Even the Gods so glorious must march at the last, down the dim dusty road to death the destroyer.

– L. Sprague de Camp, The Tritonian Ring

I hesitate to mention the name L. Sprague de Camp ’round these parts, given the resentment held against him for his character-sullying, inaccurate portrayals of Robert E. Howard in his REH biography Dark Valley Destiny and elsewhere. But if you can look beyond his REH sins (and that’s a big if), de Camp the fiction author has a few gems to offer fans of sword-and-sorcery.

One of de Camp’s more highly-regarded S&S stories is the short novel The Tritonian Ring. Though an imperfect work and not in the same class as Howard’s best, upon recent re-read I found that The Tritonian Ring remains a cracking good read and worth picking up, if you can still find it these days. It’s pure story and possessed of a reckless momentum that lovers of S&S will appreciate.

Though de Camp greatly admired Howard’s writings and Conan in particular, latching on to Howard’s tales and reissuing edited stories and pastiches of the Cimmerian with fellow writer and S&S aficionado Lin Carter, The Tritonian Ring is a deliberate attempt by de Camp’s to break from The Hyborian Age and its larger-than-life heroes. According to this Wikipedia article, de Camp intended Poseidonis to be “The Hyborian Age done right” (i.e., a pre-cataclysmic age of earth that may have logically occurred, based on de Camp’s conception of the science of geology). It’s also an overbold claim sure to irk Howard fans.

It’s unfortunate de Camp again steps in it (and on Howard) with his attempted Howard one-upmanship, as the setting of The Tritonian Ring is among its charms, and differs in a few significant ways from The Hyborian Age — but “done right” is another matter altogether. Despite de Camp’s best efforts and ambitions, the world of The Tritonian Ring is in no ways a superior imaginative work than The Hyborian Age, and as a work of art, it pales next to tales like “Beyond the Black River” and “Red Nails.”

The Tritonian Ring is set in Poseidonis, a prehistoric land consisting of the conjoined masses of Europe, Asia, and Africa, which had not yet experienced continental drift. This is the fabled time of Atlantis, whose spires had not yet sunk beneath the sea. All the weapons, gear, architecture, and technology in the novel are bronze-age, which lends the book a further air of realism.

But The Tritonian Ring is far from historic fiction. Rather, de Camp uses its familiar backdrop of chariots and bronze-plated cuirasses to introduce gorgons and wizards — a healthy dose of monsters and magic — and the Gods as well. Loosely based on the ancient Greek pantheon (each representing a different facet of mankind), the Gods of Poseidonis are ultra-powerful but not infallible, exerting their influence on the earth through visions and suggestion.

At the beginning of The Tritonian Ring the age of the Gods is drawing to a close. “Events will take a deadly turn for us in the next century, unless we change this pattern,” says Drax, Tritonian God of war, in a council of the Gods. The threat emanates from the northern kingdom of Lorsk, and from the actions of a single man, Vakar, a young prince and heir to the throne. The Gods send messages to the warlike race of Gorgons, urging them to launch a surprise attack and destroy the Loskan Empire before the threat can materialize.

But the King of Lorsk learns of the Gorgons’ threatening movements. He calls on the advice of the witch Gra, who advises the king to send his son Vakar on a quest to “seek the thing the Gods most fear.” Vakar embarks on a quest to recover this item, the fabled Tritonian Ring, against which the Gods’ power is useless. Yet the Tritonian Ring is no all-powerful artifact, but a mere circlet of iron forged from a fallen star.

Though de Camp does not fully explain why, the Gods power is useless against this new metal. They can’t enter into the dreams of humans that use or bear iron, and magic and supernatural creatures can inflict no harm upon men who wield it. Should Vakar recover the star, the secrets of iron smelting will be laid bare and the reign of the Gods and the age of magic ended. Poul Anderson’s fine novel The Broken Sword (1954) draws on the same sources of folklore which depicted iron as anathema to supernatural beings, and Anderson may have been inspired by de Camp, as The Tritonian Ring debuted in 1951.

It is fitting that Vakar is chosen (fated?) to undertake the quest. He is a modern man in every sense, a pragmatist whose interests lie in books, philosophy, and history. He has no use for cultures (even that of Lorsk) that adhere to ancient, senseless customs. All men on Poseidonis dream of the Gods, save Vakar (though he is keenly aware of this deficiency, this trait also renders Vakar immune to telepathy and attempts to read his mind, which comes in handy later in the book). Thus, Vakar is among the first wave of new men, those drifting away from ancient gods to worship the new gods of science and progress.

Though not cut of the same stature of Conan, and a reluctant hero who relies as much on his luck as his skill with a blade, in the end Vakar comes to embrace a philosophy that Howard fans can appreciate: “Wait to be sure of anything and you will find yourself looking out through the sides of a funerary urn, your quest unaccomplished.”

De Camp is known for his use of sly wit and he does not disappoint here, liberally sprinkling The Tritonian Ring with humor (in one scene Vakar hails a man in a group of dock workers as “You — with the nose!”. As a writer de Camp is also possessed of an ambitious (some would say ostentatious) vocabulary. Thus, words like “acephalus,” “loricated,” “drugget,” and “taboret” are tossed casually into the book, forcing us mortal readers to reach for a thesaurus.

The Tritonian Ring is also pretty raunchy. De Camp obviously appreciated the female form and he loads the book with one titillating scene after another. I lost count of how many women with which Vakar has sex, but his conquests include an Amazon queen, a female satyr, the nubile queen Porfia of Sederado . . . and a half-dozen other women I’m sure I’m forgetting. In some respects he makes Conan seem downright chaste in comparison.

Finally, it must be noted that de Camp embraces a philosophy very much in opposition to Howard’s: The Tritonian Ring stakes the claim that progress — not barbarism — is mankind’s inevitable path. We can see De Camp’s sensibilities writ large in a passage in which Vakar watches a mob of commoners rise up against their murderous and oppressive noble rulers in an orgy of revenge killing. Whereas Howard would have described the scene as a bloody cleansing, Vakar laments for that which will be lost in the destruction:

“The only sad thing is that they will in their stupid fury have destroyed all the amenities of civilized life in Belem, so that there will remain nothing but wretched savages, unable to rise from their own filth. . .”

Such passages, enjoyable on their own as differing viewpoints from Howard’s, only strengthen the claims that de Camp was fumbling about in the Lancers, making changes to and rewriting story fragments of an author which he never fully understood — or, perhaps, which he did understand, but felt no kinship.