In welcome news, TC just learned that Charles R. Saunders has a fresh blog entry posted at Drums of Nyumbani, his website. The title of this post is “The First Ghana.” Much like his article, “The Epoch of Kush,” this piece by Saunders explores the rich history of sub-Saharan Africa. Another similarity betwixt the two is that both were written during the ’70s by CRS for one of the fantasy/S&S fanzines that proliferated during that decade. Fear not, Saunders’ scholarship still holds up.

Mr. Saunders reveals the history of the first Ghana (modern-day Ghana shares little but a name with its namesake). Called Aoukar by its own people, the kingdom was given its common name by Arab chroniclers, who derived it from one of the titles of the Ghanaian ruler (a situation similar to the one in which the “Inca” empire received its name from the Spanish). Reaching its height in the eleventh century AD, Ghana was a veritable sub-Saharan Klondike, exporting gold to Europe and Asia. Such riches invited envy and aggression. Eventually, Ghana succumbed.

Medieval Ghana was very likely the source of the name which REH bestowed upon the “Ghanatas” seen in the unfinished Conan yarn referred to as “The Tombalku Fragment.” Serious students of Conan the Cimmerian might also recall that he wielded a “Ghanata knife” when infiltrating black-walled Khemi in The Hour of the Dragon. Clues left by REH point to the Hyborian Age Ghanatas being a tribe situated somewhere betwixt Stygia and Tombalku, and that said tribe had notable iron-working skills. All things considered, that matches up fairly well with the Ghanatas’ (probable) historical inspiration.

I’ve been studying sub-Saharan Africa for more than twenty-five years and CRS’ post still taught me a few things. As I stated earlier, Saunders’ scholarship (like his fiction) has stood the test of time.

The only true Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon, will be published in another version next December by Prime Books, in Mass Market Paperback.

Robert E. Howard: The Hour of the Dragon

Mass Market Paperback
Original WEIRD TALES text
320 pages
Cover by Scott Grimando
$6.99

Here’s a link to the cover artist’s website, Scott Grimando. There’s plenty of sweet art in the galleries over there.

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The transformation of literary genres in the early twentieth century was marked by a series of intriguing parallels and recurrences. When Raymond Chandler, displaced as much in England as California, started down the mean streets of writing pulp fiction, he used an Erle Stanley Gardner story as his template. Chandler prepared a detailed synopsis of Gardner’s story and then re-wrote the story himself, comparing the results to the original. Chandler’s first published pulp story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” (1933) introduced the prototype for the hardboiled private eye who emerged six years later in Chandler’s landmark first novel, The Big Sleep in the form of Philip Marlowe. Likewise Chandler’s literary heir, Ross Macdonald, displaced as much in Canada as California, would use The Big Sleep as the template for his own first novel, The Moving Target (1949) and, in the process, introduced Marlowe’s successor, Lew Archer who would arguably represent the hardboiled detective realized to its full potential.

When Robert E. Howard, an outcast in his native Cross Plains, started down the path that would eventually give the world the genre now known as Sword & Sorcery, he used Paul L. Anderson’s story, “En-ro of the Ta-an” as the template for his various “Am-ra of the Ta-an” story drafts. Anderson would likely be a completely forgotten literary figure but for the efforts of Howard scholar, Rusty Burke. Even without Anderson as a reference point, Howard’s first attempts at creating a noble savage are instantly familiar to the modern reader as being works that are highly derivative of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, Pellucidar and Caspak novels. Just as the seminal Black Mask writers took the western and successfully brought it to an urban setting creating modern detective fiction in the process, so Burroughs and those he influenced took Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli tales and laid the foundation for modern myth-making by cross-breeding jungle adventures with the lost worlds tales of Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. Rider Haggard.

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As for any inner meaning or ‘message,’ it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical… I cordially dislike allegory, and have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence… I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other resides in the purposed domination of the author.

–J.R.R. Tolkien

Reading Saunders’ review of Leonard Carpenter’s Conan the Hero, namely the myriad thinly-veiled Vietnam allegory that makes the bulk of the plot, put me in mind of the above Tolkien quotation. Naturally, it made me also think of how Robert E. Howard is one of those authors whose every work is heaving with such applicability, and how much a disservice Carpenter does to Howard as a result.

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Artist's depiction of European early modern human (Cro-Magnon).

In my post last week, I discussed the influence of Scottish folklorist Lewis Spence on Robert E. Howard’s vision of the prehistoric world. In particular I focused on Spence’s theory that the early modern humans known popularly as Cro-Magnon people were actually emigrants from Atlantis who invaded Europe in several waves during the last few millennia of the Ice Age. This is a theory to which Howard appeared to be sympathetic and which he included in several of his works.

In a recent conversation with Deuce Richardson I learned that Howard’s acceptance of the “Cro-Magnons from Atlantis” theory and his inclusion of it in his fiction had given rise to the mistaken idea among some readers that Howard’s Atlanteans (and by extension, their descendents, the Cimmerians) were somehow primitive-looking physically – like the stereotypical popular conception of a “cave man.” A number of posts on the REH forum illustrate this misconception.

In point of fact, if one understands the sources that helped frame Howard’s own understanding of the Cro-Magnon people, it becomes quite apparent that exactly the opposite is true — Howard saw Cro-Magnon man as a highly-developed race of human beings, perhaps more developed in many ways than contemporary man. This is evident even in his first professional story “Spear and Fang,” first published in 1925 and reprinted in The Ultimate Triumph, where REH describes Ga-nor the Cro-Magnon:

“Tall he was, towering well over six feet, leanly built, with mighty shoulders and narrow hips, the build of a fighting man. Both his hands and his feet were long and slim; and his features, thrown into bold profile by the flickering torch-light, were intelligent, with a high, broad forehead, topped by a mane of sandy hair.” (UT p. 212)

Both Ga-nor and his eventual mate A-aea were “perfect specimens of the great Cro-Magnon race. . . .” (p. 212)

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One of the more interesting elements of Robert E. Howard’s fictional take on the legendary Atlantis is the fact that he makes the antediluvian culture a stone-age kingdom, rather than the highly advanced civilization of the theosophists or the Bronze Age empire of Plato. This is most evident in the Kull stories, in which the high civilization of the Thurian Age is represented not by Atlantis, but rather the mainland kingdoms of Valusia and her neighbors. The Atlanteans of that time are the barbarians on the fringes of civilization.

Howard’s depiction of stone-age Atlanteans appears as early as the unpublished “Exile of Atlantis”, probably written in the first half of 1925 and as late as the 1932 essay “The Hyborian Age,” in which stone-age Atlanteans war with their Pictish counterparts after the Cataclysm. In the 1926 unpublished stories “Men of the Shadows” and “Isle of the Eons” the Atlanteans are explicitly linked to the Cro-Magnon people.

This identification of Cro-Magnon man as Atlantean and Howard’s reasoning behind this theory are expressed in a letter to Harold Preece in 1928:

“About Atlantis — I believe something of the sort existed, though I do not especially hold any theory about a high type of civilization existing there — in fact, I doubt that. But some continent was submerged away back, or some large body of land, for practically all peoples have legends about a flood. And the Cro-Magnons appeared suddenly in Europe, developed to a high state of primitive culture; there is no trace to show that they came up the ladder of utter barbarism in Europe. Suddenly their remains are found supplanting the Neanderthal Man, to whom they have no ties of kinship whatever. Where did they originate? Nowhere in the known world, evidently. They must have originated in some land which is not now known to us.” (Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume One, p. 237)

In this letter Howard seems to be paraphrasing the ideas of the Scottish journalist and folklorist Lewis Spence, who wrote a series of popular books on Atlantis in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The influence of Spence’s ideas on Howard’s early stories has been previously noted by Patrice Louinet and Rusty Burke in their essays “Robert E. Howard, Bran Mak Morn and the Picts” (2001) and “Atlantean Genesis” (2006), but this influence is significant enough to warrant further examination.

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I have already mentioned on The Cimmerian the Robert E. Howard ebooks published by Halcyon Press for Amazon’s reading device, respectively here and here. Five (?) other REH books have been published by this Texan company since then.

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I recently mentioned here at The Cimmerian that four Robert E. Howard Kindle ebooks were to be published by Halcyon Press. A few more volumes are now available. As you can see above, Solomon Kane, Howard’s swashbuckling Puritan from Devonshire, is among these digital publications for Amazon’s reading device. No way is this a complete collection, since the table of contents only lists five stories: “Solomon Kane,” “Skulls in the Stars,” “The Moon of Skulls,” “Wings in the Night” and “Rattle of Bones.” The other two books are meatier.

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Halcyon Press is a Texan publisher based in Houston. Under the series name of ”Halcyon Classics,” it is publishing a line of Kindle eBooks. Kindle is Amazon’s digital wireless reading device. Several books by TC’s favorite Texan author are now available.

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James Maliszewski

Yesterday, James Maliszewski, proprieter of the Grognardia website, as well as a Friend of the Cimmerian, wrote up a thoughtful birthday post regarding Tollers. Primarily, the entry is concerned with the influence of the appendices for The Lord of the Rings upon James’ early role-playing gaming career. It’s a worthy piece and I advise the RPG-inclined to check it out.

However, while not exactly a quibble, I think it worth mentioning that Tolkien did not in reality “box in” or over-explicate his sub-creation of Middle-earth as much as some surmise. If one excludes The Silmarillion and considers only The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, then JRRT left vast areas of his world unexplored and saw fit to let many metaphysical questions remain unanswered. The only region given a thorough going-over was north-western Middle-earth and even that had large areas about which little was revealed, whether in the tales themselves or in the appendices.

In contrast, Robert E. Howard had Conan personally visit many more far-flung regions (though it appears Aragorn came close to matching the Cimmerian in his own wanderings). In Howard’s (barely) post-Hyborian Age yarn, “Marchers of Valhalla,” he had Hialmar’s Æsir war-band nearly circumnavigate the globe on foot. In addition, while no official ‘appendix,’ REH’s “The Hyborian Age” essay goes a long way towards fulfilling that function. 

Just something that occurred to me.