The Swords of Lankhmar
core novel 1968 Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Record
| First published | 1968 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.08 (3,685 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 224 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781504068949 |
| Internal chronology | 5 |
Synopsis
In this novel-length Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser adventure, the city of Lankhmar hires the pair to protect its vital grain fleet from a mysterious menace threatening the harvest the city depends on. The threat proves to be an army of intelligent, organized rats operating beneath the city, secretly plotting a full-scale assault on Lankhmar itself. To infiltrate their subterranean ranks and learn the extent of the danger, the Gray Mouser submits to being magically shrunk to rat-size, a perilous gambit that puts him directly among the enemy he must help defeat. Fafhrd, meanwhile, works to rally the city's defenses from above as the two adventurers race to stop the rats before their plan against Lankhmar can succeed.
Where it sits
- Universe: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
- Series: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser core; position 5 of 7 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Fritz Leiber
Awards (verified)
- Hugo Award (Best Short Fiction), 1962: nominated; For the constituent novella 'Scylla's Daughter', the basis of this later-expanded novel; lost to Brian Aldiss's Hothouse series.
Notes
- The only full-length novel in the sequence; the other 6 volumes are short-fiction collections.
- From the series record (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser): 7 volumes assembled by Leiber himself from ~35-40 short stories/novellas written 1939-1988 (originally scattered across pulp magazines over five decades) into a fixed internal reading order; collection-publication order does not match this internal order (Swords and Deviltry, internally 1st, was published in 1970, after Swords in the Mist/Against Wizardry/The Swords of Lankhmar, all 1968). Classified Core Canon per the same collection-as-Core exception established for The Witcher's foundational short-story collections: for this universe, the collections ARE the primary/definitive reading unit, not supplementary material.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: position 3 of 7: previous Swords Against Wizardry (1968) · next Swords and Deviltry (1970)
- Internal chronology, within Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: position 5 of 7: previous Swords Against Wizardry (1968) · next Swords and Ice Magic (1977)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fafhrd_and_the_Gray_Mouser
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swords_of_Lankhmar
- https://www.thehugoawards.org
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