The Blue Sword
49 pages • 1-hour read
Robin McKinleyThe Blue Sword
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Background
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination and death.
Series Context: The Damar Series
The Damar series by Robin McKinley is a fantasy duology set in the titular Damar, a desert land filled with magic and political tension. The series includes The Blue Sword (1982) and its prequel, The Hero and the Crown (1984). Though set in the same world and sharing cultural and magical systems, each novel stands alone and can be read independently.
The Hero and the Crown serves as a prequel to The Blue Sword and tells the story of Aerin, a legendary queen from Damar’s past and the original wielder of Gonturan, the Blue Sword. Aerin is the daughter of the Damarian king and his second wife, a foreign woman rumored to be a witch. She is mocked and ostracized, especially by her cousin, who tricks Aerin into consuming surka leaves that cause her to become gravely ill. As she recovers, Aerin finds solace in an old book about the history of Damar, and in the companionship of her father’s old warhorse, Talat. Over time, Aerin discovers an old recipe for a fireproof salve and begins secretly training herself to fight a minor dragon threatening a nearby village. Her success earns her some recognition as a dragon-slayer.
Meanwhile, political unrest brews as the north threatens rebellion. As the court prepares to confront the issue, news arrives that the last great dragon, Maur, has returned. With the king occupied, Aerin takes it upon herself to battle the dragon alone and defeats it. Though she returns home triumphant, taking a red stone from the dragon as a trophy, she was injured in the battle and doesn’t recover. She is also uneasy about Maur’s skull, which is now kept at the castle.
In a dream, Aerin sees a mysterious man by a lake who calls to her. She follows the vision and finds Luthe, an immortal sorcerer who heals her at the Lake of Dreams and reveals her true heritage. Aerin’s uncle, Agsded, is an evil mage whom a prophecy predicted would be defeated by his kin. Luthe trains Aerin in magic, and gives her the enchanted Blue Sword, Gonturan. Aerin then travels north to face Agsded. After she defeats her uncle, she retrieves the Hero’s Crown, an artifact Agsded stole.
Back in Damar, she finds her kingdom under siege from the northern forces. Aerin joins the battle with Gonturan and the Hero’s Crown, which she gives to her friend Tor. Together, they help win the war, though the king dies in the process. Afterward, they destroy Maur’s skull once and for all, though doing so transforms Damar into a desert. Aerin marries Tor and becomes queen, finally accepted as both a warrior and a ruler, and helps rebuild Damar with him. Her story is later discovered by Harry in The Blue Sword, connecting the two heroines across time.
Genre Context: Feminist Fantasy of the 1980s
The Blue Sword is one of the major examples of a wave of female-led young adult fantasy novels published in the 1970s and 1980s. Previously, the epic and high fantasy genre largely centered on male protagonists and male-driven adventures. Female characters, if present at all, were typically sidekicks, damsels, or love interests. These passive roles for women were often justified by pseudo-medieval norms. The result was a genre where young female readers had few heroes of their own gender to identify with.
By the 1970s, a shift began to happen. The second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and early 1970s made its impact felt across literature, including speculative fiction. Women authors began entering the fantasy genre, influenced by the feminist ideas of the era, such as an emphasis on full legal equality for women, reproductive rights, the challenging of traditional gender stereotypes and gender dynamics, and greater opportunities for women in the workforce, including in traditionally male-dominated fields. In the 1980s, McKinley’s The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown (1984) are two major examples of this shift, as is the work of Tamora Pierce, beginning with Alanna: The First Adventure (1983). Such novels featured strong, complex female protagonists who challenged gender norms by exercising considerable agency and skill in pursuing their own goals. During these years, girl heroes in fantasy thus gained critical mass and visibility. However, an important forerunner to these authors was Patricia A. McKillip with The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974), which won the inaugural World Fantasy Award in 1975.
The stories still featured the familiar patterns of quests, battles, and coming-of-age journeys, but with young women at the center. The female heroes of the novels also tended to actively defy traditional gender roles and become warriors, knights, and wizards in settings where such roles were once reserved for men. The authors explicitly challenged in-world prejudices and, by extension, real-world assumptions. By proving that stories about young women in fantastical adventures could both catch the attention of readers and win critical acclaim, these authors opened the doors for more to follow. In the 1990s and 2000s, heroine-led young adult fantasies became not just common, but dominant in the market, a trend that continues to the present day.
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