Contrast with Kane in the story Raven's Eeyre: 10 years before he was a leader of a bandit group that raided and sacked a mountain inn. What unfolded involved the typical Viking raid--sacking looting and raping.

Kane raped a woman. It was apperantly so aweful and she hated him so much she despised the daughter that was sired by the union enough to be willing to sacrifice her to a demon to get revenge on her attack, Kane.

Kane saves the little girl. Partly to save himself, he's not suicidal, but also because the little girl is his daughter. Yet it was his violent preditory behavior that set the whole thing into motion in the first place--a not uncommon theme for Karl Edward Wagner.

Tuco killed a person in front of his family then sat down and eat his dinner. He might have killed the family too, can't quite remember.

I think a S&S hero could happily waterboard an enemy, perhaps even with a wisecrack. On a serious note he could torture for information--but not for kicks. So S&S heroes may be hardmen and do hard things--they don't do them for sport, they can act sadistically but are not sadists.

That started out being a G,B&U thing and wandered into more general territory.

On this idea of the character being moved by the plight of others...I'm not sure that if there were a Man Law council that would automaticaly bounce it but...

We do go back to setting. An anthropological view says you can't impose your values of good or bad upon another person existing in their own social setting and call them "good" or "bad" based on how they act--by your standards. That is (nice horrific example) take a poor, illiterate and general backward and uneducated person from the Horn of Africa. That guy becomes the father of a little girl. In their culture he would be a HORRIBLE father and man if he didn't have a clitorectomy done on that 6-year old girl with a sharp rock. Most here would go to heroic efforts to stop him. I think what he's doing is bad (way way way bad) but from his point of view it would be vile and horrific *not* to.

Now, take your setting. Dark Age, not High Middle Age. Most warriors of the age wouldn't bat an eye at a woman getting backhanded by her mate.

Ride up and save a damasel from being gang raped by brigands? Great. Now tradition says she has to give it up to you for saving her.

Are you a mercenary on a seige of a city? The walls come down after you gave the occupants a chance to surrender? There's going to be rape, torture and genocide of men, women and children now--they brought it upon themselves by not surrendering.

Slave trade? Duh.

Chivalric code evolved to stop some of this and it evolved the closer to the Rennissance they got--but the moral outrage we as modern PC, educated and civilived people feel are going to be out of place if we put them in a grim low fantasy or dark age setting.--it wasn't called the Dark Age because Edison wasn't around.

Now. REH had Conan act in a chivalrous manner in accordance with his southern views of what it meant to be a man. Okay, Conan was once pretty intent on raping (and most likely murdering) the daughter of a god once and he kept female slaves, and he wasn't above handing out some chin music to a hysterical wench--but he wasn't a serial rapist or baby killer either.

It does, in a sense come down to setting. In a Viking or Hun world much of what we term "heroic" wouldn't even strike the average rape and pillage raider as "wrong".

But, in a world of Round Tables and Knights--now our modern sensabilities can not be affronted by what it really means to be a "barbarian."--but we still get blood and thunder.

I don't think there are too many Dark Age-like worlds out there. There are some low fantasy Middle Ages ones but I don't think a great many authors want to write about as mean and as nasty a world as KE Wagner wrote. Or as REH wrote though he made allowences. Many more will write a Leiber world where the rouges are loveable if nefarious.

I'm not saying that's bad I'm just saying that much of what we think of as good and noble (stopping slavery, saving women from violence, etc--which are all good, great, good things of course) is a projection of our own 21st-century values on supposedly ancient cultures. Which maybe a reciepe for commerical success, don't get me wrong.

But part of the "sameness", IMO, of fantasy today is how modernistic the view systems of the protags always is. Writers of late can't seem "to go there" about a real savage world. It has to be a world that makes a nod at our own political and moral belief systems--not those of the acctual (say) viking.

Got a savage raider of a hero?--woa don't worry he firmly holds with the value systems of civil and gender rights! Did he just storm a castle with his bros? Great let's have some ale. Wait! Did his drunken lout of a brother-at-arms just grab a seemingly reticent serving girl and try to drag her up stairs? Oh no we'll have none of that! Unhand her vile blackheart!

That's ridiculous in a post Ice Age or Dark Age world. But it may not be in a High Middle Age world. But it's a fantasy world so maybe women's rights evolved before general literacy in your low fantasy setting.

I guess what I'm trying to say is if you want to write grim, then write grim. If you want to write (as Big Mike points out) what is basically a classical western plot in a fantasy setting then do that--both are good, IMO. But I don't know if, on a purely gut level, if both are S&S.

Part of my problem is that I see true (in my eyes) S&S as a lot closer to Dark Fantasy (Wagner not Rice) than heroic fantasy and I may have to learn to let go of that prejudice to see how big the S&S tent might really be.

Eh, I'm rambling...sorry

Frodo+Bilbo+Sam+Merry+Pippen = Manthycore bait.

Or perhaps not. She is sometimes moved by innocence, though not by much. She would most likely ignore them entirely. She certainly is not motivated by any kind of chivalry--- she is willing, for example, to watch a man fight a lion--- but in more than one instance reacts to slavery with disgust, but only she feels herself to be a slave, and only acts on that disgust when it is thrust upon her.

And I think that is how classic epic heroes and S&S heroes mostly would be. Like cows and bats, they live in the same pasture, but entirely different worlds. Aragorn was a pretty tough man, wilderness hardened and not above slapping Gollum around to get a few answers. Dropped into Hyboria he would probably do okay. His Hyboria would be a different place than Conan's, because he would be looking for different things.