The Sword of Shannara: Star Wars' Second Cousin Turns 30

Thirty years ago, an old story was told anew, reinvigorating a genre and capturing the imagination of a whole new generation unfamiliar with the pure fun this kind of storytelling could be.

While overshadowed by the fervor surrounding the 30^th anniversary of Star Wars, Terry Brooks' novel "The Sword of Shannara" also made its debut in 1977, and in its own ways, for better and worse, did for fantasy writing what Lucas' epic did for science fiction.

The two stories, in fact, have nearly paralleled each other in terms of endurance and influence.

I was in third or fourth grade when I saw my friend Jacob carrying "The Sword of Shannara" around. The book was already a few years old by then, and it was the fattest paperback I'd ever seen.

I was intrigued - my uncle had gotten me a boxed "Lord of the Rings" set when I was in first grade. After reading "The Hobbit," I tried to tackle the whole series, got lost halfway through the first book, and didn't pick them again for several years.

Jake's enthusiasm drew me to give "Sword of Shannara" a shot, though, and pretty soon I was hooked on the story, which Brooks' straightforward language made much more accessible to an elementary-school-aged kid to get into than Tolkien's much more detailed settings and descriptions.

I liked it well enough to read the first sequel, but the characters and setting lost their grip on me a chapter or two into the third book in what became Brooks' original Shannara trilogy.

Recently, I re-read the book that started it all. It was my third time - the second time was in the mid-1990s, when I picked up a copy in a used bookstore. What I remember about that return visit to its pages are the things that I'd missed when I was a kid, like the implications that Brooks' fantasy world was a chronological opposite of Tolkien's, and was actually our own Earth in a far post-apocalyptic future.

This time through, it seems far weaker and owes far more to Tolkien than I remember.

The obvious overarching story can be put down o a template that's so long-recognized it can't even be called derivative: A young man, born of destiny and swept into epic adventure by the arrival of a wise-beyond-all-ways stranger. Tremendous clashes of good and evil ensue.

Again, there's that parallel with Star Wars.

Beyond that, though, there are specific bits and pieces of "Sword of Shannara" that wander perilously close to The Lord of the Rings tale: Brooks' skull bearers, once mortals, now bereft of true souls or life, are the minions of the dark overlord much as Tolkien's dark riders. The heroes pass through the Hall of Kings, a cavern of the dead; there's a walled and "impregnable" city which must stand against an army of darkness, lest the world fall. And the villain orchestrating the chaos lies largely unseen and unheard, manipulating his armies from the seclusion of a barren land beyond the barrier of a desolate mountain range.

Despite all that, though, "Sword of Shannara" has made its mark from the beginning.

It re-energized the fantasy literature genre and dovetailed neatly with the rising popularity of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game.

"Sword of Shannara" spawned five Shannara-related trilogies, a four-book "tetralogy" and a prequel novel.

Arguably, again coupled with the Dungeons & Dragons influence, "Shannara's" success played no small role in the development of the more than 150 Dragonlance books which began publishing in the 1980s.

Purists might complain that, as Lucas has been accused of by some science-fiction aficionados, Brooks just took an existing template and dumbed it down for mass consumption. And his works undoubtedly inspired as many bad fantasy novels as Star Wars sparked bad outer space movies. (In perhaps a fitting bit of happenstance, more than 20 years after Star Wars and "Sword of Shannara" debuted, Terry Brooks was tapped to write the novelization of George Lucas' cinematic return to the Star Wars universe, The Phantom Menace.)

Still, three decades on, like its cinematic second cousin, the Shannara world and its stories maintain a loyal fan base that keep coming back to hear just one more tale.