Those of you who have been enjoying the Cimmerian Blog over the past year will be gratified to know that a brand new full-fledged blog has debuted over at REHupa.com. Three longtime stalwarts of that fine organization — Official Editor Bill “Indy” Cavalier and former Official Editors Morgan Holmes and Rusty Burke — have taken over the reins of the day-to-day management and updating of that site. That trio is set to feed you regular doses of Howardiana — news, reviews, and esoteric arcana from their secret Howard vaults. Between the three of them they have well over fifty years of Howard experience under their belt, so you know you’ll be getting some good stuff.

Indy has already popped up the first post titled “The Blog of Black Indy,” which introduces the bloggers and gives us some details on all the Howard events you should be planning for this summer. Meanwhile Rusty told me that he has some miscellaneous stuff tucked away in The Burkives that he’ll be sharing with you soon, so keep a lookout for that.

In case it’s not obvious, this is a Really Cool Thing. Having a second blog out there dedicated exclusively to Robert E. Howard should create a lot of back-and-forth between our blog and theirs, with posts from one side generating interesting responses and additional information from the other. It’s the kind of friendly competition which spurs everyone on to greater productivity, and ultimately creates a much more dynamic online presence for Robert E. Howard. I know of very few authors of any stripe or level of success that has two blogs dedicated exclusively to their life and work.

When you stop to think about it, it’s yet another way that Two-Gun Bob is proving himself to be more than capable of handling any amount of thought and scholarship people care to undertake on his behalf. I always hear people from outside the Howard field say, “Don’t you ever run out of things to write about REH?” Well, let’s see — REHupa’s been in existence for thirty-five years straight, there are several regular Howard magazines cranking out new material, there’s a yearly Howard festival with panels and tours, there’s panels at conferences like the Popular Culture Association shindigs, and there are endless books, fanzines, and reprintings of his writing.

No, I don’t think we’ll be running out of things to talk about anytime soon.

In fact, I’m hoping that this is the beginning of a trend. So far we have a Cimmerian blog, a REHupa blog, and a REH: Two-Gun Raconteur blog, not to mention other Howard-related sites like Bill Thom’s Coming Attractions blog. I would think that it’s only a matter of time before The Dark Man gets their online act together and starts a blog for the REH academics, or that Paul Herman adds a blog to Howard Works and populates it with an assortment of Howard heavyweights. The more the merrier. As it is we are so much more alive than our sister fandom of Lovecraft studies that it’s scary, but if a few more fans get into the act, who knows what heights of scholarship and entertainment can be achieved online?

So bookmark REHupa.com and add it to the REH sites you stop by each day. I’m sure you’ll find a lot of pleasant surprises there as they ramp things up, along with contributions from other REHupans as well. Being a web-connected Howard fan just got a whole lot more fun.

STEVE ADDS: I can just about handle the concept of Lovecraft studies as “our sister fandom,” despite squamous-and-rugose issues, but draw the line at referring to the new REHupa venture as “our sister blog.” Those three guys are all hairy enough to have done time in the Forest of Villefere.

LEO RESPONDS: You ain’t lyin’, sister.

Back in August 2006, The Cimmerian quietly surpassed a landmark. With the publication of its 19th issue (not including Awards Issues, Indexes, or volumes of The Cimmerian Library), TC overtook Glenn Lord’s The Howard Collector as the Howard magazine with the most issues. While both The Howard Review and Two-Gun Racontuer are getting close — and they’ve been at it since the ’70s — neither has produced as many issues as the two Top-Dogs of Howard journals. It’s only fitting that Howard fandom pay its respects to the publication that served as the model and inspiration for all that have come since. The story of The Howard Collector really starts in 1936 . . .

Robert E. Howard died in June of 1936, but his work lived on. He may have lived long enough to see “Black Canaan” in the June issue of Weird Tales replaced by “Red Nails” in the July issue, if as in current procedure magazines appeared a month in advance of their cover date. The fact that Howard was dead and gone in no way slowed his publication; he had stories in Argosy, Action Stories, Weird Tales, and others throughout the rest of 1936. Action Stories’ January ’37 issue contained a Howard yarn; Golden Fleece published “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance” in their November ’38 issue and “Gates of Empire” in the January ’39 number; Weird Tales continued a fairly steady stream of Howard’s poetry and prose until August of 1939. And then things went quiet — for a while.

The very early 1940s saw little Robert E. Howard. Fight Stories continued the practice they’d begun in 1937 of reprinting Howard’s stories once or twice a year using the “Mark Adam” byline; their last reprint appeared in the Fall 1942 issue. Spicy Adventure Stories reprinted three of Howard’s yarns, also in 1942, but again, his name was absent. From late ’39 all the way through 1943, none of Howard’s fantasy or horror tales appeared in any mainstream publication; it seemed that Robert E. Howard had finally gone west. But then “Texas John Alden” appeared in Masked Rider Magazine for May of ’44, and August Derleth included “The Black Stone” in the anthology Sleep No More. In 1945, Crawford Publications brought out their eponymous The Garden of Fear booklet. Things were looking up.

In 1946, Arkham House got the ball rolling. Skull-Face and Others, despite reportedly sluggish sales, got Howard back on the radar. Throughout the late ’40s and into the early ’50s, Howard’s work appeared in the top fantasy magazines of the day: Avon Fantasy Reader, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Fantasy Fiction Magazine. The early ’50s saw several of Howard’s westerns also reprinted. Meanwhile, the folks over at Gnome Press were busy making sure that Howard’s most famous creation wouldn’t be trapped in the pages of crumbling pulp magazines; Conan the Conqueror, the first of seven Conan volumes, appeared in 1950, with new volumes appearing fairly often until 1957. That same year Glenn Lord made his first big splash in Howard publishing by issuing Always Comes Evening, the first major collection of Howard’s verse. But then things slowed down again.

The late ’50s saw very little Howard publishing. The well-known fan endeavor, Amra, began, but had next to nothing to do with any of Howard’s works besides Conan. Donald Wollheim included “The Cairn on the Headland” in his The Macabre Reader. And then — nothing.

Fortunately, Glenn Lord was far from finished.

After compiling Always Comes Evening, Lord began his search for other obscure Howard items. In a recent letter, Mr. Lord told me, “I began buying large runs of Action Stories and Fight Stories as I knew they ran a lot of Howard’s work. Fortunately, at the time, pulps were cheap — I paid $1 each for them from Midtown Magazine Service in New York City.” He also got in touch with Lenore Preece, who sent him copies of The Junto and Howard’s letters to her brother, Harold. George Haas provided copies of letters to Clark Ashton Smith. And, through a series of contacts beginning with E. Hoffmann Price, Lord was able to track down the legendary “Trunk” of Howard’s unsold manuscripts and other assorted items.

The items slowly trickled in and Lord began work on a preliminary bibliography. As that work progressed, he told me, “I began thinking of putting this data and material in a fanzine. I named it The Howard Collector after Ray Zorn’s The Lovecraft Collector.” And thus, in the summer of 1961, smack dab in the middle of a severe Howard drought, appeared The Howard Collector #1. In his “Editorial Notes” for that issue, Lord states that THC “is dedicated to the memory of Robert E. Howard and will contain material by and about him. Frequency of publication, or continuation, will depend upon reader response.” No worries there.

That first issue provided a model that has been followed by nearly every Howard fan publication since: a little biography, “Facts of Biography” and “Letter: Dr. I. M. Howard to Frank Torbett”; a little commentary, E.H. Price’s “Robert Ervin Howard”; a little bibliography, “Verse Index”; some Howard fiction and verse, “Midnight,” “With a Set of Rattlesnake Rattles,” “The Sands of Time,” and “Sonora to Del Rio.” And Lord was just getting started. He published a total of 18 issues of THC, from that groundbreaking first issue in the summer of 1961 to the final edition, a 52-page extravaganza, in the autumn of 1973.

Anyone who has ventured into the publishing arena has some stories to tell; it’s not as easy as some might think. Lord started having problems fairly early on: “Alvin Fick printed the first issue; he did nice printing but could not continue to print for me,” said Lord. And he needed a printer; of the 150 copies of THC #1 that were prepared, most had sold. When THC #2 appeared, in the spring of ’62, Lord’s “Editorial Notes” stated, “Response to the first issue of The Howard Collector has been favorable. A few copies still remain for those interested.” Luckily, Donald Grant stepped in, but he would not be the last printer, as Lord reveals:

Donald Grant printed several issues, until he finally got so busy that he could no longer do so. With THC #9, I found out that 150 copies were no longer enough, so I reprinted that one and upped the print run to 300 copies. After Grant quit printing THC, I managed to borrow an IBM Executive typewriter, with a Bold Face No. 2 typeface — the same one used by Grant at the time — from a secretary at my workplace, and typed out the next two or three issues, sending the prepared Text to a print shop in Missouri that I was told about. And then I managed to purchase a reconditioned IBM typewriter, same typeface, of my own and I used that for the remainder of the issues.

While advanced in its day, the IBM typewriter was worlds away from modern desktop publishing:

The IBM Executive spaced the letters so that you could justify the right margins. You had to do a first typing, then add or delete spaces in the second typing, so that it all came out at the right evenly. And certain letters took up more space — an “i” for instance was one space, an “a” was two, a “w” was three, if I recall correctly.

Despite the printing problems, Lord managed to present to salivating Howard-Heads everywhere some truly unique and original material, coupled with extremely rare (at the time) items that had appeared in publications as diverse as they were limited: The Tattler, The Poet’s Scroll, The Yellow Jacket, and so on. In 1979 Lord collected the best of the material from his Journal and sent it off to Ace Publications, where it saw print in the volume aptly entitled The Howard Collector. This is still the best place to find the nuggets of Howardia that were published within those fragile pages. Other publishers have reprinted many of the items included in the journal, but some still remain locked in its pages, especially the non-Howard items, like a letter from Chandler Whipple to Glenn Lord, reviews by Fritz Leiber and Fred Blosser, poetry by Tevis Clyde Smith, Manly Wellman, de Camp, and others, articles by E.H. Price, Lin Carter, and so on.

With Amra doing its thing in the Conan world, The Howard Collector was an important voice for Robert E. Howard during this time — Amra even helped, as Lord recalls, “I got notices in Amra and ran ads in Bibby’s Fantasy Collector, possibly one or two others, for subscribers but quite a few probably found out by word of mouth from other subscribers.”

And what a list of subscribers it was. The first fans were lucky enough to be in contact with people who had actually know Howard, as well as some of the pioneers in the field. Lord remembers a few of those important readers: “Larry McMurtry subscribed, at the time he was running a used book store in Houston. The Preeces were also subscribers — Louise Preece, Lenore Preece, Harold Preece, Kathering (Preece) Luparello. Clyde Smith bought five copies of each issue.”

During his time publishing THC, Lord acquired “The Trunk” and became agent for Howard’s literary rights. Business was soon booming, fed in part by the growing popularity of the Lancer Conan volumes, which began their historic rise in 1966. As Lord reports in the final THC, “This will be the final issue of this magazine. This is its twelfth year of publication and while I dislike having to terminate it, there are a number of factors that dictate that policy, not the least of which is lack of time.” Lord explained further in a recent letter: “I cut it off when my agenting business got so busy that I had little free time — I was still working at my regular job also.”

So, at the dawn of the Howard Boom, The Howard Collector closed up shop. But it had done its job; it had kept the name of Robert E. Howard alive and well when Conan had threatened to eclipse him. For a complete listing of all items that appeared within the pages of that first Howard ‘zine, have a look here. I’ll let Glenn Lord sign off: “And I guess that is all for THC. It did run to more issues than I anticipated, after all.”

Wednesday is the final day to get those votes into Cimmerian central. There are some pretty close races, so a couple votes one way or the other can make all the difference, swinging things in a different direction. If you enjoyed the Centennial year as much as I did, and read things throughout 2006 that impressed you, then do the authors involved a favor — let them know what you think via your votes and your comments. I know from the reactions of past years that it means a lot to them. As Charles Hoffman stated in last year’s Awards issue:

I just want to make it clear how much I appreciate this honor. We live in a very materialistic society, and artistic or intellectual accomplishments that don’t bring a lot of money tend to be regarded with indifference. I have had, on occasion, to wrestle with feelings of futility. It’s therefore gratifying to know that others appreciate what one is doing, and that you’re making some sort of difference to someone. Therefore, I would like to formally thank The Cimmerian for presenting me with such impressive, solid, tangible evidence that my efforts have not been expended in a vain pursuit.

That’s what it’s all about, ladies. Right now some of the Howard scholars who worked their butts off last year to populate your bookshelves with good reading are struggling mightily to creep up in the voting, inching towards one of the coveted Skulls glowering at the top of the heap. Each of you who read or write for TC earned votes all throughout last year. You are potential kingmakers with the power to really make someone’s year special. Don’t waste the opportunity — use it! Take ten minutes to consider the nominees and get those ballots in before Thursday. Crom hath spoken.

We’ll, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Somebody snapped up the last pair of slipcases for Volume 1 and 2, so they are officially sold out, now and forever. I’ve already had a few people suddenly pop in since I posted the SOLD OUT sign and ask if I might possibly have an extra set tucked away somewhere for a rainy day that I’d care to sell. Terribly sorry, but nope. I imagine as time goes on we’ll see some pop up on eBay or at various conventions, as some folks die off or gafiate as per norm.

But here’s the thing for you latecomers: the slipcases for Volume 3 are coming soon. There will only be fifty made, and by my current count 37 of those are already pre-ordered and spoken for. If you have any thoughts about getting one, this is no time to dilly-dally — pop me an email and reserve one. You don’t need to send money yet, just let me know you will be buying one so I can guarantee there will be one available for you.

Even if you don’t have the ones for V1 and V2, you should get V3 now and then hunt down the others later. Heck, you might even consider buying two V3 slips now, and putting your V1 and V2 issues in one of them for safekeeping until such time as you get the original cases for those volumes.

A final option if you are a new guy just getting into TC and wondering how best to catch up: you can buy a Complete Deluxe Set of V1 or V2 while supplies last. There is a markup on these sets over the original list prices, but the price will only rise higher as more issues go out of print, so there’s no time like the present to make your move. When you stop to think about how expensive even some of the worst REH chapbooks from yesteryear are these days — solely due to passing time, growing scarcity, and increased interest in REH from collectors — you can imagine what it’s going to be like collecting Cimmerians in ten years when everything is out of print and there’s a universe of only fifty slipcased sets in existence. Don’t let yourself get into the all-too-common position of not buying something easily available now only to regret it later.

With dozens of TC‘s now in print for you to collect and store, the custom slipcases are by far the easiest and most elegant way to get the job done. Ask anyone who’s snagged a pair — they rock. I know one guy who also stores some of his old Necronomicon Press books in them, owing to the similar size.

Watching Clint Eastwood present a Lifetime Achievement Award to Ennio Morricone last night was as close as I’ll ever get to seeing Frank Frazetta give Robert E. Howard the Nobel Prize for Heroic Fantasy. Admittedly not an exact analogy, but close enough for rock-and-roll. Of course the sampler of il maestro‘s soundtracks should have concluded with the music from Harmonica and Frank’s ritualistic showdown in Once Upon a Time in the West, the ne plus ultra of a composer stepping in to co-write, co-direct, and co-act not just any crucial scene, but the crucial scene I would screen for xenoanthropologists from the Andromeda Galaxy who inquired about movies as an artform…

MARK ADDS: When they did their “Salute to Writers in Film” segment, I nurtured a hope that we’d get a shot of d’Onofrio shouting as he typed. Alas, it was not to be.

Everyone is voting early and often for the 2007 Cimmerian Awards, right? In honor of the ongoing event, I’m here to hand out the Lemurian Awards for the 12 all-time best essays about Howard’s work. Why “Lemurian”? Well, TC‘s annual Awards for the 3 best essays are called the Hyrkanians, and as we know from “The Hyborian Age,” the Lemurians were the ancestors of the Hyrkanians (“Now the Lemurians enter history again, as the Hyrkanians…”) In honor of that prominent Lemurian and patron of the black arts Rotath, the actual awards will be skulls, like those we’ve come to know and lust after these past 3 years, only golden this time. (Our thanks to Auric Enterprises for the generous donation of the gold that went into the sculptings, and if you can’t place Auric Enterprises it’s time to reread Goldfinger). Given their model, I can’t guarantee that these Rotath-derived golden skulls will be curse-free, but faint heart ne’er toted trophy homeward.

Is there something fishy about the Lemurians? Damn straight, and why not; after all, there was something fishy about the (pseudo)historical Lemurians. “Men of the Shadows” describes them as “the half-human Men of the Sea. Perhaps from some strange sea-monster had those sprang, for they were scaly like unto a shark, and they could swim for hours under the water.” (There’s another hint in “The Cat and the Skull’ when Howard assures us that Kull is as at home in the water as any Lemurian). Wherein lies the fishiness? These choices are litcrit-intensive. I may be in the minority in Howard fandom in that I had some decent experiences as well as some appalling ones in English classes, but to me all litcrit really means is, articles that engage with Howard’s work. Yes, I find Howard the man fascinating, but I find him fascinating because he wrote the stories and the poems. Articles dealing with his life come a distant second, and articles dealing with his impact on the lives of fans come an even more distant third. My 12 Lemurian picks are ludicrously subjective and self-indulgent, and I’m sure Leo would be willing to extend his hospitality to guest-bloggers bristling with counter-lists. Lastly, the numerical sequence implies no hierarchy or qualitative ranking whatsoever; #1 is not necessarily superior to #12. It was hard enough selecting what I deem the dozen best without also trying to arrange them in order of merit. Save for the lone whippersnapper, these essays have not only stood the test of time but been granted tenured teaching positions by time.

(Continue reading this post)

Well, I can scarcely believe I’m saying it: Volume 3 is over.

In terms of sheer work, 2006 was the longest year of my life. A full-time job, lots of overtime, and TC acting as a second full-time gig. And scattered in between there were three trips to Texas, one of them lasting two weeks, plus separate trips to Frisco, Denver, and Phoenix. It’s not often in life that one brushes up against the actual physical and mental limits of one’s endurance. I worked through to the dawn more times than I can count, and there were several points last year where my body ceased to obey orders and basically shut down until I caught up on rest. That’s a frightening specter to look in the eye, but at the same time it’s somewhat exhilarating to learn your limits. It’s as if you catch a quick glimpse of your True Self.

Nevertheless, Volume 3 will forever haunt my memories, all twelve issues of it. I’m working on the Index and the Slipcase now during my spare time, but the majority of my energy is now focused on the next challenge: Volume 4.

The color this year is Midnight Blue, and I felt the website and blog could use an updated look to mark the occasion. The V4n1 issues (February 2007) are all finished, printed, and packed. I’ll be taking them to the post office this weekend, and they should start hitting subscribers’ mailboxes early next week. Pop on over to the V4n1 page to read some excerpts and see what’s in store for you. New writers, new artist, new discoveries — Volume 4 has picked up right where Volume 3 left off.

I’m looking forward to having time to get out some more Cimmerian Library volumes this year as well. A half-dozen interesting ideas for booklets are already on the back burner. And there are a host of other Howard projects I’d like to work on as well, stuff that’s percolated in my mind for a long while. One of the downsides of editing a journal is that you spend so many hours working on other people’s prose that you end up having little time left for your own. With luck, going back to a comfortable bi-monthly schedule will allow me to get back to writing.

Keep an eye on the blog for announcements on some of these things, and until then enjoy the first volume of the post-Centennial era.

As Leo pointed out a few posts ago, mistakes in publishing “come with the territory”; Howard’s Haunts is no exception. Shortly after the first people started receiving their orders, I started getting emails about my mistakes. There were a very few typos, like artist Stephen Fabian’s name being spelled “Fabien” on page 98, and that doesn’t bother me much, but errors of fact stick in my craw. So much so that I felt a Blog post was in order. As soon as time permits, I’ll make the necessary corrections to my files, upload the new content, and have a corrected Third Edition available at lulu.com.

The biggest mistake, in my opinion, is misidentifying the Hemphill House on page 61. I don’t know if I’d been enjoying too much Howard Days cheer to follow directions correctly or not, but I was sure that the home pictured there was Novalyne Price’s former rooming house. However, both Jim Keegan and Rusty Burke have shown me the error of my assumption, and I bow before their vastly superior knowledge of all things REH. Jim was gracious enough to supply a photo of the actual Hemphill House which I’ve placed below.

Moving down the scale of oopses, I also misidentified the gentleman standing next to REH in the photo taken in Lincoln (top of this blog post and page 108 of Howard’s Haunts). Howard was traveling with Truett Vinson at the time, and perhaps it is he who took the photo, but the man with REH is not Vinson. Both Rusty Burke and Jim Keegan (again) say that this man is probably Ramon Maes. Howard and Vinson were in Lincoln to explore “the old courthouse whence Billy [the Kid] made the most dramatic escape ever made in the Southwest.” Howard explains further in a letter to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. July 1935:

We explored the exterior [of the courthouse], found it locked, and went across the street to the La Paloma Saloon, which bears a sign that claims existence in the Kid’s day. The owner is one Ramon Maes, grandson of Lucio Montoya, “Murphy’s Sharpshooter” as he told us with pride — a supple, well-built man, tall for a Mexican and broad shouldered, with a thin-nostrilled Mountain Indian look about his face. The name of Montoya is woven into the Kid’s saga. He took part in the three-day fight in which McSween was killed; he lay on the mountain that commanded the Montana House, with Crawford, firing from behind a boulder. Fernando Herrera, firing from the Montana House with a buffalo gun, killed Crawford, and broke Montoya’s leg. The range was nine hundred yards, but Herrera was a crack shot. All day Montoya lay in the glare of the sun, with his splintered leg, until, when night fell, his friends dared a sortie to get him. I did not speak of this to his grandson. To him the feud seemed like something that happened yesterday. He was very courteous and eager to point out interesting spots, and answer our questions, but when he spoke of the fighting and the killing, a red flame came into his eyes.

So, Howard may have asked Vinson to take a picture with Maes in front of the courthouse, for posterity.

Besides correcting future printings, I hope to make amends for this next boo-boo by buying the man a beer. On pages 72 and 74 I identified Project Pride stalwart Johnny Adams as Tom Stephenson. I’ve always been horrible with names, but that’s no excuse. I should have used Leo’s crack proofreading team before going to press. Thanks to Bill Cavalier and Rusty Burke for pointing this out to me.

Finally (I hope), Jim Keegan has taught me to never take an historical marker at face value, a fact I should have known based on the incorrect birth date given for Howard on the marker at Greenleaf Cemetery (below left). Keegan informs me that the information regarding former Peaster resident John Alexander Fox, which I used on pages 10 and 16, is wrong. According to Keegan, whose knowledge of such things far surpasses mine, Fox did not create the Buster Brown character: this accomplishment goes to comic strip artist Richard F. Outcault. I’ll try harder next time.

The imminent arrival of Rhymes of Salem Town got me thinking about Robert E. Howard’s poetry. With some 125 poems contained in that volume, most not seen before, and around 240 similarly unseen poems in the Collected Letters, there’s plenty for fans of Howard’s verse to be happy about: more than 300 previously unpublished poems on the way or almost on the way. To the best of my knowledge only three poems will appear in both Salem Town and the Letters, that’s 362 poems hot off the presses. Damn, how many poems did Howard write? And what’s it going to take to get them all?

After perusing The Neverending Hunt and making a few corrections and additions (with Paul Herman’s help, of course), I’ve come up with a grand total of 700 poems. Actually, I only counted 699, but I’m sure that number will turn out to be wrong; might go up, could go down. After acquiring the above mentioned volumes, the Howard poetry collector still needs to obtain more than 300 poems! And I thought getting all the prose was hard.

Without resorting to the impossible-to-find small-press publications, Howard’s poetry is still pretty tough to collect. Sure, most fans already have Always Comes Evening, but that only contains 70 (!) poems. There’s still more than 250 to be had. Even with volumes like Singers in the Shadows, Night Images, Verses in Ebony, etc., the Complete Poetry is still a ways off.

For example, “All Hallow’s Eve” has only been published twice: once in the March 1986 issue of Amazing Stories and again in The “New” Howard Reader #1; it has never been collected in a volume of verse. Nor has “Buccaneer Treasure,” which only appears in the January 1985 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories and the second issue of The “New” Howard Reader. And the list goes on, including “The Ballad of King Geraint,” arguably one of Howard’s most important pieces of verse, and inarguably his longest. This is only available in an ultra-rare chapbook or The “New” Howard Reader #6; and we all know how difficult it is to find copies of that. What’s a poetry fan to do?

At least as early as June of 2001 fans have been clamoring for The Complete Poetry. At Howard Days that year, the collection was announced as one of the “Wandering Star projects.” One post on the Inner Circle that same year had the Complete Poetry arriving the following summer, in 2002, as well as several other Howard projects. Well, we all know what happened with Wandering Star. . .

The creation of the Robert E. Howard Foundation late last year has pumped new life into these old projects: the remaining unpublished prose, the letters, . . . the poetry? Over on the Conan.com board, Paul Herman, a member of the board of directors, has made a few veiled suggestions (mostly to one “Buxom Sorceress” that the Complete Poetry might not be as dead as it appears, but he does caution that any such collection could be a “couple years” away. Regardless of the status of the Complete Poetry, with its current publishing schedule the REH Foundation is ushering into print more than 90% of Howard’s remaining unpublished verse. If that’s not cause for celebration, I don’t know what is.

At the dawn of Sword-and-Sorcery, at the very moment of the genre’s Cataclysmic birth, towers a story begun by a solitary Texan barely twenty years old. In the eighty years since, dozens of authors have fed on its aged marrow like vampires. Hundreds of books have appeared mimicking its startling idioms and seductive, haunting prose melodies. Countless millions of dollars have changed hands between readers starving for more of the same and publishers scurrying around like harried Oompa Loompas in their rush to provide it. And yet upon first publication its depressed, suicidal author received a meager $100, and would never again see it reprinted during his lifetime.

The man who meticulously constructed this genre was Robert E. Howard, and the story that exploded onto the scene with a Big Bang that still echoes in our ears today was “The Shadow Kingdom.”

Arguments about the scope and confines of genre too often descend into useless pedantry. I am reminded of film noir scholar Eddie Muller‘s witheringly brilliant retort to hairsplitters who would deny the great Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) a place in the pantheon: “To those who think this isn’t noir: Man uses woman. Woman uses man. Queasy sex. Betrayal. Madness. Gunshots. He’s face down in the pool he always wanted. Case closed.” For the attentive critic, genre labels have a purpose not to be deflected by myopic minds.

Often the most difficult part of talking intelligently about Sword-and-Sorcery is dodging the flailing Nerf blades swung in its defense by those who ostensibly would protect it from harm. Valka bless the boys at Swordandsorcery.org for the work they do popularizing a much-maligned art form, but articles like “The Demarcation of Sword and Sorcery” obsess over surface elements while careening past deeper connections with the bone-crunching regularity of Charlie Brown missing Lucy’s football. Sometimes you can’t win for losing — in “Demarcation” Steve Tompkins gets his name misspelled even as his “The Shortest Distance Between Two Towers” is trotted out in support of the notion that “there can be little argument that a great deal of separation exists between sword and sorcery and the rest of heroic fantasy.” Cimmerian readers may recall that in fact Tompkins’ essay cogently argues the exact opposite point — that there is in fact a “short distance” and not a “great deal of separation” between these demarcated kingdoms.

In “Demarcation,” author Joe McCullough goes on to conclude that

Sword and sorcery tells the tales of men who are free from all constraint. Their stature and skill mean they are free from the tyranny of other men. Their birth and raising free them from the morals and mores of society, and the lack of higher powers unbinds them from any concept of fate. Thus the heroes of sword and sorcery become the true representatives of free-will, and through their stories, readers are able to imagine the capabilities and the triumphs of men who are completely free to chart their own destiny.

It would be a pity if such rash and improvident definitions ever gain real purchase in the minds of thoughtful readers. The best Sword-and-Sorcery characters resist attempts to reduce them to comfortable stereotypes. Howard’s Kull time and again barely manages to escape from an ever-present entourage of enemies, only to remain ever-ensorcelled by the “ghosts of wild wars and world-ancient feuds,” the “inhuman powers of antiquity,” and most of all the ever-looming “phantom of his hate, the restless hatred of the savage, before which all else must give way.” With each story the King of Valusia triumphs fleetingly if at all, only to be seen at the beginning of the next tale with his golddust turned to sawdust:

There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem and upon the fingers of the women sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester’s bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh.

Even to kings, Howard purrs, and we can’t help but add “and to Sword-and-Sorcery heroes allegedly free from constraint.” The idea that S&S heroes lack the “mores and morals of society” is rebutted by innumerable passages in Howard’s work, as in this one from “The Scarlet Citadel”:

[Conan] had been placed in these pits for a definite doom. He cursed himself for his refusal of their offer, even while his stubborn manhood revolted at the thought, and he knew that were he taken forth and given another chance, his reply would be the same. He would not sell his subjects to the butcher. And yet it had been with no thought of anyone’s gain but his own that he had seized the kingdom originally. Thus subtly does the instinct of sovereign responsibility enter even a red-handed plunderer sometimes.

Postulating that Sword-and-Sorcery heroes by definition are “free from the tyranny of other men” becomes not only indefensible but insulting when one considers Charles Saunders’ hero Imaro, who thematically resonates as much about tyranny both cosmic and real as any fantasy hero created since December 6, 1865. And maybe it’s the guilty Catholic in me, but I can’t help imagining the shade of Karl Edward Wagner wanting to thump McCullough over the head with a Douay-Rheims Bible over his dictum that Sword-and-Sorcery tales feature a “lack of higher powers” that “unbinds [S&S heroes] from any concept of fate.”

In Tolkien’s defense, “Demarcation” inflicts a few goose eggs onto his wizened skull as well, as when McCullough states that “the rest of heroic fantasy, with its duties and obligations, has historically appealed to an older audience who are aware of the realities of such notions.” Perhaps he’s too young to remember the great surge of longhaired, pot-smoking, Led Zeppelin-worshipping, “Frodo Lives” hippie-folk and collegiate counter-culturists who were the true force behind Tolkien’s meteoric rise to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s. My own generation of young Dungeons & Dragons playing, Commodore 64 programming, “Shining City on a Hill” latchkey kids of the late ’70s and early ’80s solidified the trend.

Too often, knocking down these sorts of arguments feels like hammering gophers back into plastic holes at some bizarre litcrit Chuck-e-Cheese funland. It’s silly to get too tied down to genre for its own sake — Muller’s pithy yet devastatingly effective defense of Sunset Boulevard shows how people who dither with rigid formulas fall short. And yet for a genre to mean anything at all it does need boundaries, however translucent or overlapping. The trick is in defining them in a way so that they have utility in the real world. Noir is a not a series of dance steps executed in a predetermined order, it’s an overall tone — a mood, an overriding sense of cruel irony and inescapable fate. Muller telling noir fans why they better check out Sunset Boulevard — that’s utility. Good genre categorization is like the old canard about identifying pornography: you know it when you see it. That’s assuming, of course, that the critic making such judgments has his eyes open in the first place.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with retroactively folding older works into a modern genre if the result is a greater appreciation and knowledge of the field. If noir guys want to call M noir and make it that much more of an essential film to view, cool beans. If Sword-and-Sorcery buffs insist that Dunsany’s “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth” be listed before “The Shadow Kingdom” on any master list of must-read works in the field, more power to them. It’s almost always a bad idea to attempt to forcibly divide great fantasy works from each other on the basis of genre, as often the result is akin to Siamese twins being separated with a chainsaw. A generous policy of inclusion pays large dividends, as when Steve Tompkins demonstrated the benefits of letting the oft-separated blood brothers Tolkien and REH stand shoulder to shoulder. But it’s important to not lose sight of why genres spring up and where the trendlines form. Just as securities in the stock market tend to have remarkable leaders and laggards that drag whole industry groups up or down along with them, so too do seminal works in a genre create identifiable shockwaves throughout an art form, like a stone cast into a pond creating distinct ripples across its surface.

Which to my mind is why Lord Dunsany’s “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” is not the progenitor of the Sword-and-Sorcery genre and “The Shadow Kingdom” is.

Make no mistake: “Sacnoth” is a fine tale that carefully evokes an ancient métier: the pure adult fairy tale. Frequently going out of its way to remind the audience that it is a fiction, at the same time it urges us to lower our sophisticated defenses and fully give ourselves over to the impossible events depicted. It’s a brilliant and heartfelt love letter to the kind of fantasy found in William Beckford’s Vathek or the much older Arabian Nights — in that sense, it deftly and deliberately presents us with nothing new. Like those Sword-and-Sorcery paperbacks of yore, “Sacnoth” is “In the Tradition of. . .” any number of things. And yet despite its formidable presentation of what are now seen as S&S clichés, admiring readers are hard-pressed to say what wouldn’t exist right now had “Sacnoth” never been written. No new genre label was deemed necessary because of “Sacnoth,” no clamor for similar fare was heard, no groundswell of imitation followed its publication. “Sacnoth” and Dunsany both deserve better than they’ve got in recent years, but as it stands the story is a minor curio for fantasy fans. It’s a groin-straining stretch to grant it pride of place as the instigator of the Sword-and-Sorcery genre, despite plodding through tiresome surface calculations of its use of — duh — both swords and sorcery.

“Sacnoth” is best valued as a part of that vast tapestry of the fantastic and mythic that preceded Sword-and-Sorcery, one of thousands of works peppered with elements that would one day become part of the trappings of the new genre. These elements were floating through stories for millennia, but the pressing need to define a neologic subsphere of fantasy occurred precisely due to an explosion of fiction in the middle of the last century, one whose tidal wave ripples can be traced unerringly backwards through a host of authors and fanzines to the adventures of Conan the Cimmerian in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, and from there back in time to Ground Zero: the first such story to appear in that magazine by the same prophetic author — “The Shadow Kingdom.”

Like a prism, “The Shadow Kingdom” focused a series of varying, disparate colors from the fantasy spectrum, blended them in the cauldron of Howard’s imagination, and shot out of the other side a white light unlike anything seen before. Legions of readers and writers have been wrestling with the repercussions of that eerie witch-glow ever since. It shines both forward and backward in space/time and illuminates countless works of merit, including Lord Dunsany’s “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth.” But the luminous filament casting that glare clearly emanates from a single place and time — a white clapboard house in Texas circa 1926. Remembering that not only honors Howard, but helps us clearly see what we mean when we say “Sword-and-Sorcery.” We know it when we see it because Kull lit the way, and we still worry and wonder about it because Conan built the Fortress that yet protects it from ruin, and from those who seek to peel off authors and stories and banish them to the hinterlands, whether said authors be past masters such as Lord Dunsany or J.R.R. Tolkien, or modern notables such as David Gemmell, Charles Saunders, or Karl Edward Wagner.