Old-school D&D players will remember the Nehwon mythos from Deities & Demigods; in fact I read online that in his last years, when he was already half-forgotten, Leiber partly lived off his royalties from TSR. Which is sad to think of

And in Swords of Lankhmar, right in the middle of a big action sequence, a dreamy sorceress murmurs a Shakespearean stage-direction: “Alarms and Excursions.” When I was 12 this seemed like the height of sophisticated meta-writing to me. Not coincidentally, Morgan le Fay utters those same words, under similar circumstances, in The Bright Sword. I meant it as an homage, but truly my borrowings from Leiber are uncountable, from Quentin’s sea-voyage towards the end of The Magicians (nicked from “The Bleak Shore”) to Plum’s exploration of the interior of Brakebills in The Magician’s Land (nicked from “Thieves’ House.”)

I love the Mouser, but the 18 charisma seems high

And now a major caveat: Leiber’s handling of race and in particular gender is, to say the least, unenlightened. Like most writers he has moments of progressive clear-headedness, but he also deals freely in orientalist tropes, and worse: Fafhrd and the Mouser are relentlessly horny in a way that crosses very bad lines. Leiber is barely in print now—I believe he’s only published by a reprint press—and I think that’s a shame, but there are a few of his stories (like “The Sadness of the Executioner”) that truly deserve to disappear forever.

If there’s a great theme to the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, it lies in their endless circularity … there’s a touch of Estragon and Vladimir in Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

But—and this is a major but—if one is willing and able to metabolize the toxins, there’s a lot of imagination and humanity in Lieber’s books. Fafhrd and the Mouser are genuinely complicated people. They feud and reconcile and authentically love each other. They get bored and confused and depressed. They’re not Chosen Ones, or world-savers—they’re rarely masters of their own destiny, and often find themselves at the mercy of forces far greater than themselves, including Nehwon’s many gods, Death in particular, and two indelible sorcerers named Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, whose dark hood may possibly conceal a face made of snakes.

Just FYI it used to be that you wanted your armor class to be negative

If there’s a great theme to the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, it lies in their endless circularity, really in their absurdity, which appealed to me, as a budding suburban existentialist, much more than Tolkien’s grand eucatastrophic finales did. There’s a touch of Estragon and Vladimir in Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. At the end of the day, in spite of all their heroic exertions, sooner or later they always lose what they’ve won, forget what they’ve learned, remember what they longed to forget, repeat their mistakes, embrace precisely what they’ve forsworn, and retrace their paths, even from the edge of the world, back to Lankhmar, the imperishable city, City of the Black Toga, and of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes, to start all over again.

1. In Patrick O’Brian terms, Fafhrd is Jack Aubrey and the Mouser is Stephen Maturin

2. It can’t be overstated how much Leiber DNA there is in D&D. He may possibly have invented the loot drop: “His sharp eyes picked out several objects among the bones. A rusty dagger, a tarnished gold ring that looped a knucklebone, a handful of horn buttons, and a slim, green-eaten copper cylinder. The last awakened his curiosity. He picked it up, dislodging hand-bones in the process, so that they fell apart, rattling dryly. He pried off the cap of the cylinder with his dagger point, and shook out a tightly rolled sheet of ancient parchment … ” (from “The Jewels in the Forest”)