The Bittersweet Temporality of Love

On the 50th anniversary of his death, it’s a perfect time to unearth the forgotten fantasies of Thomas Burnett Swann.

By Sean Guynes April 18, 2026

IN MAY 1976, when Thomas Burnett Swann died of cancer at 47, fantasy was a new genre.

Only a decade before, in 1965, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings had exploded to bestseller status with the publication of the trilogy’s first mass-market paperback editions (the hardcovers had been a minor success in 1954–55). Boomer youths adopted Tolkien’s fantasies as watchwords for ecological consciousness, anti–nuclear proliferation, the struggle against industrialism and capitalism, and much more. “Frodo Lives!” and “Go Go Gandalf!” were printed on buttons and graffitied on New York subways.

Publishers read the signs: readers wanted more of whatever Tolkien was. Of course, novels like The Lord of the Rings had been around for decades, and Tolkien had his own influences: William Morris, George MacDonald, Lord Dunsany, even H. Rider Haggard. In the United States, a pulp tradition of weird fiction and the sword and sorcery genre had thrived in the 1930s and ’40s, and science fiction magazines published fantasy stories as a minor part of their output, even as they pretended only to value the “seriousness” and “realism” of SF.

But fantasy had yet to emerge as its own category, free from SF’s shadow. There were few generic expectations and no agreed-upon canon to unite the genre; the field was understood, very simply, as stories of the “impossible,” contra the supposed plausibility of SF. Things changed when Ballantine Books sought to capture the Tolkien market by republishing dozens of earlier (and a handful of contemporary) American and British authors in a series of “adult fantasy” books. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series published 65 books between 1969 and 1974, giving the genre a canon and a horizon of expectations, as well as a visual language for covers and shelf awareness for books with “fantasy” printed on their spines. By 1977, following the publication of Tolkien’s posthumous The Silmarillion, Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane, all of which were bestsellers, fantasy was undeniably a well-established category in the publishing world. And by 1980, just about every publisher had a line of fantasy novels.

Thomas Burnett Swann’s literary career coincided with that tumultuous decade of fantasy’s “genrefication.” Swann was the son of a wealthy Florida citrus baron; he was also a Korean War veteran, an English professor at Florida Atlantic University with five monographs to his name, and an invalid for the last decade of his life. When Swann is remembered at all, though, he is best known not for his scholarship or his poetry chapbooks but as the prolific, Hugo-nominated fantasy author of 16 novels, two story collections, and over a dozen short stories.

Swann was a prolific and provocative writer of romantic, often subtly queer, historical fantasy novels that offered glimpses into imagined pasts of gentle heroes and melancholy heroines. His novels, published between 1966 and 1977, collectively told the “secret history” of how the mythological “prehuman” peoples—centaurs, fauns, dryads, minotaurs, and more—were driven into extinction and memory by the barbarity of humanity. Swann recast the rise of human civilization as a tragedy, marking the loss of an antediluvian world of sexual freedom, gender egalitarianism, and unabashed queerness. His legacy was an impressive body of work that crafted a new, fantastical vision of human history by rewriting ancient myths, and it was so unique in the emergent landscape of 1960s and ’70s fantasy that it beggared comparison and occasionally courted controversy.

But a half century after his death, Swann is—unfairly—a mere footnote in the history of fantasy.

¤

In 1974, Donald A. Wollheim, SF editor and founder of DAW Books, fought with his distributor, New American Library (NAL), to release a queer retelling of the biblical story of Jonathan and the shepherd youth who would eventually become King David. Though NAL initially meant to ban How Are the Mighty Fallen from distribution, they ultimately relented, and Swann’s eighth and most (in)famous novel was published. Swann’s story of a bisexual David and a gay Jonathan drew on the author’s own reading of the biblical text and on his belief, repeated time and again across his novels, that queerness was a natural part of ancient cultures. In his interpretation, this reality was ultimately suppressed by Christianity and its bastardization of the true religion, that of the goddess of love. For all the controversy it caused by presenting, indeed celebrating, a romantic and sexual gay relationship, How Are the Mighty Fallen was typical of Swann’s oeuvre.

When How Are the Mighty Fallen was published in the spring of 1974, Swann was at the height of his career as a fantasy writer, but he’d begun writing professionally decades earlier with the collection of lyric poetry Driftwood (1952). Swann wrote Driftwood during his time in the navy, between performing clerical work and corresponding with SF fans and writers, among them Ray Bradbury. Discharged from service, Swann traveled by boat to Asia and the Mediterranean, and continued to write poetry, producing three more collections and placing poems in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Ladies’ Home Journal. He completed a PhD in literature in 1960, resulting in his first monograph, a book on the modernist writer H.D.

For the remaining 16 years of his life, Swann alternated between university teaching, extended periods of travel and research, and serious bouts of illness, all while writing—not just poetry and his many fantasy novels but also monographs on poets including Christina Rossetti, Ernest Dowson, and Charles Sorley. By 1970, Swann was seriously ill from what he described as persistent urinary tract infections, but which later turned out to be terminal cancer. He complained that his illness was “something so utterly inelegant,” not like “Keats with his consumption” or “Browning with her mysterious malady.” He resigned from teaching, broke off his engagement to the scholar Ann Peyton, and moved to Tennessee to write fiction full-time.

Nearly all of Swann’s output as a fantasist was written in the final six years of his life, between 1971 and 1976, and four of his 16 novels were published posthumously. His first story for an SF magazine, “Winged Victory,” appeared in 1958. It presages the writer Swann would become and hints at the kinds of critiques he would receive. Set in 306 BCE, the story tells of a sculptor’s commission from the King of Macedonia, which is interrupted when the island is visited by “the gods in a sky-chariot.” But the chariot is a spaceship and the gods are a pair of bug-like humanoid aliens, one of whom becomes the sculptor’s model for the now headless Winged Victory of Samothrace statue on display in the Louvre.

Many of the signatures of Swann’s later fantasy novels are present in “Winged Victory”: a thematic focus on love, beauty, women’s sexuality, and sexual freedom; romantic and sexual desire crossing boundaries between species; and a narratological insistence that the story is a secret, “true” history of the ancient past. At the same time, the story sometimes evinces the flaws Swann’s critics would bring up again and again: that his writing was “slight,” “saccharine,” and, worst of all, “Disneyfied.” Missing is Swann’s sense of critique, so palpable in his best novels, especially his discontent with civilization and heteropatriarchy—sensibilities honed in later novels and present, in muted form, as early as his first, Day of the Minotaur (1966).

Swann continued to write short fiction in the early 1960s and cut his teeth publishing in the British magazine Science Fantasy, where he became a regular feature alongside New Wave writers Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard. He later wrote for the prestigious American magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction. Although novels made up most of his fantasy writing, Swann continued to write short stories and novellas throughout his career. One of his best was also the last published in his lifetime—“The Night of the Unicorn” (1975), which tells the story of an aging, retired Mexican sex worker who encounters a unicorn, that symbol of purity and youth, on the tourist beaches of Cozumel. Swann had a hard time getting the attention of book publishers, but after being nominated for a Hugo Award for short fiction in 1963, Swann made the acquaintance of Wollheim, who was then an editor at Ace Books.

Wollheim kick-started Swann’s career as a fantasy novelist in 1966 by publishing Day of the Minotaur, a novel that depicts the last minotaur and the prehumans’ exodus from Bronze Age Crete following violent attacks by human outsiders. Wollheim had sparked the Tolkien craze a year prior, seizing on a copyright loophole and publishing “pirated” mass market editions of The Lord of the Rings. Of course, Tolkien sued, and before the year was up, Ballantine Books released the official mass-market paperbacks, but Wollheim continued to look for opportunities to exploit the growing interest in fantasy. Swann didn’t write Tolkienian epic fantasy, but his thematically rich historical fantasies clearly resonated with readers. He received a Hugo nomination, for example, for his novella “Where Is the Bird of Fire?” (1962), which retells the Romulus and Remus myth with Swann’s anti-civilization twist, framing the founding of Rome as a tragedy. Following Day of the Minotaur, Wollheim published three more of Swann’s novels at Ace before departing in 1971 to found DAW, where he published another seven novels by Swann.

Though hardly Swann’s best novel, Day of the Minotaur was nominated for the 1967 Hugo for best novel alongside an impressive roster that included Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17, Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (which ultimately won). Day of the Minotaur was the first novel set in Swann’s prehuman storyworld, a loose series that ultimately comprised over 2,500 pages spanning thousands of years of (pre)human history, from the banks of the Nile in third millennium BCE Egypt (1976’s The Minikins of Yam) to the farthest outposts of the British Empire in the Caribbean during the waning years of the Victorian era (1971’s The Goat Without Horns). Swann’s brand of fantasy had its detractors, but he also built a loyal fan base and quickly developed a positive critical reputation: his fiction was nominated for at least 11 SF and fantasy awards between 1963 and 1977.

Swann’s growing recognition in the insular SF and fantasy fandom of the early 1970s caught the attention of Betty Ballantine, and she published two novels by the author, beginning with one of his worst books, the Gothic pastiche The Goat Without Horns. That story centers on an educated English youth sent to instruct the daughter of an eccentric widow on a remote Caribbean island, where she is threatened by a cartoonishly evil Carib king, who turns out to be a wereshark. Surprised by its poor reception, Swann complained in an interview that few realized The Goat Without Horns was a satire, his version of Northanger Abbey (1817), but there’s very little satirical about it, and the whole thing is made all the more awkward because the narrator is a dolphin. But Ballantine was seemingly undeterred by the racist would-be satire or its poor reviews and published one of Swann’s greatest achievements the following year.

Wolfwinter (1972) is often described as Swann’s novel about Sappho, but the queer poet only plays a minor, if thematically significant, role in the story. More than anything, Wolfwinter serves as a meditation on what Swann’s critic-biographer Robert A. Collins called “the bittersweet temporality of love.” This theme emerged in Swann’s oeuvre as early as his second novel, The Weirwoods (1967), an affecting, melancholy tale of love, personal transformation, and political uprising set in ancient Etruria, and the theme intensified as his illness worsened in the 1970s. In Wolfwinter, Swann reimagines his fauns, who until then had been portrayed as mischievous lechers at best, standing in for Swann’s caricature of beatniks in The Forest of Forever (1971), and as serial rapists at worst, in Green Phoenix (1972). Now, they emerged as noble beings, made all the more romantic for their short lives, aging seven years for every human year.

Wolfwinter is the achingly beautiful story of a woman’s self-fashioning through the trials of an unwanted marriage, unplanned motherhood, and life-giving love with the faun Skimmer. So great is Erinna’s love that Hades takes offense and claims her as his own: “[Your sin] is monstrous. You have ignored me. […] You have loved a Faun who, briefer than a man, has dared to live as if he would never die. You have desecrated my name.” And so great is her love that Aphrodite intervenes, chiding the underworld god: “I know how you stole your bride from the fields of Enna because no goddess would willingly yield the sun to dwell in your windowless towers. You shall not steal a second bride.” Wolfwinter is Swann’s most romantic novel, a declaration that love exists beyond time, that it may pass quickly or last a lifetime, but that, however it comes, it leaves us forever changed. The novel is also a subtle celebration of queerness, not only due to its thematization of Sappho’s poetry but also because Erinna’s story of triumphant love is told as a lesson to a young man grieving his dead male lover.

In the years that followed Wolfwinter and before his death in 1976, Swann was absurdly productive and published nine novels (five of those in 1976 alone). His most significant novels in this later period were How Are the Mighty Fallen, Will-o-the-Wisp (1976), and Lady of the Bees (1976). These were not just Swann’s best-written novels, evincing a writer whose prose combined poetic grace, emotional depth, and wildly inventive storytelling, but his most thematically significant and critically cutting novels as well. Swann’s later novels are simpler and less explicitly about the conflict between human and nonhuman, civilization and nature, that explicitly animated his earlier writing. His later fiction, following Wolfwinter, could be glossed as a prolonged meditation on love and grief. At the same time, Swann’s more intense focus on love in later years seemingly freed his fiction to make sharper judgments about the world around him.

Swann’s best-known novel, How Are the Mighty Fallen, presents an openly gay relationship not as an anomaly but as a natural truth, described by the biblical character Jonathan’s goddess-worshipping mother, Ahinoam, Siren of Crete, as “one more affirmation of [her] divine plan, the tide which rises and falls to the moon’s compulsion, the inevitability of the seasons, the certainty that those who love will meet, after death, in the Celestial Vineyard.” Though it was typically unrequited, gay desire was a part of Swann’s fiction from the very beginning. Swann held nothing back in How Are the Mighty Fallen: “A man’s love for a man is neither more nor less than a man’s love for a woman, it is only different,” Ahinoam declares (a sentiment repeated by Swann’s version of Virgil’s Dido in the posthumous Queens Walk in the Dusk from 1977).

Readers, of course, took the hints from Swann’s writing that he was himself gay. To one friend, he described How Are the Mighty Fallen as his most personal book. To another, he explained that he hadn’t married because no woman would allow herself to come second to his writing, his true love. But letters and articles in fanzines of the late 1970s, written by those who knew the author, are full of innuendo and euphemisms that hint at Swann’s sexuality. Some have even recognized Swann as a lost gay genre writer. Most recently, in a 2020 issue of Foundation, SF writer Geoff Ryman recounted Swann’s influence on his own self-discovery decades earlier, while reading “The Manor of Roses” (1966; later expanded into 1976’s The Tournament of Thorns), a story of unrequited, inexplicit, but unsubtle gay desire.

Whatever Swann’s sexuality, the love between the half-Siren Jonathan and the future king David in How Are the Mighty Fallen is among the most romantic Swann wrote. The novel burns with scenes of longing, fleeting glances and overwhelming desires that culminate explosively, tenderly, and sexily in a tragic romance—one foredoomed by Jonathan’s fate in the biblical text. How Are the Mighty Fallen also characterizes the desert god Yahweh as a petty, jealous figure of masculine oppression; under his religion, queerness is unnatural and illegal. But for the goddess, queerness is a manifestation of her love and, like all love, is salvific. Jonathan’s queer love for David opens the way to the Celestial Vineyard, a heaven long denied the Sirens for their betrayal of the goddess centuries earlier.

Swann’s idea of the goddess and of her opposition to the violent, masculinist Yahweh/God is developed in later novels, especially Will-o-the-Wisp and the much less impressive The Gods Abide (1976), as a critique of Christianity, heteropatriarchy, and empire. One of Swann’s most bizarre creations, Will-o-the-Wisp is set in the early 1600s and offers an origin story for the Puritans. In Swann’s telling, Puritans were once a race of woodpecker people dwelling in Dartmoor who lost the ability to fly as humans encroached ever deeper into Britain. Later, the Puritans were shamed into believing they were demons by Christian proselytes. In self-hatred, Swann’s Puritans exported their vision of Christianity to the rest of the world through colonial endeavors like the founding of Plymouth Colony. Despite the initial “what the fuck?!” of this premise, Will-o-the-Wisp nevertheless serves as an effective and damning critique of the systemic oppression thriving at the intersection of patriarchy, religion, and empire.

By recasting the myth of the Pilgrim—in the year of the nation’s bicentennial, no less—in Will-o-the-Wisp, Swann implicates what the Right might call “American Christian civilization” in an oppressive lineage dating back thousands of years. Lady of the Bees, Swann’s best novel next to Wolfwinter, tells another part of that story: the foundation myth of Rome by the twins Romulus and Remus. Published the month of his death, Lady of the Bees—which expands the novella “Where Is the Bird of Fire?”—was regarded by Swann as his best work. The story presents two competing visions of humanity’s future: Remus’s gentle, loving, just society, where prehumans and humans live in harmony, and Romulus’s violent rule of the strong over the weak, of humanity’s subjugation of nature. Romulus is petulant, brutish, and misogynist; in the end, he kills Remus by accident, in a petty fit of rage, and promises his brother’s companion, a faun, that they will build an empire fitting both visions. But what follows—the city, the empire, the civilizations built in Rome’s image—is ultimately a tragedy, even as Remus’s vision lived on in gentle men like Swann.

In the most impressive novels of his career, Swann’s critical insights matched those of the decade’s greatest SF and fantasy writers. Like Ursula K. Le Guin, Tanith Lee, and Samuel R. Delany, Swann wrote novels of stunning depth and golden prose that did for 1970s fantasy what the New Wave did for SF. Whatever his sexuality and politics, Swann’s fantasies spoke to the feminist, gay rights, and environmental movements. His intense focus on “civilization” processed the growing sense of cultural malaise and crisis in the mid-to-late 1970s: the years of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, of stunning stagflation and economic insecurity, of neo-imperial failures and excesses. These realities of daily life for many Americans raised the cynical question “Civilization! What is it good for?” But the question is never cynical in Swann’s writing. It is, instead, an appropriate question, one that recognizes the injustice of the forces comprising and structuring the amorphous conditions of life we capture and allegorize in that word, “civilization.”

While Swann’s early novels staged his critique of civilization through the simple ecological allegory of city versus forest, minotaur against man, or the human and the nonhuman, his later novels grew increasingly interested in the structures of violence that staged such conflicts in the first place. Swann denounced the injustice of oppression and enslavement, the abnormality of patriarchy, the grotesqueness of normative masculinity, and the violence of homophobia. He didn’t always get it right—some of his novels are downright racist, and his characterizations of women are occasionally sexist. At the same time, for all his flaws, Swann’s fantasy novels of noble fauns, tragic dryads, and gentle heroes spoke truth to the forces authorizing all of these structures: the terrifying power exercised by kings, states, religions, and all those who turn a blind eye to the injustice in their midst.

¤

Writing in his regular review column for The New York Times in September 1974, SF author and critic Theodore Sturgeon characterized Swann’s writing with effusive praise that spoke to his elusive vision of fantasy: “He writes blissfully and beautifully separated from trend and fashion; he writes his own golden thing his own way.” When Swann died two years later, he was considered one of the most important living fantasy writers in the United States. The very idea of a “fantasy writer,” an author whose work belonged to and shaped the genre, had only just emerged by the end of Swann’s too-short career.

Had Swann survived, he might have shaped fantasy indelibly—the genre might have looked different in the 1980s and ’90s, and might have expressed a greater objection to the mainstream of Tolkienian epics. Might have, could have, possibilities—Swann wouldn’t have liked that. He would have us love his work for what it was, “his own golden thing,” written in time but also standing outside it, touching readers beyond his death. Today few writers claim him as an influence, few have imitated his style in the decades since his death, and most of his novels are out of print (a few are available in digital editions through Wildside Press).

And yet, somehow, fantasy fiction today looks a lot like what Swann wrote. Fantasy in the 2020s is dominated by retellings of ancient myth, many explicitly feminist and queer, and the genre has taken a turn toward romance, as expressed in the popular cross-genre portmanteau “romantasy.” Just as Madeline Miller and Sarah J. Maas are of our time, Swann’s writing was quintessentially of his time, even as he wrote against the grain of the genre’s emergent forms. But Swann speaks to us across and out of time, and, if we have the eyes to see, we might find his Bird of Fire—his Remus, transformed, a symbol of hope, justice, and gentleness—burning in the sky.