Historically, swashbuckling tales were fictitious, full of much daring-do done by sexy, noble-at-heart-but-on-the wrong-side-of-the-law men – those sailors aboard tall ships or outlaws on land astride fast horses. The only fantasy components in those early stories were the descriptions of the characters and their lives, as such details were very romanticized for the readers by authors.
Dictionary.com describes the meaning of swashbuckling as "[one who] engages in daring and romantic adventures with ostentatious bravado or flamboyance", while "swash" means to swagger with sword in hand and "buckler" was the small hand shield fixed to the base of a sword's blade that protected its user from hand injuries to the "sword hand". Therefore, although the term is usually associated these days with pirates and men of the sea, it actually encompasses anyone who was an adventurer who defended and advanced his life by the sword.
Two of the earliest novelists in this genre were Robert Louis Stevenson, notably famous for his Treasure Island and its main character, Long John Silver, and Howard Pyle who wrote a children's version of Robin Hood, and in the process, sanitized the character of Robin Hood changing him from being that of a common highwayman or roadside thief, to a forest-dwelling philanthropist who stole from the rich and redistributed his taken wealth among the poor. Likewise, d'Artagnan, hero of The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, was also based on a real life nobleman, at least in name, who through determination, chivalry, and much skilled sword-handling, rescues maidens, kills foes, and eventually earns a coveted spot as one of the King's musketeers.
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Fantasy (ie. seemingly magical or not of the real world) began to appear substantially in swashbuckler stories, in the early twentieth century after J.M. Barrie penned Peter Pan. The character of Peter Pan lived in a mythical land, defied aging, flew through the air, conferred with fairies and mermaids, fought off pirates with his sword, and protected children who had been taken from their homes.
