This past weekend I landed a major score at a local used bookstore, a haul that included no fewer than four works of swords and sorcery, a Weird Tales anthology, and a Year’s Best Fantasy collection. Needless to say I’ve got some good reading ahead of me. (Don’t ask me where this book store is: I won’t divulge my secrets until I’ve plundered the rest of its treasures).

Unfortunately, my excitement was dimmed upon discovering that the first book I opened, the Jessica Amanda Salmonson-edited Heroic Visions (1983, Ace Fantasy), begins with an essay that both exalts the S&S genre while managing to simultaneously land a swiping, drive-by broadsword blow on none other than Robert E. Howard.

Here’s the offending paragraph by Salmonson:

Heroic fantasy, in recent decades, has seemed too often to be epitomized by Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, and this is a sad state of affairs. The millennia-old heritage of magical and heroic tales does not begin or culminate in the rather simplistic fictions of the pulp era or the current, slavish imitations thereof. Howard’s work is admirable; he was surprisingly well-read, and invested his stories with the hodge-podge of an amateur historian or Harold Lamb fan, creating something primal, evocative, intriguing. Stylistically, he was weak. The dozen-score imitators of Howard have tended to capture the weakness of his style, but not the primal thread of his limited though worthwhile heroic vision — his, shall we say, pathos. Without denying Howard’s genius or even qualifying it, it must be recognized that glorifying his rudimentary sword and sorcery as “ideal” heroic fantasy is akin to assuming Doc Smith’s old-fashioned space opera is “ideal” science fiction. No area of fantasy should be so stagnant and devoid of stylistic and conceptual growth or variety.

This paragraph reeks of the backhanded compliments that former Cimmerian blogger Mark Finn waxed about so eloquently (and angrily) in his August 2008 post “Whispers of Imbecility.” Finn’s post took to task Arnie Fenner for his less-than-flattering comments of Howard in his introduction to . . .And their Memory was a Bitter Tree, a book containing several of Howard’s tales.

Salmonson’s anti-Howard comments in Heroic Visions — an anthology of heroic fantasy/swords and sorcery — are equally as puzzling as Fenner’s, and almost as out of place (at least Heroic Visions doesn’t actually include any Howard tales in it). To sum it up, according to Salmonson:

• Howard was “weak” stylistically
• His heroic vision was “limited”
• His sword and sorcery vision was “rudimentary”

Although Salmonson is harder on Howard’s imitators than REH himself, these body blows completely negate her positive comments that Howard’s works are also “admirable,” “primal,” and “evocative.” My question: Why is this negative commentary of S&S’s greatest practitioner necessary in a book that otherwise sings the praises of the genre? It’s a head-scratcher. It’s also noteworthy that Salmonson singles out no other author for criticism. It’s almost as if she held some vendetta against Howard.

Salmonson’s essay is not devoid of merit, as it also explores the deep roots of S&S. She notes with some illumination that we can see heroic fantasy’s nascency in works like the Aeneid, the Faerie Queene, Gilgamesh, and Beowulf. Writes Salmonson: “The plain truth is that the finest stories throughout and before recorded history have been heroic fantasies; many of the finest stories yet to be written will be heroic fantasies also.”

This is good stuff; I’m with Salmonson here. But her comments about REH serve to exclude him from this grand tradition, rather than holding him up as an early 20th century practitioner of heroic fantasy and one of the genre’s brightest lights. It’s all rather unfortunate.

Perhaps we should take Salmonson’s brief synopsis of Howard with a large dose of salt: Heroic Visions was published in 1983 by Ace, the same firm which had just finished reprinting the L. Sprague de Camp/Lin Carter-edited Conan books. The Lancer/Ace reprints of course contained introductions by de Camp and Carter that were in general quite complimentary of Howard, but also contained occasional less-than flattering comments, such as this one by de Camp in Conan the Conqueror: “Although he had his faults as a writer, Howard was a natural storyteller.”

Like Salmonson, de Camp doesn’t bother to elaborate upon or even explain these faults — supporting evidence is apparently not necessary. Perhaps de Camp rubbed off on Salmonson, who also fails to provide any evidence of Howard’s faults as a writer here, just unsupported pot-shots.

I don’t want to leave the impression that Howard is above criticism. But there is a time and place for it, and it doesn’t belong in thumbnail-sketch introductions of heroic fantasy.