Two tips which might be helpfulf to TC readers. Necronomicon Press is back open for business and is offering a fifteen percent discount on all titles bought on their site. Courtesy of Bill Thom and Coming Attractions, I learned that Wildside Press has a thirty percent off sale going on for orders of three or more books.
Michael Ehart‘s new Sword-and-Sorcery book, The Tears of Ishtar, published by Ancient Tomes Press, is a novelization of all the stories featuring his heroine/anti-heroine Ninshi, who previously appeared in The Servant of the Manthycore. This volume will include the tales from the former book, plus, according to the author, “a ton of new stuff.”
An artist's impression of Jason Momoa as Conan
Well, it’s been a week or so, and official confirmation has been delivered. Jason Momoa, he of Baywatch, North Shore and Stargate Atlantis, follows in the illustrious footsteps of such magnificent thespians as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ralph Moeller, as the latest to don the proverbial throne-treading sandals of the most iconic barbarian in modern fiction.
Well, no time like the present to offer my thoughts on the situation. Beware, landlubbers: these seas be rife with snark.
Professor of psychology (and REHupan) Charles Allen Gramlich is also the author of several novels, short stories, as well as non-fiction and poetry. Last December he announced on RAZORED ZEN, his blog, that he was working on an anthology of his Sword-and-Sorcery short tales.
The provisional title of this upcoming volume is Bitter Steel. It will collect stories mostly published in the early ’90s and include both serious and humorous S&S yarns. A third of the anthology will feature the same character, Thal Kyrin. The earliest tales have been revised, some yarns will have alternate endings and notes were added. Charles Gramlich explained that the preface “focuses primarily on Robert E. Howard as the man who created the Sword & Sorcery genre. It doesn’t say too much about the stories in the collection, because I want them to stand on their own.” Then an opening poem written “on the same rhyme scheme and rhythm” as Robert E. Howard’s “Recompense” will follow. Mr Gramlich explains how he put this anthology together in several blogs which can be found here and here. It was very interesting to learn about his working process and I’m really looking forward to reading Bitter Steel.
I see where in honor of Bob’s birthday people are relating their first encounter with his work. My story is, I think, unique; at least, I’ve never heard a similar one.
I was 14 and had read every Edgar Rice Burroughs story to be found, and a lot of Andre Norton as well. I went to the downtown Sears by bus, to check out their mezzanine bookstore which was the only place I knew that had those Ace paperbacks with the cool Krenkel and Frazetta covers. And my eye was caught by a crudely painted cover with a gory scene of an ape with its arm hacked off and a near-naked hairy guy who was apparently doing the hacking. Apparently Lancer had put out a new printing of the Conan series, but other people had already bought all the Frazetta ones. No matter; this, and the other Duillo-covered one, Conan the Wanderer, looked interesting enough to pick up and take home.
Part four of Blogging the Silmarillion continues with chapters 10-15 of the Quenta Silmarillion.
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“If we insist on asking for the moral of the story, that is its moral: a recall from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike, to that hard, yet not quite desperate, insight into Man’s unchanging predicament by which heroic ages have lived. It is here that the Norse affinity is strongest: hammerstrokes but with compassion.”
—C.S. Lewis, “The Dethronement of Power,” from Tolkien and the Critics
J.R.R. Tolkien said in a letter that “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” While true, this oft-quoted statement has led some critics and observers to pigeonhole it and his works as simple analogues of Christianity. This leads to conclusions that The Silmarillion is a parable of the Fall of Man, for instance, when in fact Tolkien’s legendarium is perhaps more akin to a hauberk of hard scale armor, its iron plates hammered together from a mosaic of influences, both Christian and other.
The deeper you get into The Silmarillion the more you feel a coldness grip your spine. It’s a bitter wind whose source is the wild North. As the late Steve Tompkins once said, “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.” While it may have been only hinted at in past chapters, this northern-ness resounds like the great hammer of Thor in the section of The Silmarillion that I plan to cover here.
The 117th anniversary of Clark Ashton Smith’s birth last week was marked by The Cimmerian (here, here, and here), Grognardia, Black Gate, and others with accolades and remembrances. As well it should. Smith, along with Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, formed the weird fiction triptych of the 1920s and ’30s — and in my opinion, he was the most talented member of a talented group. Yet a recurring question in many of these memorials is why Smith remains uncelebrated in comparison to his partners. This is especially vexing when you consider he outlived the other two by almost a quarter-century.
Blogger Jackson Kuhl (a personage not unknown to long-time TC readers) wrote the above in an entry he posted on Robert E. Howard’s birthday, ironically enough. Kuhl’s article, entitled “The Obscurity of Clark Ashton Smith,” answers the “vexing question” of CAS’ lack of literary prominence by pointing the finger directly at those who control Smith’s estate. Kuhl relates his (ultimately futile) struggles to publish an omnibus gathering together all of the Averoigne stories (a collection yours truly has been waiting for these past two decades). It is a disheartening tale, but one that should be read by every fan of the Bard of Auburn.
The news that Jason Momoa has been cast in the role of “Conan” for the upcoming flick being put together by Nu Millennium has sparked some debate around the Net. A lot of that discourse has centered upon Momoa’s half-Hawaiian ancestry (and highly Hawaiian looks) and also what Robert E. Howard meant by “Cimmerian.”
Some readers of The Cimmerian may be aware that TC blogger, Al Harron, has his own wee web log, The Blog That Time Forgot. This week, Al has taken a look at some of the mind-blowing assertions being made over at the Superhero Hype forums. If you feel like a chuckle (or a groan), check out Al’s summary of it all here.
Al Harron
AL SPEAKS FROM HIS FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE: Curses, looks like I’ve been found out! Still, if you think that’s bad, you should see this MySpace blog. Two thousand comments, and my brain is just about ready to revolt, and leap out of my body for greener pastures.
DEUCE ADDS: I thought I might alert TC readers to the fact that Al Harron has since braved the dullard-haunted morass of the MySpace Conan blog (merely to “observe” the mouth-breathing antics of the dwellers therein, or so he claims) and returned alive. Changed, perhaps, but living, nonetheless. He tells the tale here.
Illustration for the poem "Autumn Chill"
Fans of Robert E. Howard know Richard L. Tierney due to his completions of Cormac Fitzgeoffrey and Cormac Mac Art fragments and perhaps also for his Red Sonja novels written with David C. Smith. As Al Harron judiciously noted it last year when he announced this volume of poems, Tierney was, with Dirk Mosig, one of the first “Lovecraftian purists.” Some of his poems appeared also in The Cimmerian print journal. This collection of Tierney’s horror and fantasy poems inspired by H.P Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert E. Howard, Savage Menace and other poems of horror, published by P’rea Press, is coming out this month.
Information for buying the book can be had through the publisher’s email, DannyL58@hotmail.com.
Book Palace Books informs us about the soon to be released third Conan volume.
