


After a long journey, many mishaps, a lot of Character Development, and one hell of a surprise ending, Shea manages to put the Warlock Lord back in his grave.Ī few decades later, in The Elfstones of Shannara, Allanon returns, having spent the intervening years in magical sleep, and conscripts Shea's grandson Wil and elven princess Amberle to save the world. He refused to explain how to use it, though. He arrived in a small village and told the hero, Shea Ohmsford, that he was actually the last of the bloodline of the famous Elf King, Jerle Shannara, and the only person able to use the titular McGuffin to kill the Warlock Lord. These three loosely connected books deal with the Druid Allanon and his relationship with three generations of the Ohmsford family, the Heirs to the House of Shannara.īy the time Sword of Shannara kicks off, Allanon is the only surviving good Druid. Corrupted by dark magic, one of the druids became the Warlock Lord, and spent the next thousand years trying to Take Over the World from his lair in Skull Mountain, in the center of the Skull Kingdom. Long before the first book, an order of druids was established to rediscover the lost secrets of science, but instead discovered the even longer lost secrets of magic, from before the history we know.

Gnomes, Dwarves, and Trolls are all mutated humans, Elves make an appearance and there are still insane killer robots in remote places. Rather than being set in the distant past, it is set in the far future, long after a nuclear war destroyed modern civilization.

The setting is fairly standard for a fantasy series, but the Backstory is different from most High Fantasy. The series was later adapted for television by MTV as The Shannara Chronicles, based on the second book of the series and premiering in the United States on January 5, 2016. It should be noted that The Sword of Shannara was the first high fantasy novel to become a mainstream bestseller, demonstrating to the publishing industry that there was a market for fantasy the genre, at least as we know it, might not exist otherwise. One of the first second-generation fantasy series, and among the longest running, Terry Brooks' series Shannara began in 1977 with a Doorstopper called The Sword of Shannara, but is now a nineteen-volume series which includes a trilogy of urban fantasies.
