One gets the impression that since the beginning of time an unending horde of their priests and apostles (or even the gods themselves, it makes little difference) have been crippling across that same desert, the Sinking Land, and the Great Salt Marsh to converge on Lankhmar’s low, heavy-arched Marsh Gate - meanwhile suffering by the way various inevitable tortures, castrations, blindings and stonings, impalements, crucifixions, quarterings and so forth at the hands of eastern brigands and Mingol unbelievers who, one is tempted to think, were created solely for the purpose of seeing to the running of that cruel gauntlet. The vast majority of them began as men, or more strictly the memories of men who led ascetic, vision-haunted lives and died painful, messy deaths. The gods in Lankhmar sometimes seem as if they must be as numberless as the grains of sand in the Great Eastern Desert. And where do all these religions come from, you may ask? The Mouser joins a religion racketeer, responsible for collecting secular tithes from the more successful collection boxes of the religions on the Street of the Gods. Regardless of the cause, they are off to make their way in the world in separate ways. Though if the stories were all like the one I’m covering today, I’d definitely have a different attitude.įafhrd and the Gray Mouser, a usually inseparable duo, begin the story having split up, and the narrator only gives a number of bar-room theories for their falling out the limited omniscience of the narrator, who observes the duo but rarely reveals their thoughts on key issues, is a strength of the piece. Whatever the reason, I haven’t been entertained as much as I was hoping. This might be one of those cases where I’m not putting it in context in which in was written, or that I’m judging it by the standards of forty-plus years of fantasy that has taken frequent inspiration from it, so the original no longer seems new.

And I’ve found most of the ones I’ve read so far to range from decent to good, but are hardly classics. This year I began reading for the first time the sword and sorcery adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, proclaimed classics of the genre.

Lean Times in Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber