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.

(Continue reading this post)

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.

A Cimmerian reader 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.

(Continue reading this post)