One follows the protagonist Shea Ohmsford on his quest to gain the Sword of Shannara and use it to confront the Warlock Lord (the antagonist).

The other plot shadows Prince Balinor Buckhannah's attempt to oust his insane brother Palance from the throne of Callahorn while the country and its capital (Tyrsis) come under attack from overwhelming armies of the Warlock Lord.

Some accused Brooks of lifting the entire plot and many of his characters directly from Tolkien's work; others praised its execution despite the lack of originality.

During this time, Mankind mutated into several distinct races: humans, dwarves, gnomes and trolls, all named after creatures from "age-old" myths.

Man retreats southward while the other races settle elsewhere: the dwarves in the east, the gnomes in the hills of the northeast, the trolls in the north and the elves in the west.

A lone Druid, Bremen, forges a magical talisman to destroy the Warlock Lord; it is given to the Elven King, Jerle Shannara.

The council at Culhaven, which also includes the elven brothers Durin and Dayel Elessedil and the dwarf Hendel, assesses the Warlock King's current threat and decide to recover the Sword of Shannara from Paranor.

During the party's trek to Paranor, they are beset by earthquakes, causing the path to crumble and sending the panicked Shea plummeting over a waterfall.

Learning of the Warlock Lord's invasion of the Southland, the party decides to split up, with some going to mobilize armies and others conducting a search for Shea.

After being captured by gnomes, Shea is rescued by the one-handed thief Panamon Creel and his mute Troll companion Keltset Mallicos.

Journeying to the Northland, they reach the Skull Kingdom and pursue the insane Gnome deserter Orl Fane, who has carried the Sword of Shannara.

Meanwhile, a disguised Flick infiltrates an enemy camp and rescues the captive Elven King, Eventine Elessedil; at the same time, in Kern, Menion saves a woman named Shirl Ravenlock and falls in love with her.

Infiltrating the Warlock Lord's fortress in the Skull Mountain, Shea seizes the sword and learns of its true power: those touched by it are confronted with the truth about their lives.

Although immune to physical weapons, the Warlock Lord is subjected to the sword's power and forced to confront the truth about himself: he had deluded himself into believing that he is immortal, but this is impossible.

[11] He started writing the novel to challenge himself and as a way of staying "sane" while he attended law school at Washington and Lee University.

[10][12] Brooks had been a writer since high school,[13] but he had never found 'his' genre: "I tried my hand at science fiction, westerns, war stories, you name it.

[15] Del Rey chose it because he felt that it was "the first long epic fantasy adventure which had any chance of meeting the demands of Tolkien readers for similar pleasures.

[15][20][21] The original inspiration for The Sword of Shannara was Brooks' desire to put "Tolkien's magic and fairy creatures [into] the worlds of Walter Scott and [Alexander] Dumas".

[10] Brooks was inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and adventure fiction such as Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company and Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.

So I would eliminate the poetry and songs, the digressions on the ways and habits of types of characters, and the appendices of language and backstory that characterized and informed Tolkien's work.

It was Tolkien's genius to reinvent the traditional epic fantasy by making the central character neither God nor hero, but a simple man in search of a way to do the right thing.

"[24] The Sword of Shannara is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth,[15] where chemical and nuclear holocaust devastated the land in the distant past.

[11] The Sword of Shannara received mixed reviews following its publication, most of which remarked on its similarity to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

In 1978, American fantasy editor Lin Carter denounced The Sword of Shannara as "the single most cold-blooded, complete rip-off of another book that I have ever read".

[31] He further wrote that "Terry Brooks wasn't trying to imitate Tolkien's prose, just steal his story line and complete cast of characters, and he did it with such clumsiness and so heavy-handedly, that he virtually rubbed your nose in it.

[35] Shippey located analogues for Tolkien characters within Brooks' novel, such as Sauron (Brona), Gandalf (Allanon), the Hobbits (Shea and Flick), Aragorn (Menion), Boromir (Balinor), Gimli (Hendel), Legolas (Durin and Dayel), Gollum (Orl Fane), the Barrow-wight (Mist Wraith), the Nazgûl (Skull Bearers), and Tom Bombadil (King of the Silver River), among others.

John Batchelor feels that it was the weakest of the 1977 surge in fantasy, ranking it below Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, Seamus Cullen's Astra and Flondrix, and The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, while commenting that it "unabashedly copies" Lord of the Rings.

[40] The Sword of Shannara sold about 125,000 copies in its first year in print,[41] and this success provided a major boost to the fantasy genre.

"[43] Critic David Pringle said that Brooks "demonstrated in 1977 that the commercial success of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings had not been a fluke, and that fantasy really did have the potential to become a mass-market genre".