"[Sword & Sorcery] is a very formal genre, with strong, well-defined conventions; as with No drama or the Commedia del'Arte, you immediately know where you are and what's going on. It has a wide vocabulary of archetypes (they're only stereotypes if the writer gets them wrong). The advantage of this is that writers can be elliptical and referential; they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time." - KJ Parker