Part Two: ‘Tôl acharn!’

Part Three: The Long Road to Menegroth

My esteemed colleague, Brian Murphy, recently reviewed The Children of Húrin, so it seemed apposite to follow that with an account of what transpired after the death of Nienor and Túrin. Both died that fateful day above Cabed Naeramarth, but their parents, Morwen and Húrin, lived on. The curse of Morgoth upon the House of Húrin had yet to come to full fruition.

The tale of Húrin’s wanderings has come down to us, primarily, in one volume, The War of the Jewels: The Later Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Christopher Tolkien traces the evolution of the saga from the “lost continuation” of “The Grey Annals” (an account of the First Age written by JRRT in the early 1950s) to a “substantial complex of writing” which seems to have been composed in the latter half of that decade. The title that the elder Tolkien settled upon was “The Wanderings of Húrin.” All of this “substantial complex of writing” was in service of fleshing out the stories (he did the same, or began to, for his tales of Túrin and Tuor) that Tolkien had first envisioned in the ’20s and ’30s, fresh from the horrors of the Great War.

Tolkien, after the completion of his novel, The Lord of the Rings, went back to The Silmarillion with the intention of expanding it and bringing it into closer accord with his tale of the Fall of Sauron, which was, in many ways, an addendum and afterthought to the previous work. Tolkien had always intended to see The Silmarillion published, and in fact, he had submitted it to a befuddled Unwin-Ryan immediately after the unexpected world-wide success of The Hobbit. “The Wanderings of Húrin” was to play a pivotal part in Tolkien’s projected revision and expansion of The Silmarillion.

“The Wanderings of Húrin” is not The Hobbit. One tale was written (spoken, actually) in the early ’30s by JRRT to entertain his children, Christopher Tolkien chief amongst them. The other was begun by Tolkien in the late 1950s, when he saw “double-speak” (a term Orwell didn’t invent, but should have) and an Iron Curtain, with its attendant gulags (how different were Morgoth’s “Hells of Iron,” really?), spreading their influence across his world.

I will not go into the complexities regarding the composition of “Wanderings” here, other than to say Christopher Tolkien noted that his father, fairly early in the narrative, “came to a clearer understanding” of how things stood in Brethil when Húrin the Steadfast appeared at its borders with vindication and vengeance in his mind. As events would show, the shadow of Angband hung close about him.

Knowing what sorrows and horrors befell the eldest son of Galdor in the preceding six decades might allow the unitiated to better appreciate Húrin’s mind-set. (Continue reading this post)

I see my fellow blogger Deuce Richardson has mentioned “The Challenge From Beyond” in his recent post. Unlike “Ghor, Kin-slayer,” however, this round robin actually works as a story, though it certainly has its quirks.

Originally published in the fanzine “Fantasy Magazine” in 1935, and combining the efforts of C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long, this is more commonly available in Sam Moskowitz’s Horrors Unknown or as a Necronomicon Press chapbook — it’s also free online, having fallen into public domain. Another story of the same title was also created for “Fantasy Magazine” at the same time, with the same title, but this was a science fiction story by five science fiction writers.

One supposes Robert E. Howard was attracted by the idea of collaborating with H. P. Lovecraft — whose contribution is actually the largest. The gist of the story is that a man discovers a crystal cube of extraterrestrial origin, one that has the effect of capturing his soul and transporting it to another world, where he awakes in the form of a giant worm. Perhaps the most infamous part is where the shock of this transformation causes Lovecraft’s protagonist to drop dead in a faint, at which point Robert E. Howard has him awake to shrug it off in a “shit happens” manner and go on a barbaric killing spree. Here Howard’s hero, on a quest for ultimate power, takes the globe that is the god of Yekub in his centipedal grasp.

But perhaps the best writing is Frank Belknap Long’s conclusion. Striving to knit together the disparate strands of what has gone before, he tells of the doom of the man’s body now occupied by an alien mind, and of the benevolent rule of the worm body now controlled by a human mind.

Sometime in the late 1970s, the Rev. Jonathan Bacon (a one-time member of REHupa) came up with a fairly cool idea. Bacon was the editor of Fantasy Crossroads, a Howard-centric fanzine. Through Glenn Lord, Bacon had acquired the Robert E. Howard fragment, “Genseric’s Fifth-Born Son” (the title derives from Lord, as far as I can ascertain), a part of the “James Allison” series of reincarnation tales. Bacon thought it would be interesting to bring together many of the active fantasy authors at that time and have them “complete” Howard’s fragment in a round-robin fashion. Robert E. Howard himself had participated in something similar when he wrote a chapter for “The Challenge From Beyond,” a round-robin tale published by the fanzine Fantasy Magazine in late 1935. In some ways, Bacon was just following a trail that REH had helped blaze. However, he chose to discard the Lord title for the fragment as a title for the entire work, deciding upon Ghor, Kin-Slayer as being a better designation.

A more complete account of how Bacon strove to get all chapters of the collaboration he envisioned published is told elsewhere. It suffices to say that only twelve out of seventeen chapters ever saw print in Fantasy Crossroads, the last being in January of 1979.

Jonathan Bacon then dropped off the map. However, Glenn Lord still retained a complete manuscript of all seventeen chapters. Nearly twenty years later, March Michaud of Necronomicon Press, learning of the complete manuscript, decided that he would publish the entire round-robin tale. Utilizing the editing talents of Rusty Burke, Michaud got Ghor, Kin-Slayer published in August, 1997. I received my copy in early 1998.

Ghor, Kin-Slayer is a chimerical beast, no way around it. The contributors to the tale range from Karl Edward Wagner and Charles R. Saunders to A. E. Van Vogt and Marion Zimmer Bradley. I intend to examine the whole story on a chapter-by-chapter basis. For those of you who tend toward spoiler-phobia, I suggest you stop reading right about now.

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It is springtime in East Tennessee. Sometimes the spring seems to turn to summer in a matter of weeks, but this time round it’s been pretty and spring-like through most of March, all of April (while we were hearing of major snowstorms in the Northwest), and so far into May. We have been getting a lot of rain, and everything green is growing as fast as it can. While the dogwoods are no longer blooming, a lot of other things are, and it’s constantly showing me why this is my favorite time of year here. This time of year I often think about this passage from “For the Love of Barbara Allen”:

“It was mornin’ in the mountains and they were both young. You never saw a mornin’ in the spring, in the Cumberlands?”
“I never was in Tennessee,” I answered.
“No, you don’t know anything about it,” he retorted, in the half humerous, half petulant mood of the old. “You’re a post-oak gopher. You never saw anything but sand drifts and dry shinnery ridges. What do you know about mountain sides covered with birch and laurel, and cold clear streams windin’ through the cool shadows and tinklin’ over the rocks? What do you know about upland forests with the blue haze of the Cumberlands hangin’ over them?”
“Nothing,” I answered, yet even as I spoke, there leaped crystal clear into my mind with startling clarity the very image of the things of which he spoke, so vivid that my external faculties seemed almost to sense it — I could almost smell the dogwood blossoms and the cool lush of the deep woods, and hear the tinkle of hidden streams over the stones.

The Cumberland Mountains are somewhat north and west of here, maybe two or three hours drive. The Cumberland River, of which Howard also speaks, winds through them from Kentucky into Nashville. The foothills area where I live has very similar topography, climate and flora to that region. I sometimes wonder how Howard was able to describe a Tennessee mountain spring so well. Surely the reference books of the day could have provided the basic facts, but this almost reads as though Howard had talked to someone who, like the fictional grandfather, actually remembered it. By 1930, the Civil War was only 65 years in the past, and Howard could have found an old-timer who had been part of the large Tennessee to Texas exodus that followed, perhaps part of the last wave. Maybe some of that vivid description could have come from family stories handed down from ancestors who had lived in the Southeast. I can only hope that when I finally make my way through the complete letters, I will perhaps find a clue.

Anthologies of sword-and-sorcery stories have always been thin on the ground. Credit must be given to L. Sprague de Camp for getting things rolling with collections like The Spell of Seven. In the ’70s, Lin Carter moved the concept forward with his “The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories” (DAW) anthologies. One can argue that ol’ Linwood was not much of a writer, but I would categorically state that the man had taste as an editor. He gave authors like Charles R. Saunders and Adrian Cole some of their first breaks. I recommend picking up every volume in the series edited by Carter. Don’t bother with the Saha-edited books.

Coincident with the closing days of Lin’s run, Zebra Books fired up a rival series called “Swords Against Darkness”, edited by Andrew J. Offutt. Like Carter, Offutt could be viewed as no great shakes in the authorial department, but his editorial acumen was similarly keen. David Drake, [redacted] and other worthies made the jump to paperbacks (and greater things) in the several volumes of the “SAD” series. In addition, Manly Wade Wellman’s “Kardios” series finally saw print. Once again, highly recommended. The quality was satisfactorily high from book to book.

The rest of the 1980s and 1990s deserve little mention and slight regard when it comes to S&S anthologies that published rising talents. One notable exception was Asprin’s “Thieves’ World” series. Robert Adams’ “Barbarians” books contained a few new gems. Wagner’s “Echoes of Valor” series was dedicated exclusively to republishing lost treasures from the pulp era, most notably the first ever printing of “The Black Stranger.”

Once we found out (some more pleased than others) that the “Y2K” thing wasn’t going to send us all into the depths of a “new Dark Age” (as HPL might say), the odds for fresh S&S anthologies seemed as grim as ever. Then the Robert E. Howard Del Reys hit the stands and sword-and-sorcery looked to have a fighting chance in the book marketplace. Pitch Black Books jumped into the fray with Lords of Swords and Sages and Swords, both worthy collections. However, general (and shameful) indifference on the part of sword-and-sorcery fans seems to have sounded the death knell for that particular series.

Which brings us to Return of the Sword: An Anthology of Heroic Adventure from Rogue Blades Entertainment. Featuring a stirring cover from Johnney Perkins and edited by Jason M. Waltz, this trade paperback is the newest claimant to enter the battle-circle once dominated in days of yore by DAW and Zebra.

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Finally received my copy of The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, and boy, was it ever worth the wait. At 728 [redacted]-edited pages and well over seven-hundred poems, it’s a monster of a collection. Toss in the great design and layout courtesy of Jim Keegan, the fine workmanship of the Smythe-sewn signatures, and the inclusion of Steve Eng’s classic essay on Howard’s poetry as the book’s introduction, and we finally have the definitive one-volume, casebound edition of REH’s verse that we have been waiting decades for.

I was over at Donald Sidney-Fryer’s a few nights back and presented him with a copy of this book, and he was rapturous over it. He especially appreciated that the print was easy to read and didn’t engage in any of the stylistic oddities that plague so many poetry books, where they print the poems in italic or fill the pages with illustrations and faux-illuminated borders. With this book you get just the poems, presented simply but elegantly, making it easy to read and reference. Don also liked the cover, considering that photo of a young Howard in fighting trim his favorite surviving image of the Bard from Cross Plains.

I don’t envy the task that Rob had of categorizing everything. There are some very polished poems in the “Dialect & Doggerel” section that probably should be in their own category (I’m thinking here of boxing poems such as the moving “Kid Lavigne is Dead”), but the idea was to follow the same divisions that Eng used in his essay (a piece which is still the very best of its type twenty years after it was written), and that strategy works really well. To have a volume like this that us eminently suitable for handing to some newbie to Howard’s verse without any excuses, fronted by that great essay, is a godsend. I’ll be dipping into this for Howardian poetry fixes whenever I can. It’s a book that is so big and so entertaining, I don’t ever think I’ll reach the point where I’ve bled it dry of inspiration and wonders.

Everyone involved with this project deserves our highest praise. I only wish that right under the “Edited by [redacted]” and before the “Introduction by Steve Eng,” it would have included “Poems collected by Glenn Lord” to honor all of the early ground work he did digging up caches of long-lost REH verse around the country in various attics and boxes. If he hadn’t done that throughout the fifties and sixties, much of what we have would have been permanently lost. He of course gets the usual shout-out in the Acknowledgments, but his contribution is so gargantuan that it is deserving of being listed on the title-page, I think.

God, Steve Tompkins would have adored this book.

We live in halcyon days, my friends. Sure, there’s a global “economic downturn” grinding all and sundry ‘neath its leaden wheels and there is a possible influenza pandemic looming (or “lowering,” as REH might say), but we aficionados of the works of Robert E. Howard and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien have much to celebrate in the many coming months, gloom n’ doom notwithstanding.

Firstly, there is The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun by JRRT, which is being released on May 5th. The dearly departed Steve Tompkins gave us (or, at least, myself) a much-appreciated heads-up on this project. At 384 pages, this volume outstrips the recent The Children of Hurin in pagination, though only time will tell whether it does the same in its quality of story-telling. Considering Tolkien’s deep investment in the mythic ‘Nordic’ North (far deeper than Howard’s, I would argue), I have high and lofty hopes for this publication. The dark and bloody Volsungasaga, forged in the depths of the Germanic Dark Ages, was always a well-spring of inspiration for Tollers.

Coming in October from the Library of America is the Peter Straub-edited, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps. Nestled like a blasphemous, obsidian jewel amongst tales from Robert W. Chambers and Clark Ashton Smith (and, of course, Poe) is Robert E. Howard’s seminal Lovecraftian yarn, “The Black Stone.” Inclusion of a Howard story in a Library of America publication is always a provocation for (at least minor) rejoicing. I have Bill Thom (of Howard Works and Coming Attractions fame) to thank for this welcome news.

REHupan Frank Coffman has his much-anticipated Robert E. Howard: Selected Poems volume (in cooperation with the Robert E. Howard Foundation) slated for a release to coincide with the 2009 Howard Days. Considering the “poetry” theme for this year’s commemoration, Coffman’s is a most fitting book, one which complements the recently published A Word From the Outer Dark (Project Pride), along with The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard. A banner year for REH poetry fanatics. (Continue reading this post)

The latest batch includes one mailing from every group of ten stretching from the #90s to the #190s. See the whole list here. Each is filled to the brim with rare Howardiana. Some folks got some incredible deals in the last batch, scoring large and notable mailings for a relative pittance. #118 and #176 especially were great steals at those prices. The auction for #100 got a bit ridiculous price-wise, but it is indeed a rare-as-hell mailing and the biggest in the a.p.a.s history (plus it contains Don Herron’s infamous “I piss on you all from a considerable height” smackdown, a legendarily hilarious moment in the a.p.a.s history), so perhaps over the long-term such a buy will pay dividends. The winner now has a mailing that even several hardcore REHupa collectors still are dying to find, so they have that to weigh against the price-tag.

My personal view these days is that anything under $50 for an old REHupa, and anything under $30 for a new one, is a good deal given their long-term rarity and the amount of collectability they have. For information on why REHupa mailings are rare, collectible, and an essential cornerstone of any good Howard collection, see here.

It’s called The Hunt for Gollum, and there’s some trailers up for it right now at their website. The entire forty-minute film is set to debut on May 3.

This is the kind of thing I’m intrigued by on many levels, as a guy who has often harbored dreams of doing something similar. Think about it: they used a couple of HD prosumer video cameras in the $3000-$5000 range, some extra equipment to achieve a cinematic look (SGPro depth of field adapter, SteadiCams, computer color correction and visual effects), and a lot of donated acting, prop, and makeup help. Putting aside for a moment my loathing of the Lord of the Rings films and watching the trailer, it seems they did a good job of pressing up against true feature quality, with the usual exceptions common to fan films: somewhat subpar acting, like kids playing dress-up, along with poor choices of lenses and angles in the action scenes (too many wide lenses and not enough telephoto, odd bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views, and camera skews with no motivation or coherence) which seem to give away that it was shot on a video camera. But the long shots and general quality of the images are quite stunning, the British locations magnificent, and even the Orcs seem to mirror those in the Hollywood version, at least in the little clips I saw of them in the trailers.

The main thing I am always struck by when seeing these sorts of films (there are a lot of good Star Wars ones out there, too), is that people would spend so much time and effort aping a copyrighted world, when with a few small adjustments and a good script they could make a similarly inspired and magnificent film based in a world of their own making, which would allow them to make money off of their effort, use it as a demo reel to get a job making a more expensive feature set in the same fictional universe, or any number of other options. But I suppose that a lot of people helped solely because it wasn’t just any fantasy story but one that aped Jackson’s LotR vision. I personally can’t stand that vision — that grey and drab world of misty forests peopled by unshowered Rangers and hippie elves accompanied by a soundtrack of ghostly Enya-esque wails. I think it’s beyond silly for the orchestra to boom and the camera to swoop around every time there’s a nice view or a mountain. But these guys have clearly made a great effort, achieving enough to prove yet again that independent films of this nature can and will become as cool as Hollywood fare someday soon. Amazing new cameras and computers are coming down the pike, stuff that is going to make a good homemade video every bit as stunning as most Hollywood films, even effects-laden ones. When that happens, I wonder how many Howard stories are going to get filmed? That little Solomon Kane one that made the rounds a few years back might only be the humble beginning of a big low-budget push to get Howard’s work on screen.

From the first review by Glenn Lord to many of today’s write-ups, A Gent From Bear Creek is often considered a collection of the Breckinridge Elkins stories. This, I’ve long thought, is a disservice to Howard, who went to some lengths to make this into another serialized novel, like Hour of the Dragon, although one based more tightly on previous stories. And it is especially interesting to note that the new material for the book, some three more chapters worth, was based on two deeply personal relationships; the old boy meets girl, dark stranger comes between, and love triumphs story of Breck Elkins and Glory McGraw, and the deeply personal ties between Breck and his only somewhat tamed horse, Captain Kidd. The capture and partial breaking of the horse is really far and away the most Texas “tall tale” part of the book. I can imagine “Meet Capt’n Kidd” was written while Howard was in a creative frenzy rivaling that of the wild horse in the story.

Sure, A Gent From Bear Creek started out as a series of stories. But if you read the stories as they appeared in Action Stories (easy to do since the publication of Paul Herman’s The Complete Action Stories) and read Gent shortly after, you’ll find there is quite a bit more material — more story — than is commonly recognized.

For more details on the Elkins publishing history, see this post.