The Sword of Shannara Trilogy

Foreword

I was about fourteen when I discovered Sir Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle. Robert Louis Stevenson. Alexander Dumas, and all the other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European adventure-story writers. I was immediately hooked. What marvelous adventures! Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, The White Company, Sir Nigel, The Black Arrow, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Christo, The Three Musketeers, and on and on. Each new tale seemed more exciting than the one before. Now here, I believed, were stories worth reading. Enough, already, of great white whales and repressed women wearing scarlet letters. Here were the kind of stones I wanted to write. And I tried, of course, but somehow they didn't work for me as they had for Dumas or Stevenson. I didn't seem to know enough. I wasn't comfortable with the time or the language or the feel of things. So I floundered about in fits and starts and eventually went away to college Without ever completing am thing.

But I hadn't forgotten how much I had enjoyed those stories or how profoundly they had affected me. No. Jour years of college and a semester of law school later, I decided to go back to them. An adventure story, something wonderfully dangerous, filled with hair-raising escapes, men and women of character and purpose, dangers that threatened from every quarter—that was what I wanted to write and that was how I would escape the mind-numbing predictability of law life. But it had to be something grand. How would D'Artagnan have handled Rupert of Hentzau from The Prisoner of Zenda? What if Jim Hawkins had met up with Quentin Durward? I envisioned a story that was panoramic, something vast and sweeping.

That was when I started thinking anew about J.R.R. Tolkien. I had read The Lord of the Rings two years earlier. What if Tolkien's magic and fairy creatures were made a part of the worlds of Walter Scott and Dumas? What if the story took place somewhere timeless and placeless, a somewhere that nevertheless hinted strongly of our own world in the future? What if our present knowledge had been lost, and science had been replaced by magic? But it couldn't be magic that was dependable or simply good or bad. And the right and wrong of things couldn't be clear-cut because life simply didn't work that way. And the central figure needed to be someone readers could identify with, a person very much like themselves, caught up in events not of his own making, a person simply trying to muddle through.

And that was how Sword began.