With the demise of The Cimmerian print journal, so too have the Cimmerian Awards passed into legend. However, the Robert E. Howard Foundation has taken up the gauntlet:

Though the general Howard enthusiast public can’t folk, we can still take a gander at the categories and nominees.

Our own Barbara Barrett receives a 2010 Atlantean nomination for The Wordbook, a 2009 Hyrkanian nod for her essay “Six Degrees to Cross Plains” appearing in v5n3 of The Cimmerian, and a joint contender (along with myself) for the 2010 Venarium award for her outstanding work on The Cimmerian, REHupa and elsewhere. Brian Murphy‘s “The Unnatural City” from The Cimmerian v5n2 and “An Honourable Retreat: Robert E. Howard as Escapist Writer” from The Dark Man v4n2 received a place among the Hyrkanian nominees for 2009 and 2010 respectively. The Cimmerian website itself is nominated for the Stygian for 2009 and 2010, and the fifth and final year of The Cimmerian print journal gains an Aquilonian contention.

Cimmerian alumni are also represented. In addition to his Cimmerian plaudits, Leo Grin’s “In Defense of Hester Jane Howard” is placed among the 2010 Hyrkanian candidates. Rob Roehm has many balls in the court for the Hyrkanian: “Howard at 102″ (The Cimmerian, v5n1), “Humorous Westerns Are Serious Business” (The Howard Review), and “In the Middle of the Street” (The Cimmerian, v5n3) for 2009; and “The Long and Winding Road: A Poetic History” (REH: Two-Gun Raconteur #13) for 2010. The redoubtable Mark Finn is up for the 2010 Black River Award for his Cross Plains High School presentation, as well as two for the 2009 Hyrkanian: “Breckinridge Elkins, Robert E. Howard, and Filial Piety” (The Howard Review) and The Robert E. Howard Medicine Wheel (Two-Gun Raconteur #12). Steve Trout’s “Conan and the Crusaders” (The Cimmerian, v5n2) is up for the 2009 Hyrkanian, as well as the 2010 Stygian for The Cimmerian blog.

Last but not least, the great Steve Tompkins is posthumously acknowledged with three 2009 Hyrkanian nominations in”Black Stranger, White Wolflord or, Not Out of the Woods Yet” (Two-Gun Raconteur #12), “Long Falls and Hard Climbs” (The Cimmerian, v5n4), and “Newer Barbarians” (The Cimmerian, v5n1).

Man. I guess I’ll really have to get to Howard Days now!

Fred “Is He Dead?” Thompson has drifted back into blissful Hollyweird somnolence, and the Big Giant Head has recalled Dennis “The Menace” Kucinich back to Planet Zongo, but lots of Howardians are still out there stumping for votes in the 2008 Cimmerian Awards. There’s only a week left to cast your ballots for your favorite REH books, magazines, websites, and scholars of the past year, so hurry and don’t miss out on your inalienable right to cause trouble and heartbreak in the Howard Nation. Remember, if you don’t participate in the democratic process, you’re a part of the problem. Rock that vote!

Balloting closes at midnight on January 31, 2008.

LIST OF NOMINEES

For the fourth straight year, The Cimmerian is proud to be presenting a set of Awards honoring Howardian achievements in the realms of research and scholarship. Voting for these awards is open to all readers and contributors to TC. If you have done this before, you know the drill. If not, read on.

All Cimmerian readers and contributors are encouraged to vote. You may or may not know it, but you have been earning voting power in these Awards all year long — every time you purchased an issue, contributed a letter or an essay, or helped out with my annual coverage of big Howard events. These activities earned you VOTES, which you can now apply to each award category. Here’s how it works:

1. First, calculate how many votes you have earned. Use the following guide:

1 VOTE for each issue of Volume 4 of The Cimmerian you have purchased.
2 VOTES for each letter published in The Lion’s Den for Volume 4.
3 VOTES for each essay or poem published in The Cimmerian for Volume 4, and for each Cimmerian Library volume published in 2007 with your name on it.
2 VOTES for contributing pictures or anecdotes to TC‘s coverage for the June 2006 Robert E. Howard Days.

For this year’s voting, only Volume 4 (black and midnight blue issues) count; latecomers who purchased back issues from Volume 1, 2 and 3 cannot apply those old issues to this year’s voting. If you are a subscriber, feel free to add on the votes for the issues you are due to receive soon (Awards, and Index). Some people worry overmuch about this calculation, but don’t sweat it. Just tell me what number you came up with and how you did it, and I will check this against my records and let you know if it needs tweaking.

2. Now that you have your vote total, you can browse through the List of Nominees and start selecting your choices. Remember, you get to apply your total amount of votes to each category (for instance, if you have calculated twenty votes, you get to apply twenty to the book category, twenty to the First Place Essay category, twenty to the Second Place Essay category, etc.) Also remember that within each category you may split up your votes any way you wish (ten votes to the first nominee, five to the second, five to the third, etc.) If there is a category where you have no opinion (if you didn’t read any of the nominees, for instance), just put ABSTAIN for that category.

3. Next to your vote for each category, take a minute and write a paragraph about why you voted the way you did. I print these comments anonymously in TC‘s annual awards issue. It’s a great help to me, and it gives the nominees some much-appreciated feedback on their work, even when they don’t win. Best of all, if you submit such comments with your votes, you get a free Limited copy of the annual Awards issue. So don’t just send in votes, toss some commentary into the mix for each category.

4. Once you have decided on how your votes are to be allocated, e-mail me your ballot with your list of winners and commentary. Here’s a sample ballot that you can use as a template:

______________________________

CIMMERIAN AWARDS BALLOT

NAME:
NUMBER OF VOTES I HAVE CALCULATED FOR MYSELF:
ATLANTEAN AWARD (Best Book — Single Author): [winner(s) and comments]
HYRKANIAN AWARD — FIRST PLACE (Best Essay): [winner(s) and comments]
HYRKANIAN AWARD — SECOND PLACE (Best Essay): [winner(s) and comments]
HYRKANIAN AWARD — THIRD PLACE (Best Essay): [winner(s) and comments]
AQUILONIAN AWARD (Best Periodical): [winner(s) and comments]
STYGIAN AWARD (Best Website): [winner(s) and comments]
BLACK RIVER AWARD (Special Achievement): [winner(s) and comments]
BLACK CIRCLE AWARD (Lifetime Achievement): [winner(s) and comments]
BLACK CIRCLE NOMINEE (who you want on next year’s Black Circle ballot): [winner(s) and comments]

________________________________

It’s that simple. When I receive your ballot, I will record your votes in a spreadsheet. All voting is kept strictly confidential, and as editor of TC I myself do not vote. The balloting will remain open throughout January, and close at midnight on January 31, 2008. The winners will subsequently be announced live on June 13 at the 2008 Robert E. Howard Days festival (Friday Night after the banquet, at the pavilion).

If you are at all confused about the voting, feel free to pop me an e-mail and I will guide you through it. It really is a lot of fun if you at all care about Howard studies and the various items released in the field. Feel free to pepper the various e-mail lists with discussions about the various categories and nominees — make your cases and generate groundswells for your favorites. Your favorite scholars need your help and your vote. You’ve got a whole month to think it over and send in your ballot. Have fun, e-mail me with any questions, and stay tuned this June for the winners.

Seanchai #76 makes for interesting reading in 2007. While de Camp is nowhere accused of pontiff-buggering, Rusty does have this to say in his Mailing comments to the Tritonian Ringbearer: “The only explanation I can think of for the quite substantial changes you made to ["The Frost Giant's Daughter," "The Black Stranger," and "The God in the Bowl"] is that you thought they weren’t very well written and you could do better.” There’s an endearing outburst about Milius’ Wheel of Pain — “An utterly stupid conception. What the hell was the damned thing for? It didn’t appear to do anything” — and another about the Marvel Conan’s being “largely responsible for the popular misconception of Conan as a fur-clad hulk, and for making pimply-faced, snot-nosed, greasy-haired, whale-bellied subliterate adolescents think they’re Conan and/or REH fans.” Rusty didn’t know the half of it; as we’re now aware, Marvel’s non-Roy Thomas stories even made some of them into staunch supporters of the unsinkable armada that is the Nemedian navy, ready to burst into “Anchors Away” every time the state-of-the-art shipyards of Belverus and Numalia turn out another dreadnaught.

Most striking of all was this, after a denunciation of the incorporation of the post-Howardian bridging paragraph from the 1967 King Kull in the actual text of the 1978 Bantam and 1995 Baen versions of “Exile of Atlantis”: “Until some enterprising publisher decides to make me the editor of the definitive REH editions, such mistakes will continue to be propagated, no doubt.” Marcelo Anciano didn’t become a member of REHupa until months later, so Rusty can’t have already been in secret talks with the Wandering Star bibliomancer…Another comment that jumped out at my 2007 self was this, to James Van Hise: “I really don’t know why it’s so hard to get literate REH fans to write about his work. The comments I get from guys like Don Herron, Dick Tierney, etc., is that they’ve pretty much said what they have to say about REH and unless they were to suddenly get inspired, well, they’ve moved on.” One Barbaric Triumph, multiple articles, and one Doom of Hyboria later, it is clear that inspiration took its own sweet time, but did show up eventually.

Burke and Herron (Sequenced thusly the names sound too close to Burke and Hare for comfort, don’t they?) are now right where they belong. With Glenn Lord enjoying the emeritus lifestyle (and perhaps reflecting on how living longer is the best revenge where grande dames and their dismissive references to “truck drivers” are concerned), the two junior Black Circlers can get to work on stationery, T-shirts, podcasts, and maybe even a microbrewery. This was definitely the preferable outcome — had their rivalry continued vote after vote, they might have become the Howard Studies equivalent of the black/white guy and the white/black guy in the third season Classic Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” locked in unending combat on an otherwise dead world.

Congratulations to Don and Rusty. But why was it spelled “Hyperborian” instead of “Hyperborean” back when the League and its REH/CAS agenda were around?

Finally back home from Cross Plains, and sick as a dog from a throat/nose bug caught while suffering from the usual Howard Days dehydration and lack of sleep. But the Friday night Cimmerian Awards went off well, and now that they have been officially announced I have posted the winners here on our site. There is a lot of trivia and anecdotes to go along with this list, all of which will be explicated in the annual Awards issue available later this summer.

Here is the list of winners:

The Atlantean — Outstanding Achievement, Book By a Single Author
MARK FINN, for Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard

The Valusian – Outstanding Achievement, Anthology
DENNIS McHANEY, for The Man from Cross Plains: A Centennial Celebration of Two-Gun Bob Howard

The Hyrkanian – Outstanding Achievement, Essay
First Place: BILL CAVALIER, for “How Robert E. Howard Saved My Life” (from The Cimmerian V3n6)
Second Place: STEVE TOMPKINS, for “The Shortest Distance Between Two Towers” (from The Cimmerian V3n3)
Third Place: JOHN HAEFELE, for “Skull-Face and Others at Sixty” (from The Cimmerian V3n9)

The Aquilonian — Outstanding Achievement, Periodical
LEO GRIN, for The Cimmerian Volume 3

The Stygian — Outstanding Achievement, Website
MARK FINN, LEO GRIN, ROB ROEHM, STEVE TOMPKINS: The Cimmerian Blog

The Venarium Award – Emerging Scholar
JOHN HAEFELE

The Black River Award — Special Achievement
DON HERRON, for finding both the original Kline typescript to A Gent from Bear Creek and the collection of books owned by Dr. I. M. Howard.

The Black Circle Award — Lifetime Achievement
RUSTY BURKE and DON HERRON (tie), dual inductees.

The Black Circle Award — 2008 nominee
NOVALYNE PRICE ELLIS, (posthumous)

As you can see, our bloggers here at TC Central are well represented: Steve Tompkins is now the only guy with two Best Essay awards to his credit, and fellow TC blogger Mark Finn took home top honors for his biography even as it prepares to compete in both the Locus and World Fantasy balloting. The blog itself snagged Best REH Website of the Centennial year. I was heartened by the number of people who told me that they check this blog several times a day hoping for new content, and I’m going to attempt to ensure that postings here become steadily more frequent and substantive.

Remember, if you picked up your June issue of TC in Cross Plains, drop me a line so I don’t send you a duplicate copy in the coming days. For the rest of you, expect the June issue to hit your mailboxes within a week or so. No rest for the wicked — now it’s off to prepare the August issue, as well as the 2007 Awards, issue, the 2006 Index, and the 2006 slipcases (which as of now look like they will be in my hands in early July).

Thanks to everyone who helped make 2006 the amazing year that it was for Howard fandom.

Wednesday is the final day to get those votes into Cimmerian central. There are some pretty close races, so a couple votes one way or the other can make all the difference, swinging things in a different direction. If you enjoyed the Centennial year as much as I did, and read things throughout 2006 that impressed you, then do the authors involved a favor — let them know what you think via your votes and your comments. I know from the reactions of past years that it means a lot to them. As Charles Hoffman stated in last year’s Awards issue:

I just want to make it clear how much I appreciate this honor. We live in a very materialistic society, and artistic or intellectual accomplishments that don’t bring a lot of money tend to be regarded with indifference. I have had, on occasion, to wrestle with feelings of futility. It’s therefore gratifying to know that others appreciate what one is doing, and that you’re making some sort of difference to someone. Therefore, I would like to formally thank The Cimmerian for presenting me with such impressive, solid, tangible evidence that my efforts have not been expended in a vain pursuit.

That’s what it’s all about, ladies. Right now some of the Howard scholars who worked their butts off last year to populate your bookshelves with good reading are struggling mightily to creep up in the voting, inching towards one of the coveted Skulls glowering at the top of the heap. Each of you who read or write for TC earned votes all throughout last year. You are potential kingmakers with the power to really make someone’s year special. Don’t waste the opportunity — use it! Take ten minutes to consider the nominees and get those ballots in before Thursday. Crom hath spoken.

Is there something fishy about the Lemurians? Damn straight, and why not; after all, there was something fishy about the (pseudo)historical Lemurians. “Men of the Shadows” describes them as “the half-human Men of the Sea. Perhaps from some strange sea-monster had those sprang, for they were scaly like unto a shark, and they could swim for hours under the water.” (There’s another hint in “The Cat and the Skull’ when Howard assures us that Kull is as at home in the water as any Lemurian). Wherein lies the fishiness? These choices are litcrit-intensive. I may be in the minority in Howard fandom in that I had some decent experiences as well as some appalling ones in English classes, but to me all litcrit really means is, articles that engage with Howard’s work. Yes, I find Howard the man fascinating, but I find him fascinating because he wrote the stories and the poems. Articles dealing with his life come a distant second, and articles dealing with his impact on the lives of fans come an even more distant third. My 12 Lemurian picks are ludicrously subjective and self-indulgent, and I’m sure Leo would be willing to extend his hospitality to guest-bloggers bristling with counter-lists. Lastly, the numerical sequence implies no hierarchy or qualitative ranking whatsoever; #1 is not necessarily superior to #12. It was hard enough selecting what I deem the dozen best without also trying to arrange them in order of merit. Save for the lone whippersnapper, these essays have not only stood the test of time but been granted tenured teaching positions by time.

1. Don Herron, “The Dark Barbarian,” in The Dark Barbarian. The consensus is that “Robert E. Howard: Hard-Boiled Heroic Fantasist” is the more significant, and the more disciplined, of Herron’s two contributions as essayist rather than editor to his 1984 critical anthology, but me, I like essay-sprawl better than exurban sprawl. Here we have the work of a Road Warrior for whom “Conan Vs. Conantics” is no longer even a speck in his rearview mirror, a critic who is ready to pit “history as a grim, shadowy wonderland” and a “colossal march of the races of man” against the cosmicism of HPL and CAS. Interestingly, Herron anticipated a persistent complaint about this essay: “Now all this talk of comic book and movie adaptations, authorized imitations and corporations may well seem beside the point to understanding Howard as a writer.” But in our current era of Paradox Entertainment, Age of Conan novels, Dark Horse comic books, a scripted “origin story” for Solomon Kane and a stalled-out animated “Red Nails,” the pop culture panoptics of “The Dark Barbarian” no longer seem like sidetrackings at all. The article does contain one un-Herronian blooper, the statement that JFK’s murder “was broadcast live over national television,” perhaps a conflation of the Zapruder film and the rough “justice” Jack Ruby doled out to designated patsy Lee Harvey Oswald, but what does that matter compared to footnotes that are not a chore but a reward, the print equivalent of bonus featurettes on a “special edition” DVD?

2. Fritz Leiber, “Howard’s Fantasy,” in The Dark Barbarian. In which one of Howard’s few rivals as an American heroic fantasist finalizes what he’d been revealing in a series of jottings and reviews–that he was more of an admirer, and an astute critic, than a rival (At one time Leiber planned to write his own version of Literary Swordsmen & Sorcerers or Imaginary Worlds, and the non-fruition of that project never ceases to hurt). Where would Howard studies be without Leiber’s comments on Howard’s ready recourse to “the words and phrases of power,” or his enlisting of Marlowe and Macbeth on the Texan’s behalf? An aside about “Red Shadows”–that “the Giant Ape (which appears so often as a stock menace in Howard’s subsequent work) is handled with sympathy as well as power” shows what close attention Leiber was paying, and his suggestion that “Beyond the Black River” bestrides the New and Old Worlds by partaking of “two very different yet hauntingly similar historical phenomena,” namely “the long Roman watch on the Rhine and in Britain against the barbarian hordes who ultimately ravaged the Western Empire” and the “long war along forest trails and around blockhouses of the American colonists and pioneers against the Amerinds,” is invaluable. Amusingly, the assertion that “spicy scenes fit as naturally into the swordplay-and-sorcery story as they do into the related, larger category of the picaresque” has some applicability to the later Fafhrd and the Mouser stories, wherein the amatory antics are decreasingly vanilla and increasingly exotic in flavor. “Howard’s Fantasy” is something of a fix-up, but Don told me recently that Leiber himself made a point of adding the crucial insistence “Anything I like as well as I do some of the Conan stories, I do the courtesy of taking seriously when I write about them,” which must have caused de Camp’s Tritonian ring to burn the finger it encircled black.

3. Patrice Louinet, “Conan, Kull and Bran Mak Morn: The Kings of the Night,” in The Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard. Patrice says of “The Scarlet Citadel” here that “too many events crowded on each other in what was, after all, a short story,” and the same is nearly true of the crush of ideas in this article. Still, no more effective advertisement for the at-the-time newfangled notion of drop-kicking “character chronologies” in favor of an overarching “Howard chronology” has ever been devised, and Lancer loyalists should not miss the paragraph on the insult to Howard’s concepts voiced by the pretend-Epimetreus in Conan of the Isles. Highlights like the Celticization of kingship in Howard’s work, entwined origins of ‘The Shadow Kingdom’ and “Isle of the Eons,” or the “Drums of Tombalku” fragment as an underlier-text of The Hour of the Dragon, are developed in Patrice’s later writings. The one sentence that always has me wanting to call in an airstrike is (apropos of the Saxon conquests that founded “England”) “History teaches us that the Norse penetration was quite smooth, and based mainly on commercial interests.” I would not be prepared to vouch for M. Louinet’s safety in many Welsh or Cornish pubs were word of this to spread…

4. Rusty Burke, “De Camp Vs. Howard: Rewriting Conan” (includes “An REH Purist Manifesto”, in The Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard. This essay will be essential so long as some nominal Howard fans continue to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome due to a long de Campian captivity. I cherish it because Rusty freed me from a sentimental fondness for “The Treasure of Tranicos,” the first, albeit adulterated, Howard story I ever read. Watching his systematic, methodical demolition of “Tranicos” is like watching the safety-conscious implosion of one of those white elephant/eyesore structures from the postwar decades–the destruction opens up space for urban renewal, or “Black Stranger”-appreciation (unless you’re Bill Cavalier). Rusty eschews the supposed demonizing or vilifying of de Camp that the Lancer diehards are always caterwauling about, letting many, many words and deeds speak for themselves. As V4n1 of TC amply attests, the gentleman in question was favored with multiple gifts and graces, but he was as unsuited to write Conan as Schwarzenegger was to play Conan.

5. Steve Trout, “King Conan and the Aquilonian Dream,” in The Dark Man #1 (August 1990). I finally gave this one the nod over Steve’s razor-edged “Heritage of Steel” in The Barbaric Triumph. Part of achieving recognition for Howard as an American classic is to keep loudly but lucidly pointing out just how classically American he was, and Steve has been at it for many years. The ghosts of Frank Capra and FDR beam in approval as he makes a big, or a New, deal of Conan’s progressive, as-egalitarian-as-a-monarchy-can-hope-to-be stewardship of Aquilonia. Steve calls our attention to the possibly-conflicted-but-conclusively-anti-slaveholder Venturer sequence in The Hour of the Dragon, notes almost as a throwaway that “practically all of Howard’s adventure fiction takes place on a frontier of one kind or another,” and says what can’t be said often enough: “Howard did not write in a vacuum.”

6. Don Herron, “On Howardian Fairyland,” in The Dark Man #2 (July 1991). This single-pager is the work of a Don of few words–no doubt he was in a hurry to say his piece and get back to dreaming of the Lion’s Den and the viscera he would eventually strew so lavishly across its sands. Essentially he’s alerting us here to the fact that whenever the words “unreal” or “unreality” occur in Howard’s fantasy, we need to pay closer attention, because a Pegasus-flight into the wild blue yonder is preparing for departure. “Some of the prof types go crazy over the concept of fairyland,” he notes (his prose is dressed for a casual Friday), emphasizing that the “typically dark-hued Howardian version of fairyland” is always somewhere beyond the back of beyond. On-the-fly insights about the dragon as “a weird bridge” to Xuchotl and how pastichemongers “have overloaded the Hyborian Age with tamed weirdness” and the perfect illustration-in-words from “Queen of the Black Coast” reinforce my conviction that no one should ever drink deeply from “Hard-Boiled Heroic Fantasist” without this as a chaser.

7. Rusty Burke, “The Old Deserted House: Images of the South in Howard’s Fiction,” in The Dark Man #2 (July 1991). An examination of the “Piney Wood” stories and what REH termed the “dark, brooding old plantation house” as the “central image” of those stories, standing in as it does for “both the South, and the self.” Rusty looks at the symbolism inherent in night journeys and swamp forays and the resonance of the refrain of paradises and fortunes lost in terms of the Howard family’s own precarious finances. One comment–”If you hear sound, you’re alive; if you hear only silence, you’re dead. Our heroes have left the outer, conscious world, and entered the inner, unconscious realm”–cries out to be cross-referenced to “The Screaming Skull of Silence.” Some Howardists would rather recite the contents of Conan and the Spider God at graveside in Greenleaf Cemetery than even consider the possibility that Howard might indeed have thought as his upbringing and Umwelt taught him to think; Rusty, on the other hand, concedes “Robert E. Howard was a racist, and black villains or the threat of black uprisings constitute major threats in these stories,” the better to tease out the nuances, shadings, and complexities within that concession. He touches upon the sympathy (bordering on empathy and even attraction) that Howard sometimes felt for his characters of African descent, and positions voodoo, atavism, and at-homeness in the primordial mire as counterweights to the “political and economic” clout of their former masters and un-Reconstructed neighbors. Rusty includes some provocative thoughts about “white blood” as an undesirable/unforgivable attribute in some of the “black” characters–would Howard have been more freaked out by Hallie Berry or Barack Obama? In these stories the fruits of the South’s original sin are poisonous even when as sweet as The Bride of Damballah, here discussed as an anima figure capable of making the collected works of Jung beg out loud in Swiss German for mercy. Non-Howardian fiction as ambitious as Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom or as lubricious as the “Mandingo” subgenre of bodice-rippers come to mind throughout, and this essay will only grow in importance right alongside Howard’s stature–and the concomitant target he’ll be sporting.

8. Charles Hoffman, “Robert E. Howard vs. the Desert of the Real,” Spectrum Conan Super Special. In all honesty, Hoffman could easily have been put in a position of having to clear shelf-space for four or five Lemurians; from “Conan the Existential” in the Seventies on up through “Bitter Pleasures and Swinish Stupidity: Howard’s Take on Human Character” (which easily transcends the cataract-afflicted editorial vision of Two-Gun Bob) in 2006, he’s been required reading. Chuck is particularly proud of this “big theme” effort on Howard’s “art and aesthetics,” and has every reason to be. A major theme of his most recent REH work, that as is well-known human beings can’t bear too much reality and Howard offers an exceedingly realistic alternative to reality, is introduced here, and the use made of the aridly literal desert in “Xuthal of the Dusk” after so much about the (slightly) more figurative Desert of the Real is just wicked cool despite the heat and glare.

9. David Weber, Introduction to the 1995 Baen Books collection Bran Mak Morn. It’s a measure of what a welcome event this essay-disguised-as-an-intro was for Howardists during the lean times of the mid-Nineties that we were and still are prepared to overlook a disastrous sentence in the second paragraph: “Conan and Kull, the great kings of the Hyborean Age, pre-date the cataclysm which overwhelms Atlantis.” That’s 3 major errors in a single line, if the chronic misspelling of ‘Hyborian” bugs you the way it does me. But after that Weber doesn’t put a foot wrong, from his speculation that Howard named Bran “with malice aforethought” to his invocation of “the Nordic legends whose grimness played so great a part in evolving Howard’s world” to the generalization that REH swordslingers “might equally well be outriders of the darkness who contributed to its triumph, or warriors who took their stand against it.” Like another David (C. Smith, the author of the Oron novels and The Fall of the First World), Weber is alert to to the truth that “Howard’s heroes were descended from Odysseus, not Achilles. They were thinkers.” The texts of the Baen paperbacks were highly impure, but this essay is pure gold–like the skull Weber more than earned. Bravura finish: “Bran and Cormac and Kull are always ready to teach yet another generation of writers how to tell the high, old tales of doom and glory.”

10. Leo Grin, “The Reign of Blood,” in The Barbaric Triumph. This is one of the first and then, after beaucoup rereading, also one of the last essays that anyone serious about Howard studies should read. The heroes of REH stories hold more grudges than Angelina Jolie does Third World babies–Leo sharpened and weaponized a mostly passive awareness of this until he had a tour de force. An avalanche of examples of Howard putting “a human face on the struggles of life, one that his heroes could sneer at and spit upon” or [infusing] everything in his universe with hate, making it as common an element as carbon or hydrogen” sweeps away any reservations. As a bonus, the theme is so black-hearted and red-misted that some readers will find themselves wanting to know more about Howard’s approach to love, loyalty and laughter. Not to be missed: the discussion of the reconnaissance raven in The Hour of the Dragon, which gets what’s coming to it as gratifyingly as any bird in the Conan series other than the incautious vulture of “A Witch Shall Be Born.” I personally wish Leo had slammed Lovecraft’s batty consumption of stale-dated canned goods rather than “Lovecraft’s batty life philosophies,” but such Schlagfertigkeit is only to be expected from a young (this being before TC‘s 2006 publication schedule) critic writing about an always-young author.

11. Karl Edward Wagner, Afterwords to Berkley collections The People of the Black Circle, Red Nails, and The Hour of the Dragon. It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want t– er, I mean I’ll bestow Lemurians as I see fit. If KEW’s 3 intros and 3 afterwords haven’t been spliced together into one-super-essay yet, something will have to be done about that. Being a brilliant heroic fantasist one’s own self doesn’t make one a lock to excel as a critic also, but it worked out that way with Wagner as well as Leiber. To move from the introductions to the Lancer paperbacks to these is to leapfrog all the grades from kindergarden to a grad school seminar, is in short to be educated. Sharing out a treasure trove of citations from then-unpublished letters, The Howard Collector, and The Last Celt, Wagner robustly defends Weird Tales while taking the reader behind-the-scenes and wincing at some of the decor; he declares that “Beyond the Black River” is, like its author, “Texas-born and Texas-bred,” and calls our attention to the fact that “the Hyborian Age” contains “the bones of an epic, in the history of Gorm’s conquests”–noteworthy in light of Donald Sidney-Fryer’s contribution to TC V3n12. The Berkleys were of course “Vultures Over Cross Plains” and “Conan Vs. Conantics” put into practice, and references to “the frustrations of a Howard fan in obtaining true text” and “a Conan who will sweep away all your previous conceptions of the Cimmerian” indicate just how hellbent Wagner was on exploiting the Death Star’s vulnerabilities (but as a Solo who was approximately as hairy as Chewbacca, not as a Skywalker).

And for readers who care about KEW as well as REH, poignance is mixed with the passion here; Wagner’s manifest delight in the “hero-villain” Khemsa prompts thoughts of an even greater hero-villain whose name also kicks off with a K, while his remark that “The Hyborian Age” and the “much earlier version of mankind’s unhistoried past” in “Men of the Shadows” offer “interesting contrasts and similarities” is that of someone who strove might and main to reconcile the twain in the most memorable passages of Legion from the Shadows. Among the many, many things we have to thank Glenn Lord for is bringing Wagner and Howard together.

12. Larry Richter, “The Least of Bob Howard,” in The Highwayman and North Texas Ballistics Review V1n2, REHupa Mailing #146, August 1997. Regrettably, this article has only ever been available to REHupans and those blessed with REHupan connections, because Larry, although prodigally generous with his time and insights online, has long been reluctant to formalize the contents of his zines and discussion group posts for publication. He can be self-deprecating here–”It is strictly seat of the pants and intuition so far, and I might believe in elves and fairies too”–but fledgling Howardists looking to think or write about the “how” of Howard, the engines that prevent his stories (“the fastest thing delivered by Alphabet”) from ever obeying anyone else’s speed limit, owe it to themselves to get hold of “The Least.” Larry reminds us that “a Howard story is built with a strong call to passion. These works are not meant to be read by a dispassionate observer, and they make use of devices intended to convert an observer into an emotional participant in the story.” He visualizes each story as “a corridor of doors,” observes “There is usually enough discarded material bypassed in Howard’s best to form extra careers for someone else,” and concludes by stressing that the techniques in question demand the mythic as both a launchpad and a splashdown site.

It kills me to bypass certain other essays, like the “Tower of the Elephant”-oriented magnum opus Rick McCollum started but never finished in REHupa, or Rusty’s “The Journey Inside,” which occasioned an immortal Don Herron comment in Mailing #101: “Rusty: Your essay is really a long essay, quite lengthy.” (At times the many extracts from Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye threaten to engulf Rusty’s own paragraphs, like Zulu impis charging British infantry squares, but the essay–monograph, really–is worth the effort for reader as well as writer). And I’m embarassed that the Boxer Rebellion that’s been the most important REHupa development of the 21st century thanks to Leo, Mark Finn, and Chris Gruber goes unrepresented, but my suspicion is that a masterpiece of claret-and-clarity will yet be painted by one of those guys. But, for now, there you have them, my Twelve That Delve, the essayists whose countenances should be carved Rushmore-style into the side of Mount Golamira, whose keyboards should be phoenix-inscribed by the real, accept-no-substitutes Epimetreus.

1. Please breakdown how you figured out how many votes you have. Something like “12 issues + 1 Awards ish + 1 Index + 4 for two Lion’s Den letters + 3 for one essay + 2 for Cross Plains coverage = 23 votes total.”

2. Use the template provided in this post to make sure you voted for everything. Several people have missed categories by accident already.

3. For essays, you vote THREE times. Once for First Place, once for Second Place, and once for Third Place.

4. By request, I’ve added a “No Award This Year” option to the top of the ballot page. This is for when you decide that none of the candidates are qualified, and you’d prefer that no one receive the Award in question. I find it hard to believe that any category will even be so barren of talent as to require this, but what the heck.

Not since the days of H. Ross Perot have I had this much trouble deciding how to cast a vote (and I’m only half kidding). This year’s Cimmerian Award candidates cover the spectrum of Howardian achievement: from literary criticism to biographical discovery, bibliographic data to personal essay, and many combinations of all of the above. With 80 essays in contention for a Hyrkanian Award, this is clearly the category to watch; it’s also the one that’s giving me fits — there’s too many to choose from. I like to pick the essays that I feel will have the biggest impact on Howard Studies, but there’s also several essays that I just plain liked, that probably won’t have much of an impact in the field. I am also biased toward items aimed at collectors, being one myself, which makes the Atlantean Award a tough call for me. What to do, what to do.

In the past, Leo has mentioned that not everyone entitled to vote has exercised that right. Come on! Every contributor and reader of The Cimmerian needs to use their votes. Given my above-mentioned biases, do you really want me swinging the vote in any direction? And, as a recipient of two skulls myself, I can’t tell you how much it means to read the voters’ comments in the pages of the Awards Issue. Whoever wrote that “For stark, living zealotry” comment really made my day. Don’t deny the people who made the Centennial Year the spectacular success that it was — vote! Even if you don’t have any comments to make, show the fine fellows of Howard fandom your support.

This has been a public service announcement.

KEW is in no position to serve as Guest of Honor, unless we figure out how to work the Orastes/Valerius/Tarascus/Amalric trick. But with all due respect for the carnosaur-sized footprints the two current frontrunners have left all over Howard studies, he does belong on the Black Circle ballot as much as anyone save Novalyne Price Ellis herself (Leo asked for suggestions, and I can’t believe I spaced; guess I’m an imperfect Wagnerite). I went on and on in the Lion’s Den this past year about Wagner’s credentials as an REH editor and exponent, and will refrain from flogging that dead destrier here. Perhaps the thing to do is to add his name next year; for de Camp to beat KEW into the Black Circle would be a justice-miscarriage of Shub-Niggurathian proportions.

Sorry, Karl. Won’t happen again.

LEO ADDS: I put him on the list. No big deal, anyone who has voted and wants to change their vote before March 1 is welcome to. There’s probably a lot of others we could add to that list, but I figure we might as well wait until someone raises a stink about them.