The Sword of Shannara - Background

Background

Brooks began writing The Sword of Shannara in 1967, when he was twenty-three years old. He started writing the novel to challenge himself and as a way of staying "sane" while he attended law school at Washington and Lee University. and as a result of being caught up in "the Tolkien tradition". Brooks had been a writer since high school, but he had never found 'his' genre: "I tried my hand at science fiction, westerns, war stories, you name it. All those efforts ... weren't very good." When he was starting college, he was given a copy of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to read for the first time. From then on, Brooks knew that he had found a genre he could write in. Writing Sword took seven years, as Brooks worked on it only sporadically while also completing his law school courses and rewrote it many times.

Brooks initially submitted his manuscript to DAW Books, whose editor Donald A. Wollheim rejected it and recommended submission to Judy-Lynn del Rey at Ballantine Books instead. Ballantine Books accepted The Sword of Shannara for publication in November 1974. Brooks' editor was Lester del Rey, who used the book to launch Ballantine's new Del Rey Books imprint/subsidiary. Del Rey chose it because he felt that it was "the first long epic fantasy adventure which had any chance of meeting the demands of Tolkien readers for similar pleasures." The blurb on the back cover even stated "For all those who have been looking for something to read since The Lord of the Rings, here is a wondrous new epic fantasy: The Sword of Shannara", a common marketing strategy back then.

In 1977, The Sword of Shannara was simultaneously released as a trade paperback by Ballantine Books and hardback by Random House. The Brothers Hildebrandt, who had previously done illustration work for the work of Tolkien, was asked to make the cover. Greg Hildebrandt remembers the Del Reys as being "obsessed with the project. It was their baby." Upon publication, the novel was a commercial success, becoming the first fantasy fiction novel to appear on The New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

The original inspiration for The Sword of Shannara was Brooks' desire to put "Tolkien's magic and fairy creatures the worlds of Walter Scott and Dumas". Later, other inspirations jumped onto Brooks' bandwagon, joining with these. In all, Brooks was inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings and adventure fiction such as Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company and Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.

However, Brooks decided not to use historical settings like these works. He instead followed and modified Tolkien's use of a fantasy setting instead:

I would set my adventure story in an imaginary world, a vast, sprawling, mythical world like that of Tolkien, filled with magic that had replaced science and races that had evolved from Man. But I was not Tolkien and did not share his background in academia or his interest in cultural study. So I would eliminate the poetry and songs, the digressions on the ways and habits of types of characters, and the appendices of language and backstory that characterized and informed Tolkien's work. I would write the sort of straightforward adventure story that barreled ahead, picking up speed as it went, compelling a turning of pages until there were no more pages to be turned.

Being his first novel, he admits that he was very influenced by The Lord of the Rings when writing it, but that he has evolved his own signature since then:

Tolkien approached it as an academic, and he was writing it as an academic effort, not as popular fiction. I’m a popular fiction writer, that’s the way I approached it. And I think that you’re right, too, about the fact that I was heavily under the influence of Tolkien when I wrote Sword of Shannara and it shows in that particular book. But I’ve really gotten a long way away from Tolkien these days and not very many people come up to me any more and say, “Well, gee, you’re writing an awful lot like Tolkien.” They don’t say that any more.

Brooks also made decisions about his novel's characterization and use of magic when composing his work, saying that the magic "couldn't be dependable or simply good or bad". Also, he wanted to blur the distinctions between good and evil, "because life simply work that way." Lastly, he wanted to ensure that readers would identify with his protagonist, Shea, which he accomplished by casting Shea as "a person simply trying to muddle through".