A few days ago, I was poking around my shelves for something to write about and found a copy of Sword of Shannara and decided to re-read it, in memory of the friend who introduced me to 1970s fantasy novels. I will write more about it when I’ve finished it, but the pages of turgid (I hesitate to call it) prose, and the all-male cast trooping across a landscape on a journey related to a magical object that will save the world and earn them glory is typical of late 1970s/early 1980s high fantasy. All-male novels – the only women around being conveniently slaughtered (because they were bitches, excuse me, witches), or needing to be rescued because of their weakness and stupidity or, if they were the active type who horned in on a man’s glory, was sent up the cliff first in their short skirts so the male cohort could stand around at the bottom looking up at her panties and commenting on her anatomy like a group of 8th grade goofs¹ – got me thinking about what women writers penned in response.

While the male high-fantasy heroes were madly pursuing outside objects, the female heroes were discovering, like Dorothy, that they had the power inside themselves all along and didn’t need Ruby slippers to get what they wanted or save the world. McCaffery’s heroines were riding off on Dragons and discovering time travel, McKillip’s were discovering the powers within them and refusing to give in to demands to use those powers for darkness, and – in this book – McKinley’s heroine, Angharad (Harry), throws off the traditional expectations of femininity, discovers the magic within her, and then uses it to unite two warring armies against an evil third.

Let me back up: Harry grew up back “Home” (a vaguely Englandish sort of place), where she was expected to wear skirts and corsets, embroider, and seek a fine marriage – all of which she rebelled against after the death of her mother, riding and reading history instead, and learning to tolerate cigar smoke so she could join her father and his cronies as they discussed foreign affairs after dinner. When her father dies, Harry is left without a guardian or a sponsor at Home, no inheritance, and no prospects of marriage owing to her temper and some kind of scandal in her family tree that is better left unspoken of. So she joins her older brother, a cavalry rider with a bright future ahead of him, who has been assigned to Damar (a vaguely Arabianish sort of place).

There Harry catches the eye (literally) of a visiting chieftain, whose inner voice tells him she will be of importance to his people, though without explaining how or why, and he kidnaps her and spirits her away into the desert. On the journey back to Damar, she is given a horse, taught to ride without reins, and begins to learn a little of the history and language of the Hillfolk. One night, sitting up late listening to the men discuss international affairs, she partakes of an elixer that is passed around and has a vision of one of their historical heroes, a woman called Aerin who wields a blue sword.

Yes, as it turns out, this is a sequel to another book that I posted about earlier this year, The Hero and the Crown, although this book is of a different tone altogether.²

Once they reach the hills, Harry is tutored by one of the Hillfolk in swordplay and riding for war and then joins an annual sort-of jousting tournament, where she earns a spot in the King’s guard as a kind of talisman and pledges allegiance to him. She also earns a spot in his heart.

But finding her inner hillwoman has not made her any easier to be around, and she and the king often argue, both equal in stubbornness. The Hillfolk have an uneasy truce with the Homelanders who occupy their country, neither side trusting the other. But the Hillfolk are fighting a greater enemy and that is why the king had come to the Homelander colony where he first locked eyes with Harry: to ask for military aid. Which was refused. Now the king is willing to save his own people by driving the enemy towards the Homelander settlements, which Harry naturally disagrees with.

Refusing to take sides between her Homelander attachments and her new role as Damari heroine, Harry has to find a way to leverage the strengths of both sides to manage their weaknesses, and how to leverage her powers and channel her inner Aerin to vanquish evil.

This is one of McKinley’s better books, and earned accolades from Newbery and the ALA. In this book, someone who has no expectations of greatness finds themselves on a journey away from safe and familiar lands. They become part of a troop of loosely aligned companions who may seem to be the same quest, but who have individual priorities that put the quest in jeopardy. The hero(ine) finds assistance in unexpected places and, after adversity, triumphs at great cost to themselves, eventually reaching a battle-scarred happy ending.

This plot may seem familiar to readers of high-fantasy (it is basically the hero’s journey) but think about what is different here from, say, Tolkein: the fellowship contains both men and women; both sexes appear throughout the book in characters that contain both good and bad; Harry is not on a quest to find (or cast away³) an object to save the world – she has to find the strength within her and decide to use it.

You also see her within the book, learning to ride without reins or saddle and to use a sword, making mistakes, getting discouraged, trying again and again. Unlike the LOTR, where Frodo, Same, Pippin, and Merry, receiving swords from Bombadil, use them without much training.⁴ Granted, even a modern untrained American could have some luck swinging a large, sharp object around without training, but our inexperience and lack of training would quickly show against a real swordsman and we’d be dispatched forthwith. My point being that, in books featuring women heroes, you see the training occur, you see the attempts, the failures, the final triumphs.

I don’t know that I’ve read much high fantasy lately. My tastes have run less towards epic tales about saving the world, and more toward personal stories, where someone has to save their own world. Or thinks they have to save their own world and then discovers that, oops, that will also save the universe, no pressure.

Anyway, this is a good one, definitely worth reading, and high on the list of books I gift young teen nieces. Enjoy!

1. David Eddings fans will recognize the reference. ↩︎
2. The Hero and the Crown was more of the “princess whose powers were unrecognized and fights dragons” sort of book. This is more of the “heroine in a strange land, who is allowed to step outside her society’s norms and discovers potential for greatness” sort of book. ↩︎
3. For some reason, I am reminded of The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which the object that must be cast away is an empty glass Coke bottle which, falling from a passing airplane, created strife amongst the members of a remote “bushman” tribe, each of whom wants it for its different qualities and potential uses as a variety of tools. The leader of the tribe makes a quest to throw the object off the edge of the world and I can’t help wondering if writer-producer Jamie Uys was a Tolkein fan. ↩︎
4. And don’t tell me the Hobbits had training – there was no reason for agrarian, peace-loving Hobbits to have learned swordplay – they didn’t need it, with Gandalf and the Rangers watching the borders. If any of them would have, it would have been Merry, whose family seems to have historically fought as protectors of the land, but there’s no reason to believe that even he knew how to wield swords. Which is why The Shire was so vulnerable once Gandalf and the Rangers turned their attention Eastward and fell so easily – read the book, don’t just watch the movie here, folks – and why Pippin and Merry and Frodo and Sam are welcomed home as heroes – they’re the ones who know how to use swords and vanquish the enemies. BUT, do you ever see them learning to use the swords? No. You see them running, hacking away, running some more, sneaking, running, lolling about Rivendale, hiking, running – well, you get the point. They weren’t trained: they went from complete ignorance to expert swordshobbits without demonstrating the struggle to get there. ↩︎