troll

noun

1. a dwarf or giant in Scandinavian folklore inhabiting caves or hills.

According to a 1908 encyclopedia: “Trolls are dwarfs of Northern mythology, living in hills or mounds; they are represented as stumpy, misshapen, and humpbacked, inclined to thieving, and fond of carrying off children or substituting one of their own offspring for that of a human child. They are called hill-people, and are especially averse to noise, from a recollection of the time when Thor used to fling his hammer at them.”

[origin: 1616; Norwegian troll and Dan trold, from Old Norse troll giant, demon; probably akin to Middle High German trolle lout]

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.

It has not rung for a thousand years,
To waken the sleeping trolls,
But God defend the sons of men
When the bell of the Morni tolls.

[from “Bell of Morni”; for the complete poem see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 193]

Looks like a final piece of news for The Cimmerian, at least for the month of May: according to TheOneRing.Net, Guillermo Del Toro is apparently leaving production of the upcoming film adaptations of The Hobbit.

This doesn’t come as a surprise to me. The financial and legal wrangling going about the project looked like they weren’t going to be over anytime soon, and with over two years going, I can’t blame Del Toro from moving on. While I think Del Toro may have surprised us with the films, Jackson (pictured above with Del Toro) & company are still in control, and that will always be a source of intense division among fans.

The question now becomes, who will step up to the plate in Del Toro’s absence?

A couple weeks ago I reviewed R. J. Myers’ The Cross of Frankenstein. It was the respected political commentator’s first foray into fiction. He followed it with a sequel, 1976’s The Slave of Frankenstein and despite the promise of a third book, his only other genre efforts were a late seventies soft-core vampire title and a privately-published guide to blood-drinking as an alternative lifestyle. I always feel a pang of guilt when I come down hard on a fellow pastiche writer. I’ve been on the receiving end of disappointed Sax Rohmer and Conan Doyle fans who felt I had no business continuing the adventures of characters they love. At the same time, I believe I have been fair and honest in my assessments when reviewing pastiches. I have the utmost respect for Joe Gores, Michael Hardwick, Cay Van Ash, and Freda Warrington as writers who tried hard to stay true to the original author in terms of style and spirit. I can still enjoy Peter Tremayne and Basil Copper who, despite falling short of the mark, can still spin an entertaining yarn. Consequently, I feel justified when I confine Myers to the lowest pit of literary Hell alongside Ian Holt and Richard Jaccoma for The Slave of Frankenstein, while a very different beast than Myers’ first effort, is equally contemptible.

The book begins thirty years after the events of The Cross of Frankenstein. Our dishonorable hero, Victor Saville found himself wanted for the murder of the detestable Mr. Greene shortly after the close of the first book. Wisely, Saville sought legal counsel and confessed a full account of the incredible events that transpired. Strangely, his legal counsel didn’t believe that self-defense when dealing with a murderous political revolutionary allied with the Frankenstein Monster would help his case so he advised his client to change his name and become an American citizen. The trick is that the new surname Victor chose was Frankenstein which rather defeats the purpose of going into hiding since any surviving members of the religious cult and private militia knew Saville to be Frankenstein’s son.

Sure enough, over the next thirty years, the Monster (yes, the Monster) sends him a series of harassing letters to his new home. Victor chooses to ignore these and considers his father’s creation to be nothing more than an irritating crank. You know I can’t think of a worse portrayal of Mary Shelley’s dignified and awesome literary character than turning him into a nineteenth century prank caller. The years have passed and Victor married, fathered a son and daughter (Victor and Victoria, naturally), became a widower and finally gets pissed off that the Monster is now threatening to do nasty things to Victoria (now a student at Oberlin College) so he decides at the ripe old age of 60 to journey to Virginia and kill his father’s other son once and for all. (Continue reading this post)

Well, it appears that’s that. Just a scant week ago, I was astonished to discover it had been exactly one year since my debut on The Cimmerian, and now it appears my first year will be my last on the site.

Working at TC has been the time of my life. I followed the blog for years, always hoping that someday I might be able to make an impact comparable to it: maybe even join the elite ranks of TC itself. I was astonished to see Steve Tompkins post my silly little story, and for it to result in a great throwdown between Leo & Steve on the merits of Conan the Barbarian and Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. To be invited as a regular (after all that) in 2009 was, at the risk of being terribly trite, a dream come true.

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The Dark Man, vol. 5, no. 1

The most recent issue of The Dark Man (vol. 5, no. 1), the peer-reviewed journal of Robert E. Howard studies is now available from Gavinicuss Books and Mike Chomko Books. This issue contains three articles from REH scholars Charles Hoffman, Jeffrey Kahan, and Philip Emery as well as several reviews by Hoffman and Morgan Holmes. This week I would like to take a closer look at the three main articles in this issue and add a few comments of my own.

The first article, “’The Shadow of the Beast’: A Closer Look,” by Hoffman discusses one of the more unseemly sides of Howard’s work in analyzing the theme of miscegenation in “Shadow” and some of the other “Piney Woods” horror stories. The subject of Howard’s views on “race” is certainly a touchy one and often evokes passionate responses on the part of his fans (see for example this 17-page thread from the official REH forums). Trying to decipher the personal views of someone who lived and died nearly a century before is always a dangerous game, even when one has access to numerous writings and personal correspondence. To paraphrase Mark Finn, Howard’s views on race were complicated. Whatever his personal views, it is undeniable that Howard, like many pulp writers (as well as creators from other media), did make use of a number of the often-demeaning racial stereotypes of his day.

In this article, Hoffman unflinchingly discusses one of these stereotypes — the sexually aggressive black male who lusts after white women — and looks at how Howard made use of it in certain of his stories in order to play on the fears of his readers. For Hoffman, the fear of miscegenation in white America was “at the root of horrific violence committed against blacks” (TDM 5.1, p. 8). This is something of a generalization, but there is probably a lot of truth there. Consider the incredible popularity of the film Birth of a Nation (1915), in which the ‘heroic’ Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue of a helpless white woman in the clutches of a lustful black man, or the intense hatred directed at heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, who dared to cross the color-line not only in the ring, but also in the bedroom.

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This is it. Quite possibly the iconic Conan image. It adorns the walls of bedrooms and offices as posters, decorates the cover of Conan the Adventurer and others, even used as a basis for film posters — Conan or otherwise. Everything a Conan or Sword-and-Sorcery fan could want is in this image: the muscular hero standing atop a veritable hill of ruin and carnage; the hints of sorcery and eldritch horror lurking in the background; the inimitable Frazetta female reclining next to the hero.

But is that all there is? Art historians pore over the likes of a Caravaggio or Michelangelo, eagerly pointing out little tidbits like the artist inserting a self-portrait into the painting, or a sly insult in the background–even the allusion of religious commentary via biological symbolism. Could this same method be used with Frazetta?

Someone might say this is the height of pretentiousness, pseudo-intellectual drivel designed to imbue a commercial work with deeper meaning that simply isn’t present. “It’s just an awesome painting, you don’t need to analyse it!” On the contrary, I do need to analyze it, precisely because it’s an awesome painting. There’s more to the picture than the mere fact that it’s a muscular dude on a mound of corpses with a sword in hand and a babe holding his leg. A look at the details might shed some further light on why this image has become possibly the defining visual interpretation of Robert E. Howard’s Conan.

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Things change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. The Cimmerian blog has been pretty steady for well-nigh five years in providing  coverage of topics both REH-centric and not.

In 2007, Leo Grin typed ”The Deathliest Hallow,” opening the TC floodgates for numerous JRRT-related posts from Steve Tompkins and others. Blog entries about David Gemmell, Karl Edward Wagner and Charles R. Saunders have never been few nor far between here at The Cimmerian. Check the archives and tell me it ain’t so. The Cimmerian always supported the fantasy genre that Robert E. Howard loved (and, in the case of sword-and-sorcery, created). From the earliest days of the site, the bloody history of mankind, a topic REH found endlessly fascinating, has been explored.

Perhaps that matters to some. Perhaps not.

The Cimmerian blog seems to have mattered to a few people. To those loyal readers, I raise a mead-horn. Y’all were the best. My utmost thanks to the bloggers who kept The Cimmerian’s bloody sword swinging in the hinterlands of the aether all these years. Nobody involved (Leo Grin first and foremost) ever made a dime from writing for The Cimmerian blog. Love for the works of Robert E. Howard was the primary motivation and criterion for membership here.

The Cimmerian blog will cease as of the second weekend in June. I hope y’all enjoyed the ride.

*Art by Rebel Highlander.

LEO ADDS: Kind of a cryptic announcement that Deuce posted above, so allow me to elaborate a bit.

I was originally fully set on closing down the blog circa December 2008 when the print mag ended its run — I was ready to move away from REH fandom and into other endeavors, and wanted to make a clean end of it all. I figured the other bloggers would easily find new homes at REHupa or at Damon’s TGR blog, and the TC archives could be moved somewhere, and that would be that. But at the time, blogger Steve Tompkins implored me to allow him to keep it going under his leadership. I capitulated, gave up the reins to him. . . and a few months later poor Steve was dead.

TC was very fortunate for Deuce to step in and take over the managerial role at that time, and under his reign he added many bloggers and the hit-count exploded. Me and Steve got maybe 10,000 hits a month, give or take, but under Deuce he built that up to the current total of around 80,000 a month, or almost a million per year — not bad for a fantasy niche blog.

But Real Life issues of various kinds have been piling up on Deuce and me for many months now (that eternal fandom lament), to the point where neither of us is able to give TC the editing and management time it deserves. Remember, this blog was originally an adjunct to the TC print mag, and there was a certain focus and set of standards inherent in that endeavor (set down, it should always be remembered, by my friend and mentor Don Herron). Even though the focus of the blog has grown well beyond REH, I never wanted to lose those standards. Maintaining those standards, I learned from my time publishing the print mag, takes active editing and management: developing themes and subjects around which to post, correcting and enhancing the essays and posts of the newer people who may not be as up on the old scholarship, maintaining a certain editorial voice and taste. Even my own pieces went through this crucible at TC, to their benefit. We used to routinely do this back in the day, and the new crop of bloggers deserve the same courtesy and attention.

But of late, Deuce and I haven’t been able to be that involved — I’m ashamed to say I’ve been so busy I haven’t even been able to read many of the current posts at TC. And so every time Deuce and I see a mistake in a blog post we should have corrected before publication, or a critical take that it was our job as manager/editor to help expand or deepen, we’ve felt like we’re letting the TC name down. If I had it to do over, I would have closed the blog down back in 2008, but I don’t have that time-travel luxury. So now, in May of 2010, with less and less time for it, Deuce and I both decided that we should bite the bullet now, better late than never. The popular TC bloggers will not vanish from the web — some will pop up at the other REH and fantasy blogs you guys visit (REHupa, REH:TGR, Black Gate, et cetera). And many of them have personal blogs as well for you to monitor. I’m sure this move will have the effect of making these other venues all the stronger, and that’s as it should be.

So that’s the story. It’s been a good run (five years for the print mag, some six for the blog) but Life moves on. If you are a reader who wants to keep up with the things TC used to post on, I’d recommend checking out REHupa.com, REH: Two-Gun Raconteur, the forums at Conan.com (especially the REH-specific forum), and the group blog at Black Gate magazine. If the TC bloggers know where they are heading off to and where you can find them in the future, I trust they will post that information here in the coming weeks. We’ll keep the blog open for them here until June 11, the anniversary of Robert E. Howard’s own death. Soon after that, I expect that the TC archives will be shuttled off to some other site (most likely my personal site at leogrin.com) where any of you can continue to access them, and the internet address “thecimmerian.com” will vanish from the Internet.

Thanks to everyone who, as contributor or reader, helped make TC a going concern for its run. See you around the blogosphere.

Previous Posts In This Series:

1. “Uther Was A Black-Bearded Madman” Part 1

2. “Uther Was A Black-Bearded Madman” Part 2

3. “Uther Was A Black-Bearded Madman” Part 3

4.  A Bloodstained Map of Britain

(As with other posts in this series, I am taking the brief mentions of Uther Pendragon by the Gaelic pirate Cormac Mac Art, in REH’s “Tigers of the Sea” and “Temple of Abomination”, as a basis for further speculation, and treating them as fundamental.  Tie-ins with actual history are being treated as secondary to Howard’s fictional background.)

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Previous Posts on Uther Pendragon:

1. “Uther Was A Black-Bearded Madman” Part 1

2. “Uther Was A Black-Bearded Madman” Part 2

3. “Uther Was A Black-Bearded Madman” Part 3 

In three previous posts I’ve been conjecturing, guessing, and generally filling in gaps concerning the early life and career of Uther Pendragon – based on the comments made about him in the “Cormac Mac Art” stories by REH, set in the fifth century. At least one takes place during Uther’s reign in southern Britain, and one other in the time of his successor, Arthur.

I’ve supposed Uther spent the first thirty years of his violent life in Gaul, from his birth in 440 A.D. until he crossed the Channel to Britain with the fixed purpose of winning a kingdom — and maybe, in the end, an empire. The details can be found in the three posts hyperlinked above. This post doesn’t concern Uther directly. It only describes the kingdoms and power balance in Britain during Uther’s lifetime, particularly in the years to 470, when he left Gaul for Britain, having made the former too hot to hold him.

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Shooting my longbow out in the back yard last weekend, my thoughts turned to one of the most colorful warriors to ever nock an arrow.

Nay, it was not Robin Hood who occupied my thoughts; nor was it Bernard Cornwell’s archer-hero Thomas of Hookton. As is my wont, my archer hero is a man who carried the style and the virtues of ancient warriors into the  cauldron of the 20th Century. “Mad Jack” Churchill sent many an enemy to hell with a well-placed broadhead arrow and forced many a prisoner to throw down his arms at the point of a broadsword. What makes Mad Jack exceptional is that he accomplished these feats in the midst of World War II.

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