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Kothar Barbarian
Swordsman by Gardner F.
Fox
INTRODUCTION
More than a century ago Albert Kremnitz, a German philosopher no
longer widely read, wrote that "the Industrial Revolution, The Age of
Materialism, will almost certainly drive people back to mysticism rather
than away from it. In the beginning, of course, popular taste will seem to
move in quite the opposite direction, toward the mundane and the banal,
toward the frenetic pursuit of possessions, toward a contempt for all that
is lyrical in man. The first stage will see no attempt to justify this distaste
for the mystic and the unexplained. Although this stage will be prolonged
for many years, and how many years no one can even hazard a guess, it
will gradually give way to another stage in which the course of mankind
will find itself troubled by what it has cast aside.

"During this stage there will be many explanations as to why the mystic
nature of man no longer has any value in an ever changing world, yet none
of these 'explanations' will remove the sense of unease, the nagging
realization, the painful awareness that man, for all his material progress,
remains bound to all that is barbaric in his past. The fourth stage will see
a great reversal of the first stage, and as never before man will plunge with
enthusiasm into an attempt to understand, and to participate in, the
'dark' energies of his nature.

"If compelled to predict the time when this fourth stage would come
about I would set the date at midpoint in the twentieth century, at which
time the Industrial Revolution will itself be undergoing the transition to
which all revolutions, indeed all things, are subject."
 Kremnitz goes on to describe this "new Age of Heroes." He states that
since the modern hero will have been dwarfed by his environment, the
popular demand for larger-than-life heroes will have to be satisfied by the
recreation of mythological supermen, or, as he predicted with amazing
insight, the invention of heroes so magnificent, so fantastically endowed
with super-powers, that they exist only in the fantasy projections of man.
Such a superhero is Kothar—Barbarian Swordsman.

From the world beyond, or past, recorded time Kothar comes. From out
of the deepest, most violent recesses of mankind's dark, collective memory,
Kothar the gigantic barbarian strides, the enchanted sword Frostfire
glittering in his mighty hand. Lusty, hot-blooded, masterful, unafraid of
things real or unreal, Kothar dominates the misty, bloody world created