It’s been brought to my attention that in the (still ongoing) struggle to get all of the new issues and slipcases out, it slipped my mind to credit those of you who offered voting comments last year with a free Limited copy of the V4 Awards issue. Therefore, if you receive a package and your discount is not reflected on your invoice the way you think it should be, feel free to deduct $10 from your total. I’ll also be assembling a list and sending out individual e-mails to affected persons about this, but figured I should make a blanket announcement immediately first. If you do end up paying for it when you should have been credited, I’ll apply that $10 towards your next order. Any questions or concerns, feel free to drop me a line.

I think it’s fair to say that during 2007 we here at TC’s Centcom were both anniversary-minded and Tolkien-minded, but fell down on the job when it came to being Tolkien anniversary-minded. In other words, we celebrated the diamond jubilee of “The Phoenix on the Sword” and the miracle of filial piety that saw The Children of Húrin into bestselling print as a near-novelistic standalone, but we spaced on the 30th anniversary of The Silmarillion, that gateway to the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth. Unfinished (but unbeatable) tales, false starts better than the true finishes of most fantasists, and all the priceless detritus of what Tom Shippey termed “intense and brooding systematization” would follow, but the 1977 book came first—as it also did, in its earliest form of The Book of Lost Tales, in Tolkien’s creative life.

The Simarillion’s thirty years at large in the world have played out as something of a Thirty Years War. Ted Nasmith’s painted realizations of Silm.-scenes are far more vivid than the poor-visibility-or-soft-focus efforts of certain mistier Tolkien illustrators, but he was fairly mild-mannered when he described the work as “magnificent but underappreciated.” It occasionally seems to me that Mein Kampf hasn’t been reviewed as vitriolically and vindictively as The Silmarillion. Much-purchased upon publication but anecdotally little-read, dismayingly “like the Old Testament,” “as boring as the endless legalistic pedantries of Leviticus,” “a telephone directory in Elvish,” or “a stone soup of the most mouth-mangling names ever seen in print.” One worthy speculated that someone capable of reading The Iliad “for pleasure” might just about be able to enjoy The Silmarillion—his disbelief that any such freak existed, or should be permitted to exist, was so tangible it might as well have been in Braille. The Time reviewer back in October of 1977 bemoaned the absence of “a single, unifying quest” and “a band of brothers for the reader to identify with.” As it happens The Silmarillion’s central narrative does indeed feature a single unifying quest, and it’s the stuff of nightmares, the nightmares endured and perpetrated by a band of literal brothers hagridden by an overbold oath sworn in haste and repented at sorrowful leisure.

Many, many Tolkien fans have been unable to forgive the book for not being The Lord of the Rings. This criticism confounds me; Some Girls isn’t Exile on Main Street, and Exile wasn’t Aftermath, but so what? Hardly more receptive have been some Tolkien critics and scholars who ought to know better, read better — as initiates bask in the current golden age of Tolkien Studies it might seem like the act of an ingrate or churl to harbor a pet peeve about this, but I do. Patrick Curry’s Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity (1997) alternately dressed JRRT in forest green or reconfigured the reserved Edwardian and rose window Catholic as an unlikely, waistcoat-wearing shaman of postmodernism, backhanding The Silmarillion all the while because…no one really read it. Janet Brennan Croft’s War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (2004) made skillful use of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, and even devoted its Chapter Three to “World War I Themes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.” Yet Croft was comfortable ignoring The Silmarillion’s war to end all warriors, one which spans hundreds of years and tens of thousands of casualties, and, stasis-sealed in stalemate and attrition, reminds us in every chapter of how the Western Front came to resemble a gargantuan, technologically upgraded medieval siege. Marjorie Burns’ Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth (2005) flaunted the same sin of omission. Norse and Celtic elements are as integral to The Silmarillion as are hydrogen and oxygen to water; the book is so northern that compasses point quiveringly in its direction, but Burns barely bothers with it.

Luckily, not all Tolkienists are as blinkered in this respect as Croft and Burns: of the Silm.-immersive studies I’ll mention two by Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (1983, revised 2002) and Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology (2005), and what is for me the most exciting JRRT-related book of the Aughties, John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth (2003). These were joined in late 2007 by Walking Tree Publishers’ The Silmarillion Thirty Years On, edited by Allan Turner, which contains Michael Drout’s “Reflections on Thirty Years of Reading The Silmarillion,” one of the best and bravest Tolkien pieces ever written. Drout is the William C. H. and Elsie D. Prentice Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and as an academic he’s a survivor in a milieu where self-exposure might as well be indecent exposure, a wallow in the slough of subjectivity. He admits, but does not apologize for, “the exceptionally personal nature of this essay,” and the unusual approach could not be a better fit for an exceptionally personal work like The Silmarillion. The nine-year-old Drout, hard-pressed by a problematic relocation and the splintering of his parents’ marriage, collaborates movingly with the professor who’s enough of an Anglo-Saxon specialist to merit a place among Harold Godwinson’s housecarles on Senlac Hill (Stop by his blog, Wormtalk and Slugspeak, for, among other attractions, a stimulating discussion of when Beowulf came into being, with choices like Migration Period, Conversion Era, Golden Age, Viking Raids, Reform, or Anglo-Danish Rule)

Some of the appeal “Reflections on Thirty Years of Reading The Silmarillion” holds for me has to do with experiential overlap. Drout writes “Waiting for me under the Christmas tree that year [1977], a gift from Santa Claus mixed in among the various Star Wars toys my brother and I had coveted, was a copy of the book, the cover illustrated with a colorized version of Tolkien’s drawing ‘The Mountain-path.’” Same deal in the Tompkins household, and the Christmas mass we attended that morning, after the presents had been unwrapped but before serious enjoyment could begin, was the draggiest, most temporally distorted I ever endured.

Drout was new to my native region at the time: “We had been used to living on the ninth floor of a high-rise building in New York City, where having enough heat was never a problem (too much heat was), so it was very difficult to adjust both to the new frugality brought on by the energy crisis and the typical New England approach to keeping houses chilly. “ For me it was the opposite; that just-shy-of-cryogenic “New England approach” was the norm, and the flamethrowerish blasts of heat typical for New York City buildings almost killed me when I went off to college. The Great Blizzard of February 1978, which lives in New England folk-memory thanks to winds that threw their weight around like hurricanes and civilization-canceling accumulations that sneered at the best efforts of snowplows, snowblowers, and the National Guard, serves a backdrop to Drout’s essay. He plunges back into his most prized Christmas present while “it [is] easy to feel as if Morgoth was winning, as if the bitter cold we all felt was rushing out of the gates of Angband.”

Morgoth (the first and infinitely more powerful of Middle-earth’s two Dark Lords) is indeed winning for chapter after chapter after chapter. The Silmarillion is more of a downer than the average bottomless pit; Ted Nasmith paintings like “The Kinslaying at Alqualondë,” “Flight of the Doomed,” “The Hill of Slain,” “The Burning of the Ships,” and “Finduilas Is Led Past Túrin at the Sack of Nargothrond” hint at what readers should expect. Drout quickly confronts the fact that as compared to LOTR, the constituent texts of The Silmarillion are “far more unforgiving, close engagements with death and entropic destruction, the theme (as Tolkien put it in ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’) ‘that men, each man and all men and all their works shall die.’” And never more so than in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, of which Drout recalls: “My favorite part of The Silmarillion that year was Chapter 20: “Of the Fifth Battle: Nirnaeth Arnoediad,” nine pages of almost unmitigated disaster poured upon all the heroes of the previous chapters.” The Eldar, The Fair Folk, Tolkien’s supposedly spoiled darlings, bring this on themselves. Here it might be most efficient to quote the Prophecy of the North, the curse Mandos, the Doomsman of The Silmarillion, launches like a salvo of cruise missiles at the rebel Elves:

Tears unnumbered ye shall shed; and the Valar will fence Valinor against you, and shut you out, so that not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains. On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the West unto the Uttermost East, and upon all that will follow them it shall be laid also. Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue. To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass. The Dispossessed shall they be forever.

(Dispossession, the import of which keens like a coronach through so much modern fantasy, was a Tolkien specialty) And so it goes; here is Drout’s casualty report:

But even “hard-hearted” would be a litotes for describing the way Tolkien treats his characters in The Silmarillion: Miriel, Finwë, Fëanor, Aredhel, Eöl, Angrod, Aegnor, Fingolfin, Fingon, Beleg, Orodreth, Gwindor, Thingol, Celegorm, Curufin, Caranthir, Dior, Nimloth, Turgon, Glorfindel, Amrod, Amlas, and Maedhros are all killed by violence or by wasting away, and those are merely the main Elves who die.

If that reads like the premise for the most engrossing Icelandic saga never written, it isn’t a coincidence. Bloodlines and bloodfeuds often elbow individual characters aside as the protagonists of The Silmarillion. Few of the Elves survive a sufficient number of pages for much to be achievable in the way of characterization, but they are at their most human, which is to say fallible and culpable, throughout. Fëanor, who crafts both the Silmarils and the outrages that lead Mandos to pronounce sentence, is if not a black Prometheus like KEW’s Kane, then certainly a crimson one, a pyrotechnic event. Although he scorns Morgoth with the most Shakespearean diss in the whole fantasy genre (“Get thee gone from my gate, thou jail-crow of Mandos!’ And he shut the doors of his house in the face of the mightiest of all the dwellers in Eä”), Fëanor actually recapitulates the artistic/demiurgic imperative that motivates Morgoth when, in his original guise of Melkor, he is present at the Creation, the heights and depths to which genius can be spurred. “Love not too well the work of thy hands and the devices of thy heart” might be The Silmarillion’s cardinal warning, which Fëanor ignores. Tolkien tells us that he is “consumed by the fire of his own wrath,” and indeed he dies “wrapped in fire and wounded with many wounds” — the Balrogs who bring him down in effect fight fire with fire.

Of the lordly Thingol Tolkien writes “Wide were the countries of Beleriand, and many empty and wild, and yet he welcomed not with full heart the coming of so many princes in might out of the west, eager for new realms” — this Elvenking could almost be the emperor Alexius, fretting at the arrival of the First Crusade. And yet, through the application of what Christopher Tolkien described as a “characteristic tone, melodious, grave, elegiac, burdened with a sense of loss and distance in time,” a terrible beauty is born, if the reader consents to sup his fill of sadness.

Sadness is of course a thoughtcrime in the U.S. of A., even more of a hanging offense than not wearing a flag lapel pin. It is in “defense” of this alien and seditious emotion that Drout says certain things about as well as anyone ever has: “If sad things happen to them, people will be sad, and there is nothing abnormal about it and nothing to be done beyond waiting for the sadness to pass. Sadness is a part of being human. It is not something to be cured or treated.”

From sadness Drout proceeds to a sister-feeling:

Once we recognize the inevitability of death and loss, we are, I think, ripe for nostalgia, a feeling that has been (perhaps deliberately) misunderstood as a kind of tedious affectation, the indulgence of an old man endlessly talking about the great days of his youth. That stereotyping is the trivialization of a very central human emotion, and nostalgia is far more significant than its bad reputation would indicate.

Nostalgia is, in fact, as natural a response to time’s unidirectionality as are antibodies to pathogens:

War, famine, death of one’s lord, the commission of crimes: these things all could lead to that condition most horrible to the Anglo-Saxons, exile. But there is another kind of exile as well, one that is forced upon all individuals, not just the guilty and the unlucky: that is the exile from one’s past that is created by the forces of time. Time pushes relentlessly into the future, separating us further and further from childhood, then from youth, and all the while from those whom we have loved.

Every paradise is lost, that’s what paradises are for. The angel with a flaming sword is essentially supernumerary; all that mortals can ever do with a paradise is lose it by evicting and exiling themselves. And we are most of us therefore susceptible to the same temptation that animates Xaltotun as much as does the Heart of Ahriman in The Hour of the Dragon: look homeward, malign angel. But when the Noldor, the self-propelled outcasts of The Silmarillion, look homeward, a special and arguably sadistic refinement comes into play, as Drout points out: “The Elves do not merely remember their past as perfect; it still exists, across the seas, in Valinor and Tol Eressëa, and the actual existence of this paradise makes their separation all the more poignant.” We humans aren’t as lucky (or is it unlucky?) as Tolkien’s Elves, but Valinors of sorts are available to us, be they the green-gold stun grenade of a spring day, the Polaroid poignance of that one page it might be easier to skip in the photo album, or a chance hearing of a long-ago hit single that ruled the airwaves all during one of those cusp-between-adolescence-and-adulthood summers when possibility and probability were still in equipoise.

Few supervillains have ever rivaled Morgoth in the creation of nostalgia through “the destruction of every beautiful city (Menegroth, Nargothrond, Gondolin). The silmarils are lost and Beleriand is in ruins.” Coming to The Silmarillion from an Iliadic background, this urbicidal emphasis mesmerized me (If I’m not careful, I can even lapse into pining for purple-towered Python); it was like watching jackboots smashing a succession of the most ornate dollhouses and elaborate dioramas ever created. Drout stresses that eucatastrophes (Tolkien’s coinage for climactic, predicament-dissolving mega-events like the Incarnation or the providential completion of Frodo’s mission) are scarce in the book:

Tolkien may have intended the War of Wrath to be one, but the chapter as it stands, perhaps because it happens mostly in very swift, skeletal narration, has a very different emotional effect than the horns of Rohan. Perhaps this eucatastrophe (the hosts of the Valar arriving from the West) is diminished in The Silmarillion because the price paid for it, the undercutting of the victory, is given more narrative space than the victory itself: the theft of the silmarils by Maedhros and Maglor, and the eventual loss of the jewels makes much of the war seem as if it was fought for naught. But for me this does not diminish the power and the beauty of The Silmarillion, quite the opposite.

(While it is as silly to look for isomorphism between World War One and The Silmarillion as it is between LOTR and World War Two, a longstanding complaint among the Blimpish who still lobby for a more old-fashioned, patriotic, it-was-worth-it treatment of the Great War is that the Allied victories in the titanic battles of the summer and fall of 1918 have always had far fewer books, or pages within books, devoted to them than the butchershop bungles of 1915-1917. And just as everyone who has read about 1918 after 1939 has done so knowing that it would all need to be done over again, everyone who comes to The Silmarillion from Rings knows that the Free Peoples are going to have to do it again, with unnervingly less overseas assistance, against the next Dark Lord.)

“A work of art can do more than comfort or encourage or distract or console,” Drout reminds us. To harrow is the legitimate function of a few black-beaked works; the lack of overt consolation can be perversely consolatory for certain sensitivities. Drout writes “Tolkien’s world has provided a master narrative, the workings out of a pattern of building and loss, triumph and fall, beauty and wreckage, that seems to me to lie beneath all of human history, both the immediately personal histories of individual lives and the vast sweep of peoples and nations.” This talk of “a master narrative” and “the vast sweep of peoples and nations” summons more than just The Silmarillion and the appendices to The Return of the King; “The Hyborian Age” is right there with them, which is why I cling to the minority opinion that the exclusion of Howard’s pseudo-history from both Skull-Face and Others and last year’s two-volume The Best of Robert E. Howard was wrongheaded and shortsighted. And Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane stories owe much of their brutal power to the fact that we witness the vast sweep, the triumphs and falls, the beauty and wreckage, through the unmeetable blue eyes of a single accursed actor.

“For Tolkien, the answer to these tragedies of being human was his religion, but for people who lack his gift of faith, there may be no consolation, merely acceptance: but that can be almost enough.” To which I would add, almost enough if fictional but heartfelt tragedies are presented artistically and cathartically. Guy Gavriel Kay assisted Christopher Tolkien in assembling The Silmarillion for a year, and it’s no coincidence that his own epic fantasies The Fionavar Tapestry and Tigana also manage the feat with which Drout credits the 1977 book, to “shape grief and loss and fear into order and beauty.”

Aeschylus poor-mouthed his plays as “slices from the great banquet of Homer,” and however much I dote on it, The Children of Húrin exists in a similar relationship to The Silmarillion. As Christopher Tolkien revealed back in 1977:

To bring [The Silm.] into publishable form was a task at once utterly absorbing and alarming in its responsibility toward something that is unique. To decide what that form should be was not easy; and for a time I worked toward a book that would show something of this diversity, this unfinished and many-branched growth. But it became clear to me that the result would be so complex as to require much study for its comprehension; and I feared to crush The Silmarillion under the weight of its own history.

Although the younger Tolkien has since been hard on himself in second-guessing the many decisions he was forced to make with his father’s drafts spread out on a Procrustean bed, far from being crushed, The Silmarillion is now perched gloriously atop its own complex history. To which we bring histories of our own; all honor to Michael Drout for sharing his, and prompting reflections that without this one book, the past thirty years would have been more like a garbage scow than an argosy, a shotgun shack than a Gondolin or City of Wonders.

The Internet teems with would-be trailers or pre-vis pitches for a filmed Silmarillion; here’s one scored to the great Howard Shore getting his Wagner on. The artwork varies wildly in quality (thank the Valar for Nasmith), but over the course of seven minutes you get a sense of how the master narrative passes “from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin,” for “that was of old the fate of Arda Marred.” Perhaps it’s the fate of any Arda we can ever hope to know.

I’ve been watching this development quite closely for a while, now, as it kinda closes a loop for my own personal development. Since I came to REH by way of Conan, by way of gaming, it’s somehow appropriate that I comment on the game, by way of Conan, by way of REH. This is what Kurt Vonnegut uncharitably called “[fill in the blank] disappearing up its own asshole.” It’s a good term, though. I’m going through the looking glass. That’s right, I’m going to join the 100,000 some odd players, gamers, hard-core sword freaks, and thirteen year olds who skirted around the Mature Content warning to play the Age of Conan MMORPG game as a Robert E. Howard fan. I’ve done my pre-order for the Deluxe edition, with extra bells and whistles, as well as extra in-game goodies for folks who want to shell out the extra cash. They are promising me a war rhino. I have no idea what the thinking is behind that. Where the hell am I supposed to put it? In my bag of holding? Come on.

I’m also attempting to wrangle a new, souped-up computer (I needed one, anyway) to allow me to safely play the game with no lag time (crucial in big battles). In the interest of offering up a somewhat balanced review of my playing experience, I’ll be throwing up a daily report here whenever I play the game: my initial impressions, experiences, and even player interactions. I have no idea whether or not it will help you decide to try the game, but I will try to be pithy, in any case.

I’m not a stranger to online gaming; I just don’t like it all that much. Oh, the games themselves are fine. But I’ve found that, with only a handful of exceptions, the majority of the online gaming community are a passel of heathens and savages, ill-mannered little troglodytes that kvetch and bellyache about everything that can actually hold a teenager’s interest and opinion in the game. Power gamers, the lot of them. They all want an axe that does eleventy-hundred points of damage that costs no endurance to swing and kills everything they want it to kill. And they want it at first level. Any changes made to the game brings them sobbing to the forums to complain about how everything is now ruined. And the rest of them, who were complaining about the game being unbalanced, start complaining that it’s now unbalanced in the other direction. They are impossible to make happy.

And yet, there’s a massive culture in this country that mashes these people together on servers and have them interact with one another. This is what has, up until now, kept me from playing fantasy games online. That and the generic-ness of it all. Did you ever play Diablo? Sheesh. Talk about blandsville.

Well, that’s going to change (I hope), since these guys mention in every press release that this is based on Conan’s world as created by Robert E. Howard. His name comes up a lot. And, if they are to be believed, they are cleaving closely to the stories and descriptions from Our Favorite Writer. Will the adventures match the vision? Am I, by creating a character in this virtual world, becoming a pasticher? Will I ever find anyone online who doesn’t type in LeetSpeek to the exclusion of all else? Only time will tell.

Once everything gets up and running, if there are any regular Cimmerian readers who would like to play alongside what I’m doing, I’ll post my handle and server along with everything else. Heathens and savages need not apply.

Cimmerian reader Zack Esser has created a new website dedicated to all things Howard and fantasy. It’s called BorderKingdom, and it promises to be, among much else, a prime showcase for Hyborian Age art. He has a blog that will regularly publish new artwork and essays, and a gallery titled Images of Hyboria. Head over and give it a look.

Cimmerian readers are aware of the intellectual battle that has been waged in The Lion’s Den about H. P. Lovecraft since the release of “Lovecraft’s Southern Vacation” in TC V3n2 (February 2006). One of that discussion’s prime participants, Graeme Phillips from England, has recently published the first issue of a new ’zine dedicated to the man who was Providence. Titled Cyäegha, and produced in a run of sixty numbered copies, the first issue is dedicated to the Belgian Mythos writer Eddy C. Bertin and runs twenty-eight pages.

For a contents listing and ordering information, go here.

My copy of Dossouye is ordered and on the way, and I’ll have more to say about it another time. Until then, head over to Charles Saunders’ brand new website, complete with blog, links to interviews, and of course information on his new book.

Any given year is a demonstration of mortality in action, but so far 2008 has been especially hellbent on inaugurating the afterlives of figures who had permanent luxury suites in the Tompkinsian pantheon: George MacDonald Fraser, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Fagles, and now Charlton Heston.

No sooner was I surfing the first wave of obituaries and career summaries than I was muttering and cursing. Everything else Heston did was being reduced to flotsam bobbing atop each half of the parted Red Sea, or dust beneath Judah Ben-Hur’s chariot wheels. It’s difficult to be objective about those movies because they became the Easter season equivalent of the Yule log, always on the TV screen in the background. When I try to watch either, it isn’t long before I wish someone had spiked the holy water. Oh, Ben-Hur retains some interest because of the involvement of Gore Vidal, Yakima Canutt, and a young assistant director named Sergio Leone, and the early scenes at the Egyptian court in The Ten Commandments are entertaining, mostly because of Yul Brynner’s seething Ramses (had he not gotten all that emoting out of his system, would he ever have been able to play the robot gunfighter in Westworld?) But I prefer Heston’s mid-career parts, when cracks in the Michelangelo-sculpted marble and verdigris on the gleaming bronze began to be detectable, so I was glad to find Manohla Dargis’ “The Man Who Touched Evil and Saved the World” in the New York Times: “My fondness for Mr. Heston can be traced back to the films I saw growing up, most important, his great dystopian trilogy, Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971), and Soylent Green (1973).” Had Ms. Dargis bethought her of how Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) ends, she might have reconsidered the second half of her tribute’s title, but I’m with her on the Dominus of Dystopia; whenever I read Howard’s “The Last Laugh” (an overheated discussion of which concludes an essay printed in TC V5n1), despite the probable Conanomorphism of the protagonist’s appearance, I imagine Charlton Heston, the last word in last stands and the first choice for the day after the end of the world.

When one is christened John Carter, as was Heston in Illinois, in 1923, a destiny that includes swordplay and striding across science fictional stages is preordained. He never really played a Howard-style barbarian (perhaps a not-so-small mercy, given the heinous crime-against-casting that was John Wayne as Genghiz Khan), although he battled barbaric Frisian raiders in The War Lord (1965)—one can make a case for REH succeeding as a screenwriter strictly on the basis of Chrysagon De la Croix’s calling his sword a “cold wife”—and Natohkian, mostly Berber hordes in El Cid (1961). The historical and science fiction genres afforded him an imaginative depth that offset a supposedly curtailed breadth, but then Mick LaSalle, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, has beaten me to questioning the attribution of a “limited range” to Heston:

Al Pacino, for example, railing on the beach at the end of Planet of the Apes, would simply register as Al Pacino, very upset. It would most certainly not register as humanity encountering the tragic folly of its ways, but that’s exactly what you get from Heston.

People who think they’ve said it all by typing the words “limited range” deserve to be Soylent Green. Such assessments are the preferred ploy for dismissing the range within which iconic actors or writers excel; witness our reason for blogging here. Okay, Clint Eastwood didn’t really have the range to play John Huston, but it was and is riveting to watch him try in White Hunter Black Heart. Heston won a lot of roles by winning the genetic lottery first, with his profile not unlike that of The Muppet Show’s Sam the Eagle, his lean-hipped, built-to-escape-Ape-City physique and a voice equipped with non-electronic Dolbysound. Martin Scorsese, in his two-page introduction to the staggeringly lavish Collector’s Edition of El Cid released by gruesome twosome Harvey and Bob Weinstein this winter, remarks on the actor’s “unique presence’ derived from “a sense of stillness and of dynamic movement.” Michel Mourlet was already onto this aspect of Heston well before Colonel George Taylor, Chinese Gordon and Will Penny back in 1960:

He constitutes a tragedy in himself…Through him, mise en scene can confront the most intense of conflicts and settle them with the contempt of a god imprisoned, quivering with rage.

Mourlet famously pronounced Heston “an axiom”; is it any wonder that late in life the actor at times seemed to be embodying not human characters but rather the Second Amendment, the Laffer Curve, and the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision? Less flippantly, Heston could play troubled men, but they had to be greatly troubled. When he wrestled with doubt, it was on a scale to dwarf any contretemps confected by the WWF. Heston’s casting in Touch of Evil (1958) as Ramon Miguel Vargas, a Mexican cop so upright he makes other law enforcement personnel seem barely bipedal, has been mocked in Get Shorty and Ed Wood, and it’s true that he fails to persuade us that so much as a single ancestor ever spoke Spanish, let alone Nahuatl, but his south-of-the-border straight arrow emphasizes how marvelously bent Orson Welles’ Hank Quinlan is. And it is here, amidst the stews and sinkholes of Quinlan’s corruption, that the demigod-gaze is perturbed by the first intimations that will lead to the immortal bellowing of the words “It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!” No Heston, no Touch of Evil, so it’s gratifying that he was still of sound, if heavily armed, mind and body for the more Wellesian restoration of the film in 1998. Similarly, no Heston, no Major Dundee (another film in which crossing the border is an act of ontological profundity), which might not strike us as a comparable loss unless we factor in the lessons Peckinpah learned and applied to The Wild Bunch.

Anthony Mann was fresh from having been booted from Spartacus when he directed El Cid; “Inside this angry man, there is an artist struggling to get out,” was Heston’s impression of the director. Of course the artist had already achieved breakouts in his Jimmy Stewart Westerns and Man of the West (1958); Mann specialized in tortured psyches externalized topographically, and his sensibility—Mitteleuropa by way of Broadway, the Old World returned to by way of the Old West—is crucial to the continued watchability of El Cid (JFK apparently enjoyed the film so much he invited Heston to the White House and impressed the actor with his knowlege of the Reconquista and Cid-ology).

For Scorsese, the film stands out due to “unusually dark textures,” and heralds a transition from “studio era decorum to a greater frankness,” but unfortunately El Cid too often keeps to the circumspect side of the changeover. With the exception of a minor villain’s redemptory crucifixion at the hands of the North African invaders, the violence is all-but-bloodless; the ocular daggers Sophia Loren and Heston shoot at each other must be the sharpest weapons in the film. And a major opportunity is lost when the “Spanish” Moors, the warriors of Al-Andalus who side with the Cid, are lost in the crowd. This judgement may be unduly influenced by Guy Gavriel Kay’s luminous 1995 novel The Lions of Al-Rassan; Kay telescopes the long, arduous centuries of real-world Spain’s Reconquista into a single lifetime, that shared by his Cid-surrogate Rodrigo Belmonte and the “Moorish” champion Ammar ibn Khairan who is his mirror-image, sword-brother, and cruelly fated ultimate opponent. The film’s emir Moutamin (Douglas Wilmer) suggests an embryonic ibn Khairan, and the character deserved more scenes. On the other hand, the goings-on are enlivened by the Castilian princeling-and-princess Alfonso and Urraca (John Fraser and Genevieve Page), siblings whose closeness possibly explains some things about medieval Spanish royalty.

Chief among the delights of the new ‘Miriam Collection” El Cid package are a featurette about Anthony Mann with actual interview footage, a commentary by the producer’s son and a biographer that delves into the tricky relationship between the Franco dictatorship and the filmmakers—after all, the generalissimo was himself a conqueror who’d landed on Spanish shores with Moorish soldiers—and a reproduction of the 1961 souvenir program that kicks off with an article by none other than Harold Lamb, introduced as “famous Author and Historian.”

55 Days at Peking is a tougher sell, being more concerned with Marine major Heston’s efforts to disarm estrogen bomb Ava Gardner than with the day-to-day progression of the 1900 siege of the foreign legations’ compound (a mere wall-and-gate away from the Forbidden City). Flora Robson as the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, Leo Genn as Jung-Lu, Robert Helpmann as Prince Tuan—all are about as authentic as Duke Feng in de Camp and Carter’s “The Curse of the Monolith.” (Amusingly, the DVD offers subtitles in “traditional Chinese” and “simplified Chinese”) And the movie doesn’t take the time to create even one Boxer character! The Sand Pebbles (either Richard McKenna’s 1962 novel or Robert Wise’s 1966 film) does a much better job of showing the affronts to Chinese sovereignty that would fuel the rival fires of Kuomingtang and Communist nationalism, although Tsui Hark riffed on the opening scene of 55 Days, during which the longsuffering Chinese citizenry must endure the din of the contending anthems of the trespassing nations, as performed by a military band in front of each legation, in Once Upon a Time in China. David Niven’s British envoy refers to “the eleven great powers”—a multipolar world indeed!—and from an American perspective the Boxer Rebellion, even when superficially treated as here, is fascinating because at the dawn of the century, in an enclosed space, we fought side by side with not only our allies in wars yet to come (the British, the French), but also our foes (the Germans, the Austrians, the Italians, the Japanese) and of course our eventual archrival the Russians. 55 Days exhibits none of the Prussophobia that for decades has had many of us chanting “Shoot the German! Shoot the German!” at the climax of The Wild Bunch, and I note with bemusement that Leutnant Georg Ritter Von Trapp (yes, that Von Trapp) was decorated for bravery as part of the Austro-Hungarian naval contingent operating against the Boxers; perhaps he steeled himself for dealing with Julie Andrews by looking back on his Rebellion experiences.

The first element of the multinational relief force to hove into view is the Raj on horseback, Indian cavalry, and a moment or two later hindsight ensures that it’s difficult to cheer the advent of the Japanese column. Still, it’s unfair to complain that more isn’t done with the ironies that hover like hummingbirds; the story of the Western-and-Japanese response to the Rebellion cries out for a gifted narrative historian in command of all available diaries, memoirs, and similar primary sources. (Alas, the elderly Harry Flashman, who pitched in to advise on defending the legations, left no account of his no doubt involuntary involvement, but it is some consolation that Flashman and the Dragon, George MacDonald Fraser’s novel dealing with the earlier Taiping Rebellion and Second Opium War, is the pick of the later Flashmans). Heston’s best moments come when one of his officers is killed, the man’s half-Chinese daughter (one of the original Amerasians, generations before Korea and Vietnam) asks whether there might be a place for her in America. The answering unease of Heston’s Matt Lewis is unlovely to witness but beautifully played.

As eminent Victorian and martyr-in-waiting Charles “Chinese” Gordon in Khartoum (1966), our man out-points Laurence Olivier in their two scenes together (Of course the Englishman is acting in something perilously close to brownface as the Mahdi). The film benefits from a screenplay by Robert Ardrey that badly but becomingly wants to be Robert Bolt’s for Lawrence of Arabia, and Ardrey, the then-notorious author of African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man (1961) is almost as much of a presence in two 1969 movies that he didn’t write, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Planet of the Apes. Let Dr. Zaius preach it for us:

Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil’s spawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home, and yours. Shun him, for he is the harbinger of death.

African Genesis and its follow-up The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder fell into the disrepute that awaits many if not most popularizers, but recently, with books like Richard Wranghan and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (1997) and Craig Stanford’s The Hunting Apes: Meat Eaters and the Origins of Human Behavior (2001), it almost seems as if Ardrey’s ghost is clambering back up out of Olduvai Gorge. Anyway, Wilde once interpreted the 19th century dislike of realism as “the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the mirror,” and apes, as REH showed again and again in his poetry and prose, are the perfect funhouse mirror for reflecting our ineradicable Caliban-ness. The damn dirty ape whose stinking paws we can’t get off of us is us.

The Planet of the Apes series is a politically polymorphous text, one that has been seized upon both by the KKK and those who populate Kleagle nightmares (the studio panicked after test screenings of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes were extremely well received by urban audiences, so the version subsequently distributed was much less, well, riotous). At the risk of being jejune, the first movie is far and away the best, the most resonant, thanks to Rod Serling, director Franklin Schaffner (who’d done The War Lord with Heston in 1965) and the man who brought George Taylor to misanthropic life. This astronaut has the Right Stuff but the Wrong ‘Tude; he’s John Carter with gangrene of the spirit, Pauline Kael’s “perfect American Adam,” but one for whom every Eden is already Sheol. His lack of pride in his own species goeth before a Fall the likes of which he could never have imagined. Heston’s perfect imperfection or imperfect perfection comes not just from his physical attributes but from the fact that he’d been busy incarnating Hegemon Agonistes, what Eric Green, whose seminal Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics and Popular Culture (1996) notched a Richard Slotkin introduction, calls “white heroic strength and Western indomitability” in epic after epic, really since The Naked Jungle (1954), in which the swarming, unindividuated, all-destroying Other is army ants rather than the cannon fodder of the Mahdi or the Dowager Empress. Planet’s roughest of rides for the Heston persona, an enterprise in which the actor was an invaluable and clued-in collaborator, is the hole card that Tim Burton’s 2001 rejiggering could never hope to match.

Linda Harrison’s Nova is arguably the most successful, if dialogue-denied, casting of a producer’s girlfriend as heroine in cinema history, and she might have loosened Heston up during their doomed time together; when we check in with him again postapocalyptically in The Omega Man, his Robert Neville (like Taylor, a colonel) is comparatively funky, enjoying solitary showings of Woodstock and a short-but-sweet relationship with sistah-survivor Rosalind Cash.

Like, say, Eastwood and Mitchum and Marvin, Heston was an icon of the sort that only our amber waves of grain seem able to produce, but he accepted fewer limits on his “limited range.” As a fledgling-thesp he played Heathcliff, Macbeth, and Petruchio for live television productions, and he would go on to chance his WASPy self in the Irish-American bogs of Eugene O’Neill (A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, with Deborah Kerr). The stages of Heston’s filmography can’t be understood without the stage. Oh, it was great to see him as Sutter Caine’s publisher in John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (Caine is a Stephen King stand-in, which prompts the melancholy realization that a more Hestonian book mogul would have had the gravitas to tell the real King that at least three hundred pages needed to be trimmed from The Tommyknockers). But it was far greater to see him as The Player King in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996). Whether early in his career or late, he reached for the role of Mark Antony (in both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra) the way others reach for a favorite smoking jacket, and on the evidence of El Cid, would have made a memorable Coriolanus. Shakespeare holds a special place in any overview of Heston’s career; Shakespeare helped give him that career, proffering as the playwright does the keys to the kingdom, to all of the pre-American or un-American kingdoms of “period,” of history and legend. Unlike so many American actors, Heston could be exported from his own place and time, could thrive in contexts like the Book of Exodus, the Paris of Dumas, and the Book of (Simian) Revelations. I hope his Long John Silver and his dying Henry VIII in Richard Fleischer’s Crossed Swords (1977) won’t be forgotten, and it’s a disgrace that The War Lord, set in a twilight realm riven by not only conflict between Norman and Frisian but also that between Christian and pagan, isn’t readily available as a featurette-laden DVD. Had the Jackson/Walsh/Boyens version of Denethor in The Return of the King been more faithful to the Tolkien character—the despair-reduced, Sauron-sapped ruins of a great Numenorean lord—Heston might have been as superbly suited to that role as are Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee to theirs.

The aforementioned Player King signs himself out thusly: “My spirits grow dull, and fain I would beguile/The tedious day with sleep.” When a damnable disease dulled Heston’s spirits, he reacted with considerable grace and dignity, and our day can only be more tedious now that he’s embarked on his last and longest sleep.

Arma virumque cano…Robert Fagles, who unleashed what some of us consider the supremely Howardian gifts of intensity and immediacy on The Iliad (1990), The Odyssey (1996), and The Aeneid (2006), died this week. Died, save for the imperishable legacy that yet lives and will keep right on flying out of bookstores like the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz (er, that is, if they were noble and tragic).

The classicist Oliver Taplin wrote of the Fagles Iliad that “his narrative has real pace, it presses onward, leading the reader forward with an irresistible flow.” The speed of a cheetah, the spring of a leopard, the strength of a tiger, all in one translator/poet package. A fellow member of the Princeton faculty, Paul Muldoon, remembers Fagles as “a quiet man, diligent and decorous, yet one who was unexpectedly equal to the swagger and savagery of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in a way no one had managed before him. It was as if two key texts of Western literature had been adapted by a director of Westerns like Leone or Peckinpah.” That, O Prince, is high praise indeed.

Writing in the darkest depths of the Forties, as the Third Reich’s Nacht und Nebel obscured and threatened to erase European civilization, Simone Weil responded with the 20th century’s most memorable observation about the first Western epic: “The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad is force.” In Fagles, Homer’s poem at last met a translator forceful enough to turn that fearsome true hero loose upon an unsuspecting—and unsuspected by the publishing industry—readership. If you don’t believe me, invest a few minutes at your earliest convenience in an encounter with the Fagles version of Achilles manslaughtering his way toward the gates of Troy, Hector, and destiny. Divorce the words “death star” from their Lucasfilm associations, and you have the vengeful son of Peleus: something brilliantly baleful that should be visible only as an inhuman gleam, far off in the heavens, now brought cataclysmically to earth and destroying everything in its path (I can think of no finer compliment to pay Robert E. Howard than that in a sort of dark miracle, he briefly achieved a similar murderous paroxysm in the paragraphs where Turlogh goes berserk after the death of Moira in “The Dark Man”).

I was privileged to be able to ask Fagles a question once, about the continuity between the Iliadic Achilles and the man we meet again in The Odyssey’s underworld sequence, when he did a reading at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in Manhattan. Much luckier were those few freshmen at Princeton who wangled their way into a seminar he taught for years and years: an immersion in the Homeric epics, with their translator and revivifier as diving instructor! Fagles’ only rival as a contemporary master of The Matter of Troy is the great Christopher Logue, who in War Music, Kings, The Husbands, All Day Permanent Red, and now Cold Calls has retold many books of The Iliad with daring, dangerous anachronisms that annihilate the distance between us and Homer; although Fagles never went that far, he once admitted that he was constantly “on the prowl for modern voices of the heroic,” and singled out Ken Burns’ The Civil War for drawing on the full resources of 19th-century American speech and rhetoric (the Burns documentary, of course, made Shelby Foote a star, and Foote’s Civil War tripledecker has been described, justifiably, as “the American Iliad“). Robert Frost here, Eliot there, Yeats here, there, and everywhere—the best poets are the most welcome of ghostly guests at Fagles’ Homeric banquets.

While at the 2006 World Fantasy Convention, the publisher/editor of The Cimmerian and I were equally jazzed by two imminent releases: Kull: Exile of Atlantis and the Fagles Aeneid. How thrilling it must have been, for a man who’d labored long on the seesaw battles wherein Hector and Achilles, Paris and Ajax are still alive, finally to get to chronicle, thanks to Virgil, the toppling of the topless towers, that archetypal apocalypse from which the stench of burning flesh and the screams of the women and children still reach us. Among the prodigies Fagles performed was to bring Turnus, often dismissed as a Hector knockoff, an ersatz Homeric antagonist, to powerful life and poignant death. And his comment that “In Virgil as in Homer, you find great reservoirs of memory,” affords a clue as to why his translations are no core curriculum chore but as affecting as The Lord of the Rings or “The Shadow Kingdom.”

I should really mention his Oresteia (1975) and versions of the Three Theban Plays by Sophocles (1982); when his Antigone speaks, every word is like the pierce-the-heart blow Uma Thurman’s Bride holds in reserve for David Carradine’s Bill. But nothing I could say would come near doing justice to either Fagles’ work, or for that matter the coruscating introductions Bernard Knox contributed to the three epics, nigh-ultimate triumphs in their own right. So instead:

Vale, to an imperator of translation.

LEO ADDS: His were the words and poetry of a vanished age — like Robert E. Howard he possessed that rare gift for communing with spirits and bringing their long-lost ways and dreams to life for modern readers:

But when the tenth Dawn brought light to the mortal world
they carried gallant Hector forth, streaming tears,
and they placed his corpse aloft the pyre’s crest,
flung a torch and set it aflame.

At last,
when young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more,
the people massed around illustrious Hector’s pyre. . .
And once they’d gathered, crowding the meeting grounds,
they first put out the fires with glistening wine,
wherever the flames still burned in all their fury.
Then they collected the white bones of Hector —
all his brothers, his friends-in-arms, mourning,
and warm tears came streaming down their cheeks.
They places the bones they found in a golden chest,
shrouding them round and round in soft purple cloths.
They quickly lowered the chest in a deep, hollow grave
and over it piled a cope of huge stones closely set,
then hastily heaped a barrow, posted lookouts all around
for fear the Achaean combat troops would launch their attack
before the time agreed. And once they’d heaped the mound
they turned back home to Troy, and gathering once again
they shared a splendid funeral feast in Hector’s honor,
held in the house of Priam, king by will of Zeus.

And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses.

Received some interesting news from Paul Herman today:

Jim Butcher, author of the popular The Dresden Files series [now on its 10th installment], included this in an afterword in his most recent bestseller, White Night. He first says that he was introduced to fantasy at age seven when a relative gave him Lord of the Rings and the Han Solo stories of Brian Daley. He then states:

My first love as a fan is swords-and-horses fantasies. After Tolkien I went after C.S. Lewis. After Lewis, it was Lloyd Alexander. After them came Fritz Leiber, Roger Zalazny, Robert Howard, John Norman, Poul Anderson, David Eddings, Weis and Hickman, Terry Brooks, Elizabeth Moon, Glen Cook, and before I knew it, I was a dual citizen of the United States and Lankhmar, Narnia, Gor, Cimmeria, Krynn, Amber – you get the picture.

Becoming de rigueur to drop REH’s name in the field, it seems. Nice to see the continuing influence.

LEO ADDS: And the cover of the book above (which I assume is derived from a description of the character in the novel) makes it seem as if Butcher put a lot of Solomon Kane into his hero.

I haven’t gotten around to auctioning off the rest of my REHupa collection yet — confound it! — but Mark Corrinet is now getting rid of the numerous extra copies he was forced to purchase when building his own collection. Up on eBay right now are four really hard-to-find issues, numbers 63, 64, 83, and 94, all dating back over twenty years. If you’ve ever wanted to acquire some of these, now is a rare chance to do so. My own earliest copies are in the #90s and #100s, so there’s no overlap with Mark’s first batch here. Get ‘em while you can, or you may never have another opportunity. You’ve been warned.