The news has begun to spread that Steve Tompkins of The Cimmerian passed away on March 23 after suffering a heart attack. As usual, real life has a lousy way of intruding on the fantastic.

I won’t sit here and tell you that Steve and I were friends. I’ve never met him face-to-face. But we had exchanged a dozen or so e-mails since he asked me in February to contribute weekly pieces to The Cimmerian. This news has hit me pretty hard and I feel like I’ve lost a comrade in arms, the trusted man to my left in the shield wall of those fighting to preserve Robert E. Howard’s legacy and promoting fantasy fiction as a whole. Steve’s shield was broader and he wielded a more skillful sword than most who answer the martial call of defending swords-and-sorcery and weird fiction.

Steve was a brilliant individual with an unquenchable passion for Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Edward Wagner, George R.R. Martin, Charles Saunders . . . the list goes on and on. He had a remarkable insight into the works of all these diverse authors, an amazing recollection of miscellanea and facts stored in the arsenal of his mind, and an uncanny ability to cite reference upon reference and work them, intelligently, into indefatigable essays. I’m not being self-deprecating when I say that Steve’s knowledge of the fantasy genre dwarfed my own.

What a loss, all that knowledge. Well, at least a part of it is preserved here, and in countless essays in dozens of periodicals and publications. People who have been in this game far longer than I will hopefully chime in with some insight on Steve’s prodigious body of work — I think it will surprise many to see it laid out in full.

Steve’s work here The Cimmerian speaks for itself. Do a little digging and you’ll uncover some truly remarkable essays. He recently wrote an exhaustive three-part series surveying the entire field of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos that left me dizzy and realizing I have a lot of reading to do. Another one of my recent favorites was his overview of cursed swords in fantasy literature, “An Early, Albeit Pagan, Christmas in the Old North.” I also enjoyed his piece on Armistice Day and how World War I may have played a hand in shaping Howard’s tales.

I have sitting on my bookshelf (actually, it’s on my desk right now) a copy of Kull: Exile of Atlantis, one in the line of the wonderful, must-own Del Reys that put into print and in one place for the first time the raw, unedited, pastiche-free Howard that we for years had desperately wanted. All you need to know about Steve’s place in Howard circles is this: He wrote the introduction to the book. To quote from that essay:

Kull of high Atlantis. Kull, who will never be “of” Valusia no matter how long he rules the Land of Enchantment. Kull, cold-eyed but hot-headed, a bull in an unimaginably ancient china shop. Kull, the thinking man’s barbarian and the barbarian as thinking man, for whom the surfaces of forbidden lakes and sorcerous mirrors are not barriers but invitations. Kull, who opens Pandora’s boxes like birthday gifts. Kull, who returns the stare of Deep Time and dares the stair that leads up to perspectives high, chilly, and cosmic. The king who philosophizes with a broadsword and legislates with a battle-axe, the king who haunts us because he is himself so haunted. Kull, who is no mere way-station en route to Conan, but an unforgettable destination in his own right.

As you’ll notice by the tagline at the top of this site, Steve recently broadened the scope of The Cimmerian to include, “A website and shieldwall for Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Best in Heroic Fantasy, Horror, and Historical Adventure.” This description couldn’t be more up my alley and it is why I am a regular visitor here. Now that Steve is gone, I don’t know what will become of the site, frankly.

With true humility, I regret that Steve will never see the end of my Top 10 list of fantasy battles over at The Silver Key, of which he had tried to get me to leak to him before I was done. Now I wish I had written them quicker. I regret far more that he’ll never get to read A Dance With Dragons (come on George, please finish this). It’s a heart-wrenching pity that he also won’t get to read The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, due to be published in May (I’m tearing up now. He deserved to be able to enjoy it).

But I know he’s standing with a smile on his face in the great shield wall of some glorious afterlife, battling ferociously by day and drinking mead with these selfsame foes at night in the Great Hall. And of course, swapping (and, likely, enlightening these warriors with insightful new perspectives of) the heroic tales that he so loved.