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EPVIDS ARE A SERIES OF BLIGHTED WEAPONS IN FANTASY, USUALLY SWORDS, that are evil, possessed, vampiric, or demonic. Although this unlovely acronym is admittedly somewhat excessive and tongue-in-cheek, especially as not all my listed EPVIDS will contain all these attributes, they nevertheless comprise a distinct (albeit small) sub-category of twentieth-century fantasy with a surprisingly clear genealogy. In fact, their history partly mirrors the twists and turns of modern fantasy itself. In The Evolution of Modern Fantasy, for example, Jamie Williamson breaks down twentieth-century fantasy into a "literary" branch, headed by such writers as J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord Dunsany, Morris, and Hope Mirrlees, and a "pulp" branch headed by the likes of Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert E. Howard, and Jack Vance. The differing contexts for each branch, as Williamson argues, are "rather more significant than generally affirmed" (15). The pulp writers adapted their medieval content to "the conventions of modern narrative forms" and wrote typical adventure - story prose; the literary writers, in contrast, published in more respectable venues, directly engaged medieval literary models, suited their prose style to their themes, and in general revived the "conventions of traditional 'faery, or romance literature'" (36).
Through the category of evil possessed vampire demon swords, however, these two branches meet and merge. If we use Brian Attebery's well-known concept of the fuzzy set, which employs a logic of center and periphery to delineate genre, the quintessential modern EPVIDS-the core of the subgenre, in other words-is easily Stormbringer, a creation by Michael Moorcock in his Elric of Melniboné tales. Yet Moorcock was not the first fantasist to write such stories. Poul Anderson and Tolkien both independently composed tales with EPVIDS, drawing their inspiration from their antiquarian interests in Old Norse literature and Finnish folklore. Their adaptation strategies were startlingly similar, too, especially when constructing individual subjectivity. For the characters who wield a cursed EPVIDS, Anderson and Tolkien grant modern unities of selfhood combined with non-modern habits of being and desire. From these antiquarian antecedents-but more especially Anderson- comes Michael Moorcock, who gave the subgenre its indelible "pulp" stamp, eschewing elaborate or "archaized, poetic language" (Williamson 168) while writing quickly and for money. Yet Stormbringer also initiates a more thoroughly modern form of EPVIDS subjectivity. Moorcock's...