The Sword is Forged

The Sword is Forged

First edition cover
Author	Evangeline Walton
Cover artist	Rowena Morrill
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Historical fiction
Publisher	Timescape Books
Publication date	1983
Media type	Print (hardcover & paperback)
Pages	347
ISBN

The Sword is Forged is a 1983 historical fiction novel by Evangeline Walton. It is based on the story of Theseus and the Amazon queen Antiope from Greek mythology.

The Amazon queen Antiope is captured by Theseus and brought back to Athens to become his bride. They fall in love and she bears him a son, Hippolytus, but soon the Amazons besiege Athens to reclaim their queen.

According to Douglas A. Anderson, Walton wrote a trilogy of novels about Theseus in the mid-1940s. She completely rewrote all three books in the mid-1950s, but put them aside when Mary Renault published her own Theseus novels, The King Must Die (1958) and later The Bull from the Sea (1962). After the success of the Ballantine editions of her Mabinogion tetralogy in the 1970s, Walton visited Greece and started reworking her own Theseus trilogy. The first volume was published as The Sword is Forged in 1983. Walton died in 1996, and the other two installments remain unpublished.

In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, John Clute and John Grant cite The Sword is Forged as an example of the use of the Amazon in sword and sorcery as "an icon of female autonomy". They go on to explain that novel uses Theseus to present "a patriarchal challenge to the Amazon in terms which allow some inspired debate".Kirkus Reviews suggests that the takeaway theme of the novel is that "love 'must always mean bondage' for women".