Previous Posts In This Series:

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

This writer’s previous post on Uther (as REH, perhaps, envisioned him) – born Eutherius, possibly in Orleans, and a witness at the age of eleven to the crucial Battle of Chalons against Attila’s Huns — dealt with his background, his world, and the situation in which he found himself as a young man. The Huns were no longer a menace, but the Franks to the north, Visigoths to the south and wild Saxon pirates along the western coasts, made the word “secure” a joke. Aegidius was the ruler of the “Roman Kingdom” north of the river Loire, centred on Soissons, and he needed help badly. It came to him from an unexpected direction.

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REH had his individual ideas on most subjects, and expressed them with vehemence. Hearing of George Bernard Shaw’s proposed visit to the U.S.A., he wrote, “Very condescending of him. He’s probably a genius. He’s also a poseur, an egomaniac, and a jackass.” Writing about King Arthur, as discussed by Cormac Mac Art and the Dane Wulfhere, Howard had his own ideas on that subject too.

REH’s Arthur is “a shock-headed savage with a love for battle.” Cormac goes so far as to tell Wulfhere, “One of your Danes might seem a gentlewoman beside him … he has a hungry sword! It’s little gain we reivers from Erin have gotten on his coasts!”

Since Cormac touches his scars reminiscently as he says this, it’s reasonable to think that some of those scars were given to him by Arthur or Arthur’s followers when Cormac was a chief of Gaelic reivers. And since Wulfhere responds, “Would I could cross steel with him,” he apparently never has, so it follows that Cormac hasn’t encountered Arthur again in all the time he’s been sailing with Wulfhere.

This Arthur, who claims the name or title Pendragon, in fact seems to be an adventurer out of nowhere with no known, or anyway mentionable, parentage. Cormac says to Wulfhere (in the fragment, “The Temple of Abomination“), “Pendragon — ha! He’s no more Uther Pendragon’s son than you are. Uther was a black-bearded madman — more Roman than Briton and more Gaul than Roman. Arthur is as fair as Eric there. And he’s pure Celt — a waif from one of the wild western tribes that never bowed to Rome.”

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To the casual eye, Robert E. Howard was a writer of two-fisted, macho fiction where women were relegated to the role of gossamer-veiled damsels requiring rescue and some off-stage shagging from his mighty-thewed heroes.

There are such women in Howard’s stories, of course, particularly in the weaker Conan tales. But Howard drew some extraordinarily vivid female characters, among them the immortal Belît, Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, Red Sonya and Agnes de Chastillon (Dark Agnes, Sword Woman).

These women were able to stand and fight among men, indeed insisted on being treated as equals by their male counterparts, thus winning their admiration. Coming from a pulp writer and amateur boxer from 1930s Texas, such proto-feminist characters must come as a shock to the uninitiated.

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I’ve been reading a fair amount, here and there, about Robert E. Howard’s having been a racist. I’ve read someone’s opinion that he was an extreme one even by the standards of the 1930s. Now that I doubt. Certainly there are lines and statements in Howard’s stories (usually uttered by a character who naturally would say something like that; not nearly as often outside the dialogue, in REH’s own authorial voice) that I wouldn’t like if I was black. REH didn’t like such slurs, either — when similar things were said about the Irish.

I’m not sure I can contribute anything worth a damn to the discussion. I’m partisan for a start. I love REH’s stories and poetry, and I flinch at the thought of a fellow like that living out his days in an essentially anti-intellectual, racially biased, violent — and not infrequently murderous — environment. (It’s probably significant that his best-known and most evocative character, Conan, gets out of his dark, gloomy, savage homeland while still a young lad, adapts to civilization with all its failings, and never goes back.) So, emotionally, I’d prefer to defend REH than attack any day.

I’ve another misgiving, due to my not being native to Texas, or even the U.S.A. I’m Australian. Barging into this weblog and pontificating about racism (in the Lone Star State or any other) would surely lay me open to the rejoinder that we have a bad record in these matters Down Under. Ask any Aborigine.

Maybe I can provide a certain amount of perspective, though, from the former British Empire’s point of view, especially the English-speaking parts of it — Australia, Canada, and England itself. I’ll stick mainly to the attitudes reflected in popular adventure and thriller fiction. They reflect the attitudes of real people, including some highly-placed ones — who surely kicked back by the fire and read Rohmer, Sapper or Dennis Wheatley when they thought nobody was looking.

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REH’s stories and fragments that feature Gaelic pirate Cormac Mac Art are set in the mid-to-late fifth century A.D., when the Saxons were settling in Britain. It’s the time of Hengist, King Arthur and Vortigern, all of whom are mentioned, as is Uther Pendragon. The stories also turn on the presence of Vikings, Danish Vikings at that.

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Maxym just read the new Conan script. He is not pleased.

Have you seen any movies lately? We’re making tin gods out of those poor buffoons in Hollywood; I dote on movies and appreciate the scanty art therein but I consider the profession about the most debased and debasing I know.
– Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, week of February 20, 1928.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. These are frustrating times for Howard fans who, like Two-Gun Bob, dote on movies. Solomon Kane has yet to win a distribution deal in the U.S. and Howard purists have thrust their rapiers repeatedly into the movie’s hide, coldly raging at the liberties taken with Howard’s steely Puritan.

And the new “Conan” movie… Arrrgggg!!!

With rare exceptions (which will get their due in due course), Hollywood just doesn’t seem to do well with swordplay, sorcery and barbaric splendor. But wait, dog brothers. All is not lost to the swashbuckling brotherhood. We can find the treasures we seek far from the debased civilization that is Hollywood. Look to the East, where Cossack riders thunder and swordsmen ply their trade in the trenches and upon the high seas.

In an occasional series, we’ll take a look at some films that will stir the blood of the fighting Howardians — and spare their grinding teeth.

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Previous Posts In This Series

1.   Donn Othna in “The King’s Service”

2.   Donn Othna: From Chalons to the Gulf of Cambay

3.    The Foreign Rajah of Nagdragore

4.    REH’s Lost Kingdom of Nagdragore

Caveat: This is supposition and fancy, embroidering on a fragment of Robert E. Howard’s.

When Donn Othna and his Saxon captors sail storm-driven and battered into the harbour of Nagdragore on the Gulf of Cambay, after a voyage for which epic is an understatement, the Briton’s sword hums faintly. Donn Othna explains that it sings because it’s coming home. “It was here that my sword was born from furnace and forge and wizard’s hammer, dim ages ago. It was once a great saber belonging to a mighty Eastern emperor … ”

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Previous Posts In This Series:

1.   Donn Othna in “The King’s Service”

2.   Donn Othna: From Chalons to the Gulf of Cambay

Constantius, the adventurer who has made himself a king on the Gulf of Cambay in REH’s fragment “The King’s Service“, is the second major character after the Briton Donn Othna. Constantius is highly interesting, but his antecedents are harder to work out than Donn Othna’s. He’s clever, even brilliant, ambitious, and skilled at playing his opponents against each other and exploiting their weaknesses. (He admits with candour that while this is effective at keeping him in power, it’s hurtful to the kingdom.) Despite his own failings and flaws, he has intense personal magnetism, a power of fascination, even towards men — but it’s something women can’t withstand to save themselves.  He’s doubtless bragging when he says any woman is like wax in his hands; still, the results are impressive.

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Previous Posts In This Series:

1.  Donn Othna in “The King’s Service”

2.  Donn Othna: From Chalons to the Gulf of Cambay

3.  The Foreign Rajah of Nagdragore

Robert E. Howard was fascinated by the unexplored back alleys, byways and more obscure shadows of history. Even his mere fragments and outlines are filled with tantalizing hints and throwaway ideas that would be good for an entire series. I can imagine how he’d love the advances in archaeology and historical knowledge that have been made since the 1930s. 

Take his fragment, “The King’s Service.”  The main characters, the fighting Brythonic Celt, Donn Othna, and the flawed-but-magnetic adventurer-become-rajah, Constantius, are worth a detailed article each. So is the background, Howard’s invented Ruritania-in-India, the realm of Nagdragore.

Back in the 1930s, lucky Robert Howard could simply say, “The glories of Nagdragore have been forgotten for a thousand years. Not even in the misty gulf of Hindu legend where a hundred lost dynasties sleep unheeded, does any hint of that vanished realm linger. Nagdragore is one with a thousand nameless ruins … ”

These days people may ask a bit more. We tend to wonder, when we’re not being swept along by Howard’s prose, just where Nagdragore might have been. If it existed. Under another name, maybe. And REH does give some specific indications.

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John Wesley Hardin by Michael Shreck

Long narrative dreams are fairly common with me, and sometimes my dream personality is in no way connected with my actual personality…  I’ve wandered all up and down the 19th Century as a trapper, a westward-bound emigrant, a bar-tender, a hunter, an Indian-fighter, a trail-driver, cowboy — once I was John Wesley Hardin!

– REH to H.P. Lovecraft, February 11, 1936

Robert E. Howard was fascinated with John Wesley Hardin, probably the deadliest Western gunman of them all. It’s not hard to see why: the Texan possessed the qualities of skill at arms, physical prowess, indomitable will  and go-to-hell attitude that Howard infused into all his protagonists. In fact, Hardin might have been one of Howard’s characters. He once wrote, “Some day I hope to be able to use the life of John Wesley Hardin, either as a biography, or a basis for a historical novel.”

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