chine

Noun
1. backbone; spine

[origin: 14th century; Middle English; from Anglo-French , enchine; of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German, scina, shinbone, needle]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

Chief Oswald was a man of war,
Fame of his deeds was blown afar.
Now he smote on the British line,
Cleft a Briton from chin to chine,
Severed another through the spine.
From another knight he dashed the brain,
Charged from the side at the king amain.
Conal’s sight was growing dim,
He saw the fight in a red haze swim.
His sword arm hung like an arm of lead,
He scarce could lift his armored head,
His life was ebbing in spurts of red.
But even as waning sight was spent
He saw the peril of Geraint.
He reined about his weary horse
And barred the furious Saxon’s course.
And the blow for the back of the king was stayed
By Conal’s notched unsteady blade.
Rider and steed in one overthrow
Sank beneath that fearful blow.
King Geraint wheeled and he saw the end
Of his trusted comrade and boyhood friend.
His heart went cold and his lips went pale;
He smote the Saxon like a gale,
Rent his shield and his coat of mail.
Oswald lay by Conal’s side
And over them washed the battle tide.

[from "The Ballad of King Geraint"; to read the complete poem, see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 73]

I just know I’m going to get some outraged emails at 12:01am on September 1 from people irate that they had no adequate warning of my decision to stop selling back issues after August 31, and upset that I’m being such a hardass about my deadline (I’ve already had people vainly ask me to extend the deadline just for them, or let them keep things on layaway for days, weeks, or months, despite my very clear blog post last time about those things). So to be perfectly clear as we come down the home stretch:

August 31, 2009 is the date after which all excess unsold copies of The Cimmerian will be destroyed. If you want any after that, you’ll have to wait for already-sold copies to appear on eBay, or scavenge at the REH Museum in Cross Plains for what copies they might still have.

No, I’m not going to change my mind. No, there will be no extensions or copies held on layaway.

August 31 is the date. Get ‘em while you can.

And to be assured of getting your order, your don’t just need to send me an email requesting the issues by the deadline, your money needs to be sitting in my PayPal account by midnight of the night of Aug. 31–Sept. 1, Pacific Time. Any monies sent after that time will be refunded and the orders will go unfilled. And any email conversations that we might have had before the deadline that were ultimately not sealed by a payment will be considered void.

I’ve been overwhelmed with orders the past few weeks and am slowly working through them whenever I get free time, so if you’ve sent in money and I’ve confirmed receipt, don’t worry, you’ll be getting your package soon. Any questions, feel free to ask. If you have been sitting on the fence for the last five years, you have until Monday evening to get in on the action.

I can’t make it any more clear than that.

The geography and ecology of Khitai is fascinating in its own right, but it is not all we know or can extrapolate from Howard. This second week of my look at Khitai will go into detail regarding the religion and culture of the mysterious jungle nation.

Religion

“It was made from the black lotus, whose blossoms wave in the lost jungles of Khitai, where only the yellow-skulled priests of Yun dwell.”

“The Tower of the Elephant”

There are three deities mentioned by Robert E. Howard present in Khitai: the first is Yogah.

Yogah, also known as Yag-Kosha, is an extraterrestrial being from the planet Yag, who was exiled from his home by its kings. When he was the last remaining of the outcasts, Yogah dwelt in Khitai, worshiped by the locals. Since Yogah imparted white magic to Yara, it is logical that he did this with the Khitans also, resulting in him being deified as a god of knowledge, wisdom and magic. These folk may be the same priests who charm gray apes, and induce them to dance to their pipes. Quite why or how they can do this is unclear, but presumably it is part of their mysterious rites, maybe taught to them by Yogah himself. Perhaps the jungle-folk appealed to Yogah for assistance against the apes’ predations: Yogah would teach them a peaceful way to control the beasts, inciting them to expend their energy in wild dancing, until they could dance no longer, and fell asleep. The Khitans would leave food offerings beside the apes, and upon awakening, they would take this food and retreat to the jungle, to feast peacefully and contentedly.

It isn’t clear how the Khitans reacted to Yara’s kidnapping of Yogah: one would assume that they would be dismayed at this act of iconoclasm, but even with Yogah’s white magic, they may have been unable to stop Yara with both his own dark powers and those of the enslaved, unwilling Yogah against them. The fact that Yara succeeded in taking Yogah indicates that, all in all, Yogah was likely to be a minor deity, a local tribal god. Since the wizards of the east are considered greater than those of the west (at least by Hadrathus in The Hour of the Dragon), it’s difficult to see how Yara could succeed with even a few Khitan wizards on his trail, let alone the entire nation of Khitai.

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Roland Emmerich’s much-maligned pre-historic fantasy adventure is making the rounds of the cable channels these days. It’s not a good movie, but it’s not as terrible as some claim either. Slavers capture some people from a tribe of mammoth hunters, including our hero’s love, so he sets out with a few other brave friends to track them down and effect a rescue. It turns out they are being taken to slave on massive pyramids, being erected by an advanced prehistoric civilization a la Stygia, ruled by sacrifice-demanding “gods” from Atlantis, or perhaps another world. There are other weird elements in the prophecies that move the plot and an ancient witch-woman with visionary and other powers. Obviously, complaints about historical accuracy are as off base as they would be regarding a Kull movie. The real stars of the show are the metafuana, particularly a scene stealing digital sabre-tooth and the hordes of mammoths.
Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers agrees:

The best acting comes from woolly mammoths, man-eating ostriches and a saber-toothed tiger — and those babies are digital. It’s the human actors who look fake.

Like Conan, D’leh (Steven Strait) can raise an army when needed, and he manages to recruit a tribe of black savages to his cause as well as igniting a slave rebellion among the pyramid workers.

The climactic invasion of the united barbarians and savages, sweeping into the decadent civilization of the pyramid-builders to slaughter and destroy evokes Howard; it’s like watching the fall of Acheron or the chaotic climax of “Marchers of Valhalla.”

Like “In the Name of the King,” this is an attempt to do sword & sorcery without actually crediting Howard, but his influence is there anyway. It’s also an interesting enough, if flawed, popcorn movie.

I’ve been on an escape kick lately. I wrote about it here at The Cimmerian, and in the latest issue of The Dark Man I have a published opinion piece about its presence in the works of Robert E. Howard.

In short, while some critics consider escape a dirty word, I think it’s one of fantasy’s strengths, and a quality of the genre to be embraced, not shunned. I also think that readers who deny fantasy’s escapist element are deluding themselves; we love sword fights, and alien landscapes, and dragons. If we didn’t, wouldn’t we all be reading non-fiction or John Steinbeck novels instead?

As a followup on my recent post extolling the values of escapism, here’s some more of my thoughts on how this quality relates to Howard’s Conan stories.

For readers not afraid to embrace its delicious rewards, Howard’s stories offer a rewarding escape destination, “An age undreamed of when shining Kingdoms lay spread across the world, like blue mantles beneath the stars.” Like a long vacation after many months of thankless work, an escape to the Hyborian Age illuminates new possibilities for the reader.

Here are a few choice offerings.

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Lamb’s obituaries in 1962 barely mentioned his fiction. By then, the cheap magazines that had published his yarns were long forgotten except by a few passionate collectors. Like a burial mound’s hidden hoard of treasure, they lay undisturbed, awaiting their rediscovery by Mr. Jones — and now a growing band of admirers.

Such is the coda of John J. Miller’s article concerning Harold Lamb’s career and the publication of Swords From the West, one of a brace of (very recently published) editions collecting Lamb’s work put out by Bison Books.

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Donald M. Grant died the other day in Florida. The name might not mean much to those but recently come to Robert E. Howard fandom. To REH fans like myself, who came of age before 1990, Donald M. Grant and the publishing company he founded represented a source of quality hardcovers featuring the fiction of Howard, Harold Lamb, Karl Edward Wagner and others that was unmatched anywhere else.

It took me a few years to realize that some of the Zebra paperbacks that introduced me to Robert E. Howard’s work originated as DMG hardcovers (cut me some slack, I wasn’t even a teenager). Once I did, I tried to get hold of such when I could afford them. Grant’s publishing house printed the first collection of Howard’s verse I ever owned. Donald M. Grant, Publishing, Inc. is still the only English-language publisher to have printed One Who Walked Alone and Post Oaks and Sand Roughs. While I own a beautiful copy of The Road of Azrael published by Mr. Grant, I am sad to say that an edition of the DMG The Sowers of the Thunder, generally considered one of the finest illustrated books to ever showcase the work of Robert E. Howard, eludes me. (Continue reading this post)

bill

noun
1. a weapon in use up to the 18th century that consists of a long staff ending in a hook-shaped blade.

[origin: 14th century; Middle English bil, from Old English bill sword; akin to old High German bill pickax]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

There’s a bell that hangs in a hidden cave

Under the heathered hills

That knew the tramp of the Roman feet

And the clash of the Pictish bills.

[from "The Bell of Morni"; to read the whole poem, see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 193]

For those of you who live in Texas or can get there, and have never met Glenn Lord (only the world’s greatest Howard fan, collector, and scholar), here’s your chance. On Saturday, August 29, some fans are holding a get-together with Glenn in Houston. The place: Joe’s Crab Shack, 12400 Gulf Freeway. The time: 1 p.m.–3 p.m. Don’t miss it.

In the news this week, it was revealed that the expansion to the best-selling game based on the Hyborian setting would bring Khitai to the Age of Conan. Titled “Rise of the Godslayer,” the expansion seems ideal for the lucrative Chinese and Korean online gaming market–no doubt giving their Beijing office plenty to do. They decline to take Conan and the Demons of Khitai one-off as inspiration, in favor of an aesthetic altogether closer to a Chinese milieu, which is certainly music to my ears.

Those acquainted with World of Warcraft and Masters of the Universe will no doubt find the sight of giant tigers as mounts familiar. But what of Conan himself? The synopsis of the expansion’s story puts “The Tower of the Elephant” in an entirely new light, and raises many questions regarding the fate of Yogah and the mysterious evil he was protecting the Khitans from.

The lack of concrete information about Khitai would make it ideal for a game setting, since it allows greater freedom of interpretation without taking extreme liberties with the stories. As demonstrated in the first issue of the Hyborian Age Gazetteer, with a bit of application and connections, one can easily flesh out the character, history and culture of a nation. Since Khitai is mentioned not once, but several times, this makes it even easier. This gazetteer will, hopefully, serve as both a small guide to Khitai as Howard described, and a look at what Funcom’s plans for the Blue East may entail.

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