Will no one rid me of this persistent untruth?

Fritz Leiber did not coin the term sword and sorcery (or, as he originally phrased it, sword-and-sorcery) in the pages of the famous fanzine Amra. 

Here’s what happened.

Michael “Mike” Moorcock wrote an article in Amra, volume 2, number 15, dated May 1961, entitled “Putting a Tag on It,” in which he is responding to a letter from Sprague de Camp (provenance not cited) that used the term “Prehistoric-Adventure-Fantasy” to describe the “Thing.” Moorcock proposes “Epic Fantasy.” (He also, of interest to our taxonomists—among whom I number myself—lists his five requirements, A through E, of a “basic general formula” for s&s.)

In the next issue, volume 2, number 16, early July 1961, in the “Blunders” editorial, a writer who was certainly George Scithers (using the editorial “we”), says of the demise of the two major heroic fantasy magazines: “Indeed, Weird Tales and Unknown/Unknown Worlds are long defunct; both were noted for swordplay-and-sorcery stories.”

And yes, in a letter (“Swackle”) later in that same issue, on page 21, Leiber writes: “I feel more certain than ever [that this field] should be called the sword-and-sorcery story.” Note the brackets. And note further, the editorial insertion immediately following Leiber’s purported letter to Amra: “The above paragraph was written to and printed in Ancalagon, a fanzine published by G R Heap, address cited.” 

The first issue of Ancalagon, which was an organ of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, was dated March 1961. It was edited by George Heap, who, in an interesting sidelight, published the sole issue in Volume 1 of Amra in 1955, four years before Scithers and company took up the title with the second volume. The issue opens with Heap’s “On Fantasy-Adventure.” It is a six page single-space typed discussion of what to name what Moorcock would, two months later, call “epic fantasy.” There’s a suggestion here  that the whole question of terminology may have originated at a recent “Hyborian Legion muster.” More on the Hyborian Legion later, perhaps.

It is in the second issue of Ancalagon (only three would appear), dated April 1961, that Leiber makes his famous pronouncement in a letter of perhaps 350 words. The quote that Scithers et al changed up a bit, in the original letter, reads: “ANCALAGON looks nice, especially the cover (where the art seems nicely gaged to the method of reproduction) and the article on fantasy-adventure—a field which I feel more than ever should be called the sword-and-sorcery story.”

He goes on to write:

“At any rate I’ll use sword-and-sorcery as a good popular catchphrase for the field. It won’t interfere with the use of a more formal designation of the field…when one finally comes along or is finally settled on.”

I find the article in the first issue of Ancalogon of considerably greater interest and of greater substance than the Moorcock piece cited above. There’s also another letter in Ancalogon #2 besides Leiber’s of some length that adds to the discussion written by Gary Deindorfer of Morrisville, PA, and a third, shorter, attributed to a “grh.”

The whole issue of nomenclature, then being discussed side by side with the same battles over definition that continue down through today, is spread out over quite a few issues of several early 60s fanzines. You can find the issues of Ancalagon, but not Amra, at fanac.org.