Grab ‘em while they’re hot, my gentle readers.

On Saturday, Terry Allen, REH fan extraordinaire (and honcho of the REH Comics Group) posted on the Official Robert E. Howard Forum regarding Howard’s placement in Amazon’s Top Five Fantasy Bestsellers. Learning this, I felt a rush of righteous exultation.

 For a while, I refrained from using the link Terry provided, since I didn’t figure there was much more to be learned by actually going to Amazon’s website. Eventually, however, I noticed something odd about the title of the Howard volume in question. I couldn’t recall ever seeing this title in print: The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 1: The Shadow Kingdom.

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As some TC readers may know, acclaimed English fantasy author, Robert Holdstock, died just the other day. Over at the REHupa blog, Morgan Holmes gives his personal perspective on Holdstock’s career. Scottish fantasy author, Brian Ruckley, blogs about his deep admiration for Holdstock here.

 From all accounts, Robert Holdstock was a man who loved life and lived it to the fullest.

kine

noun

1. Archaic.  plural of cow.

[origin: Middle English kyn, from Old English cyna, genitive pl. of cu]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

Kine is used in three of Robert E. Howard’s poems:

Last he turned to the Northward, leaving the warm seas behind,
Leaving behind the warm lands rich with gold and with kine.
Back, yes back to the Northland sailed Harald, the viking bold,
With his long ship red with blood and weighted with gems and gold.
To Kirkness-town he sailed and anchored his long ship there,
With his flag, the flag of the cormorant, floating free to the air.

[from “Eric of Norway”; to read the complete poem, see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 356 and The Rhyme of Salem Town, p. 76]

Let him teach
Of destruction of sin,
Decency toward women,
Kindness toward men.
Ho, then the swine!
In fury they rise,
Bigoted hate
In their piggish eyes.
Nay, nay, seek not
To uplift the swine.
Prey upon them
Like a wolf on kine.

[from “Mankind”; to read the complete poem, see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 358 and The Rhyme of Salem Town, p. 24]

Now I am but a simple churl
Who loves the kine and grass,
To watch the burning dawns unfurl,
And the fleecy clouds that pass.

I love to dream and take my ease,
I wish no mortal ill;
I thought to live my life in peace
On some green Devon hill.

But when the Broad-brims stopped all play,
And stifled fun and mirth
I roused myself and rode away
To ride them off the earth.

[from “The Road to Bliss”; to read the complete poem, see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 479 and A Rhyme of Salem Town, p. 88]

Gbo (or close enough)

Charles R. Saunders has posted a very helpful blog entry for the bovinically-challenged on his website. Saunder’s utterly bad-ass Sword-and-Sorcery heroine, Dossouye, is partnered in her exploits by an equally deadly “side-kick” named Gbo. Gbo is not to be trifled with, nor is he an Asian water buffalo. Mr. Saunders sets the record straight.

I first read about Dossouye and Gbo in Amazons! around 1980 (the story in question was “Agbewe’s Sword”). At the time, I was struck by how unique CRS’ pairing of warrior and bull was in fantasy fiction. Unique, but not unlikely. Having grown up around cattle all my life, it seemed far more probable that a (woman-) warrior would bestride such a steed than, say, a dragon. Bovines, even domesticated ones, are formidable beasts. Generally speaking, for any herd animal to survive, it must possess one of two traits: speed or lethality. Bovines aren’t renowned for their speed. There is a perfectly logical reason why the very capable predators of sub-Saharan Africa have never wiped out the Cape buffalo. Cape buffalos are bad news.

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REHupan (and Professor) Frank Coffman now has his Robert E. Howard: Selected Poems ready for online purchase at lulu.com. Here’s the info…

$23.50

Ships in 3–5 business days

A large and representative selection of the poetic work of Robert E. Howard, with a general introductory essay, 30 chapter introductions, and commentary by Prof. Frank Coffman, one of the foremost authorities on Howard’s verse and “ways with words.”

Three indexes add to the value of this ample selection: by title, by first lines, and a “Form Finder” index to allow quick access to Howard’s work with the ballad, the sonnet, blank verse, free verse and other forms and techniques.

Well over half of Howard’s more than 700 poems are included in this text, set in a text size and format for presentation that enhances readability and enjoyment. For those who are familiar with Howard’s prose fictional works, but who remain uninitiated in the many qualities and nuances of Howard’s verse, this compilation and commentary will offer insights into the complexity, quality and breadth of his work. For those who believe they know Howard’s poetic work, some new perspectives will broaden their appreciation.

No other pulp magazine featured more of Howard's stories and poems than Weird Tales.

Previous installments:
Pulp Collecting and REH, Part 1

First issue of Weird Tales from March 1923.

There are few creators who are as enjoyable to collect as Robert E. Howard. His works have been published and adapted in various forms and in numerous media for over eight decades.  Howard items have an incredibly broad range in scarcity and value so that any collector on most any budget can usually find a niche within the hobby that suits their tastes and resources.

Out of all the REH collectibles out there, however, there is nothing – at least to this writer – quite like the original pulp magazines. To be able to hold in your hands one of these relics of a bygone publishing era and read one of Howard’s yarns as his first generation of fans would have done is a special experience indeed. The primitive line drawings that comprise the interior illustrations, the smell of the pulp paper, the letters from readers arguing the tastefulness (or lack thereof) of Margaret Brundage’s latest racy cover – all these things help to connect the modern collector with that earlier time when Two-Gun Bob was still alive and well and furiously pounding away on his Underwood.

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It seems that a disagreement between gaming company Mongoose Publishing and the Conan license holders has led to the company parting ways with the Conan property:

A disagreement between ourselves and the licence holders has resulted in Conan being suspended in limbo. It is a tricky position – we cannot produce more material for the game (sales of further OGL Conan supplements will simply not justify the work required), and we have been forbidden to move the sword-swinging barbarian to a new games system.

As I said in a previous post, I’m not much of an active gamer, at least not to the degree of my fellow shield-bearers Brian Murphy and Deuce Richardson. I’ve never hosted or played a game of Mongoose’s Conan RPG, simply because I haven’t made the leap to actively seek out people for the simple purpose of The Game. Still, I find something immensely appealing about the roll of the die, the active imagination of mighty deeds and foul deviltry, and the arcane esoterica of the Dungeon Master. I currently own more than a few of the supplements Mongoose published, many by their resident loreman Vincent Darlage, since the art and scholarship was well worth reading in itself, though there are a few problems.

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In the latest The Dark Man, Charles Hoffman’s “Elements of Sadomasochism in the Fiction and Poetry of Robert E. Howard” has some interesting comments on “The Hyena“, a very early Howard story written while Howard was still in his teens.
It is interesting to find that he also used this setting with two other tales, “The Slayer“, and “The Wings of the Bat“, both unprinted until The Last of The Trunk. Both tales also involve Ju-Ju men, or witch-doctors, plotting mayhem against the whites. One would conclude that “The Slayer“ is a direct sequel to “The Hyena“, as the narrator refers to having killed Senecoza previously. But we are told by Hoffman that “The Hyena“ was written in 1924, and the editor of Trunk tells us the other stories are “pre-1924″. So either Howard wrote the sequel first, or more likely someone is in error. In a homage to the Alan Quatermain stories, the king of the Zulus in “Bat“ is named Umslopogas. It still amazes me that out of all the material available to him, August Derleth included “Hyena“ in the second Howard collection, The Dark Man and Others.

DEUCE ADDS: A couple years ago, over at conan.com, Patrice Louinet had this to say about “The Slayer”:

REH actually began a sort of sequel to the story, featuring the same hero and mentioning Senecoza. This fragment, tentatively titled “The Slayer” by Glenn Lord, will be included in The Last of the Trunk, the book collecting the immense majority of as-yet-unpublished Howard fiction, forthcoming from the Robert E. Howard Foundation.

“The Wings of the Bat,” to my ear, definitely sounds like it was partially a riff on Sax Rohmer’s Bat-Wing, a book we know REH read. Rob Roehm blogged about it here.

As for Derleth selecting “The Hyena” for The Dark Man, I’m not particularly surprised, considering Derleth’s blinkered and untrustworthy taste in regards to REH’s fiction. On the other hand, just before The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard was released, there was a certain REH fan shambling about the blogosphere who practically called Rusty Burke a Howardian anti-christ for leaving ”The Hyena” out. He cited Derleth’s unerring judgement for support.

While Howard won’t be listed on anyone’s list of great visual artists any time soon, his style is clean, his perspective accurate, and his attention to detail surprisingly good. All of the items mentioned here wouldn’t even fill up a thin chapbook, but who knows what other items remain buried in the Howard archives?

– Rob Roehm, from his post, “The Complete Drawings of REH?”, November 17, 2007. 

Now, just a little over two years later, this news from Rob Roehm, over at The Robert E. Howard Foundation website…

The Robert E. Howard Foundation is pleased to announce The Collected Drawings of Robert E. Howard. This slim, 42-page volume collects all of the known artwork by our favorite Texan. All of the comics and doodles from his letters and all of the Hyborian Age maps have been collected, but that’s not all. Many previously unpublished maps for stories like “Blood of the Gods” and “Wild Water” have been cleaned up and are presented here for the first time. Also, a fantastic discovery was made in Texas last year: Robert E. Howard’s high school text book. On each of the blank pages within that book, a young Howard doodled characters from his favorite stories in Adventure magazine, 11 characters in all. There was also a loose sheet of paper folded in the book with additional drawings. All are collected here. Order today and, depending on which shipping option is chosen, it might just show up in time for Christmas.

The Collected Drawings is an 8.5 x 11, perfect-bound paperback with an introduction by Bill Cavalier. Prepared for publication by yours truly.

This sounds like a cool little package. Apparently, the REHF is going with a paperback edition from lulu.com for this volume, just as they did for the first edition of Barbara Barrett’s The Wordbook. What has me really fired up are the maps that will be reproduced. We know that REH drafted rough maps (just like Conan) for several yarns, including The Hour of the Dragon. On top of that, several of the drawings I’ve seen are quite good for an untrained artist. For complete information about this REHF project, see here.

Earlier this year, Leo Grin reported on the debut of The Hunt for Gollum, a fan film chronicling Aragorn’s search for the fallen hobbit during the Watchful Peace prior to the outbreak of war. It was well-received, and is probably one of the finer examples of fan cinema in terms of technical achievement. However, like Leo, I have to lament the fact that it wasn’t truly a Lord of the Rings adaptation, but a New Line Cinema Lord of the Rings fan film: the cinematography, costume, music and character design was exactly like in the films.

It’s really hard to criticize the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The sheer amount of love, effort and perseverance which went into production from every member of the crew is breathtaking and infectious, practically unprecedented, and the sort of thing we rarely see in such a project. It undoubtedly led people to seek out more Tolkien to read, and though Jackson, Boyens & Walsh took some unfortunate, unnecessary and downright infuriating liberties with the script, they were certainly more respectful and appreciative of Tolkien than, say, Paul Verhoeven was with Robert A. Heinlein, whose first few chapters of the novel Starship Troopers left him “bored and depressed”–not that it would stop him from adapting it. Or John Milius was of Howard. I tend to swing between two extremes: on the one hand, great appreciation of the score, cinematography, creature design and environments; on the other, dislike of the additions and alterations of the script, plot and characters. When it reached the highs, it was stratospheric: when it plumbed the depths, it was subterranean.

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