Heroic fantasy

Heroic fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy which chronicles the tales of heroes in fantasy settings.

Frequently, the protagonist is reluctant to be a champion, and/or is of low or humble origin, and may have royal ancestors or parents but does not know it. Though events are usually beyond their control, they are thrust into positions of great responsibility where their mettle is tested in a number of spiritual and physical challenges. Although it shares many of the basic themes of Sword and Sorcery, the term 'Heroic fantasy' is often used to avoid the garish overtones of the former.

Initially undistinguished from the other early fantasies of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, pulp writer Robert E. Howard wrote short stories about a Barbarian Hero named Conan with tales of fantastic adventure with 'a king-sized dose of the supernatural.' Other writers of note added to the still unnamed genre: William Morris, ER Eddison, Evangeline Walton, T.H. White (in his Once and Future King) and C. S. Lewis. Heroic fantasy as a genre began to codify and accrue genre conventions following the upsurge of popularity of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which led to an increase in popularity of fantasy fiction in general.

The scholarship of writers and editors Lin Carter & L. Sprague De Camp also exerted vast influence on the Robert E. Howard unfinished Conan Stories. Carter, as editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, in effect created a literary canon of significant fantasy works which though it included the works of pulp writers Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos included other writers not working in that tradition. Carter restored writers such as Eddison and Walton from obscurity.

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