Country United States Publication date 1983 ISBN 0-671-46490-6 Genre Historical Fiction Cover artist Rowena Morrill | Language English Pages 347 Originally published 1983 Page count 347 Publisher Timescape Books | |
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Media type Print (hardcover/paperback) Similar Prince of Annwn, The Song of Rhiannon, Witch House, The Children of Llyr, The Island of the Mighty | ||
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.
Contents
Plot
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.
Characters
Development and publication
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 Walton died in 1996, and the other two installments remain unpublished.
Themes
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".
Reception
Kirkus Reviews called The Sword is Forged "an earnest, hard-working, but spindly reconstruction" of the Theseus myth, noting that "Antiope has a certain pep in the first half here ... But the Amazons emerge as a kind of terrorist branch of NOW, and Antiope's decline into All-for-Love milque-toastery is truly tedious." Don D'Ammassa wrote in his Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction that the novel is "an entertaining story but fails to measure up to [Walton's] Welsh stories".
The novel was nominated for a 1984 Locus Award, but lost to The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.