Niall of the Far Travels
The other night, as I updated the Sword & Sorcery Authors Page (hint, hint), I added Gardner Fox. He had a long writing career in both speculative fiction and comics. In his entry I mentioned the character Niall of the Far Travels, who was in fact my introduction to his writing, in the pages of Dragon Magazine; I am pretty sure it was issue 13, which I borrowed from my friend Dennis Brown, one of the first people I ever played D&D with. The first issue of Dragon I bought was #37, and the second was #38 which had another Niall tale, “The Cup of Golden Death.”
I mentioned in the entry that I did not believe the Niall tales were collected; I typed this as I linked to a Kothar collection on Amazon that had recently been republished. It would have taken three seconds to search for a Niall collection, and if I had I would have found one. It seems that with the 2017 republication of many of Fox’s S&S fiction, a collection of all 10 Niall tales was published for the first time.
This makes me happy. In those magical days of 1980, there was Conan and Niall as the embodiment of S&S for me, as I had not read about Kane or Fafhrd and the Mouser yet. Even now, when I think back on my earliest S&S impressions (as distinct from Tolkien’s high fantasy), Niall carries great weight. I am ecstatic to be getting this collection, of which I have only read about half.
I will be doing a review of the stories after reading the book. For now, here is my obligatory capitalist link: