At the dawn of Sword-and-Sorcery, at the very moment of the genre’s Cataclysmic birth, towers a story begun by a solitary Texan barely twenty years old. In the eighty years since, dozens of authors have fed on its aged marrow like vampires. Hundreds of books have appeared mimicking its startling idioms and seductive, haunting prose melodies. Countless millions of dollars have changed hands between readers starving for more of the same and publishers scurrying around like harried Oompa Loompas in their rush to provide it. And yet upon first publication its depressed, suicidal author received a meager $100, and would never again see it reprinted during his lifetime.

The man who meticulously constructed this genre was Robert E. Howard, and the story that exploded onto the scene with a Big Bang that still echoes in our ears today was “The Shadow Kingdom.”

Arguments about the scope and confines of genre too often descend into useless pedantry. I am reminded of film noir scholar Eddie Muller‘s witheringly brilliant retort to hairsplitters who would deny the great Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) a place in the pantheon: “To those who think this isn’t noir: Man uses woman. Woman uses man. Queasy sex. Betrayal. Madness. Gunshots. He’s face down in the pool he always wanted. Case closed.” For the attentive critic, genre labels have a purpose not to be deflected by myopic minds.

Often the most difficult part of talking intelligently about Sword-and-Sorcery is dodging the flailing Nerf blades swung in its defense by those who ostensibly would protect it from harm. Valka bless the boys at Swordandsorcery.org for the work they do popularizing a much-maligned art form, but articles like “The Demarcation of Sword and Sorcery” obsess over surface elements while careening past deeper connections with the bone-crunching regularity of Charlie Brown missing Lucy’s football. Sometimes you can’t win for losing — in “Demarcation” Steve Tompkins gets his name misspelled even as his “The Shortest Distance Between Two Towers” is trotted out in support of the notion that “there can be little argument that a great deal of separation exists between sword and sorcery and the rest of heroic fantasy.” Cimmerian readers may recall that in fact Tompkins’ essay cogently argues the exact opposite point — that there is in fact a “short distance” and not a “great deal of separation” between these demarcated kingdoms.

In “Demarcation,” author Joe McCullough goes on to conclude that

Sword and sorcery tells the tales of men who are free from all constraint. Their stature and skill mean they are free from the tyranny of other men. Their birth and raising free them from the morals and mores of society, and the lack of higher powers unbinds them from any concept of fate. Thus the heroes of sword and sorcery become the true representatives of free-will, and through their stories, readers are able to imagine the capabilities and the triumphs of men who are completely free to chart their own destiny.

It would be a pity if such rash and improvident definitions ever gain real purchase in the minds of thoughtful readers. The best Sword-and-Sorcery characters resist attempts to reduce them to comfortable stereotypes. Howard’s Kull time and again barely manages to escape from an ever-present entourage of enemies, only to remain ever-ensorcelled by the “ghosts of wild wars and world-ancient feuds,” the “inhuman powers of antiquity,” and most of all the ever-looming “phantom of his hate, the restless hatred of the savage, before which all else must give way.” With each story the King of Valusia triumphs fleetingly if at all, only to be seen at the beginning of the next tale with his golddust turned to sawdust:

There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem and upon the fingers of the women sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester’s bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh.

Even to kings, Howard purrs, and we can’t help but add “and to Sword-and-Sorcery heroes allegedly free from constraint.” The idea that S&S heroes lack the “mores and morals of society” is rebutted by innumerable passages in Howard’s work, as in this one from “The Scarlet Citadel”:

[Conan] had been placed in these pits for a definite doom. He cursed himself for his refusal of their offer, even while his stubborn manhood revolted at the thought, and he knew that were he taken forth and given another chance, his reply would be the same. He would not sell his subjects to the butcher. And yet it had been with no thought of anyone’s gain but his own that he had seized the kingdom originally. Thus subtly does the instinct of sovereign responsibility enter even a red-handed plunderer sometimes.

Postulating that Sword-and-Sorcery heroes by definition are “free from the tyranny of other men” becomes not only indefensible but insulting when one considers Charles Saunders’ hero Imaro, who thematically resonates as much about tyranny both cosmic and real as any fantasy hero created since December 6, 1865. And maybe it’s the guilty Catholic in me, but I can’t help imagining the shade of Karl Edward Wagner wanting to thump McCullough over the head with a Douay-Rheims Bible over his dictum that Sword-and-Sorcery tales feature a “lack of higher powers” that “unbinds [S&S heroes] from any concept of fate.”

In Tolkien’s defense, “Demarcation” inflicts a few goose eggs onto his wizened skull as well, as when McCullough states that “the rest of heroic fantasy, with its duties and obligations, has historically appealed to an older audience who are aware of the realities of such notions.” Perhaps he’s too young to remember the great surge of longhaired, pot-smoking, Led Zeppelin-worshipping, “Frodo Lives” hippie-folk and collegiate counter-culturists who were the true force behind Tolkien’s meteoric rise to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s. My own generation of young Dungeons & Dragons playing, Commodore 64 programming, “Shining City on a Hill” latchkey kids of the late ’70s and early ’80s solidified the trend.

Too often, knocking down these sorts of arguments feels like hammering gophers back into plastic holes at some bizarre litcrit Chuck-e-Cheese funland. It’s silly to get too tied down to genre for its own sake — Muller’s pithy yet devastatingly effective defense of Sunset Boulevard shows how people who dither with rigid formulas fall short. And yet for a genre to mean anything at all it does need boundaries, however translucent or overlapping. The trick is in defining them in a way so that they have utility in the real world. Noir is a not a series of dance steps executed in a predetermined order, it’s an overall tone — a mood, an overriding sense of cruel irony and inescapable fate. Muller telling noir fans why they better check out Sunset Boulevard — that’s utility. Good genre categorization is like the old canard about identifying pornography: you know it when you see it. That’s assuming, of course, that the critic making such judgments has his eyes open in the first place.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with retroactively folding older works into a modern genre if the result is a greater appreciation and knowledge of the field. If noir guys want to call M noir and make it that much more of an essential film to view, cool beans. If Sword-and-Sorcery buffs insist that Dunsany’s “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth” be listed before “The Shadow Kingdom” on any master list of must-read works in the field, more power to them. It’s almost always a bad idea to attempt to forcibly divide great fantasy works from each other on the basis of genre, as often the result is akin to Siamese twins being separated with a chainsaw. A generous policy of inclusion pays large dividends, as when Steve Tompkins demonstrated the benefits of letting the oft-separated blood brothers Tolkien and REH stand shoulder to shoulder. But it’s important to not lose sight of why genres spring up and where the trendlines form. Just as securities in the stock market tend to have remarkable leaders and laggards that drag whole industry groups up or down along with them, so too do seminal works in a genre create identifiable shockwaves throughout an art form, like a stone cast into a pond creating distinct ripples across its surface.

Which to my mind is why Lord Dunsany’s “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” is not the progenitor of the Sword-and-Sorcery genre and “The Shadow Kingdom” is.

Make no mistake: “Sacnoth” is a fine tale that carefully evokes an ancient métier: the pure adult fairy tale. Frequently going out of its way to remind the audience that it is a fiction, at the same time it urges us to lower our sophisticated defenses and fully give ourselves over to the impossible events depicted. It’s a brilliant and heartfelt love letter to the kind of fantasy found in William Beckford’s Vathek or the much older Arabian Nights — in that sense, it deftly and deliberately presents us with nothing new. Like those Sword-and-Sorcery paperbacks of yore, “Sacnoth” is “In the Tradition of. . .” any number of things. And yet despite its formidable presentation of what are now seen as S&S clichés, admiring readers are hard-pressed to say what wouldn’t exist right now had “Sacnoth” never been written. No new genre label was deemed necessary because of “Sacnoth,” no clamor for similar fare was heard, no groundswell of imitation followed its publication. “Sacnoth” and Dunsany both deserve better than they’ve got in recent years, but as it stands the story is a minor curio for fantasy fans. It’s a groin-straining stretch to grant it pride of place as the instigator of the Sword-and-Sorcery genre, despite plodding through tiresome surface calculations of its use of — duh — both swords and sorcery.

“Sacnoth” is best valued as a part of that vast tapestry of the fantastic and mythic that preceded Sword-and-Sorcery, one of thousands of works peppered with elements that would one day become part of the trappings of the new genre. These elements were floating through stories for millennia, but the pressing need to define a neologic subsphere of fantasy occurred precisely due to an explosion of fiction in the middle of the last century, one whose tidal wave ripples can be traced unerringly backwards through a host of authors and fanzines to the adventures of Conan the Cimmerian in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, and from there back in time to Ground Zero: the first such story to appear in that magazine by the same prophetic author — “The Shadow Kingdom.”

Like a prism, “The Shadow Kingdom” focused a series of varying, disparate colors from the fantasy spectrum, blended them in the cauldron of Howard’s imagination, and shot out of the other side a white light unlike anything seen before. Legions of readers and writers have been wrestling with the repercussions of that eerie witch-glow ever since. It shines both forward and backward in space/time and illuminates countless works of merit, including Lord Dunsany’s “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth.” But the luminous filament casting that glare clearly emanates from a single place and time — a white clapboard house in Texas circa 1926. Remembering that not only honors Howard, but helps us clearly see what we mean when we say “Sword-and-Sorcery.” We know it when we see it because Kull lit the way, and we still worry and wonder about it because Conan built the Fortress that yet protects it from ruin, and from those who seek to peel off authors and stories and banish them to the hinterlands, whether said authors be past masters such as Lord Dunsany or J.R.R. Tolkien, or modern notables such as David Gemmell, Charles Saunders, or Karl Edward Wagner.

Late last year I was privy to a couple of Emails in which Fred Blosser and Morgan Holmes, Howardists of some repute, expressed skepticism about Michael Chabon, suspecting him of “slumming” in his faux-pulp or neo-pulp endeavors. So I was pleased when Leo relayed (by way of Don Herron) Scott Sheaffer’s report of an REH-mention by Chabon in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He’s on the side of the angels, or at least the akaanas and Yagas, and instead of building a table-barricade in the dealers’ room at Pulpcon and glowering graybeardedly at him we should be grateful for his fond gravitation to the gaudy genres of yore. No Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has ever gone over so well with me as that notched by Chabon for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, as indispensable a fictional jamboree about the dawn of the superheroes and the Golden Age of Comic Books as Gerard Jones’ 2004 Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book is a factual one.

Kavalier and Klay rewards the attentive with allusions and in-jokes about pulps and weird fiction on every other page. Luna Moth, a somewhat nocturnal emission of the eponymous creators’ imaginations, battles in “dislocated non-Euclidean dream spaces” against “slavering Elder Creatures readying vast interdimensional armadas of demons.” And what of Luna’s origin?

Know that before my homeland, great Cimmeria, was plunged into eternal darkness, it was ruled by women. All were happy in the Queendom of Cimmeria, peaceful, contented — the men in particular. Then one shrivel-hearted malcontent, Nanok, schooled himself in the ways of bloodshed and black magic, and set himself upon an obsidian throne. He sent his armies of demons into battle against the peace-loving Cimmerians; the outcome was foreordained.

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In the spring of 1936, with the specter of his own end closing in on him, Howard nevertheless found time to send his favorite gal-pal Novalyne Price some Valentine cheer, in the form of a touching, rather remarkable letter. It began with, and managed to sustain, a smile-inducing level of good humor, from the first sentence:

Dear Novalyne:

I heard yesterday you had the mumps; now you tell me it’s the itch. I wish you’d make up your mind. In either event, you have my sympathy.

The letter continues in that lighthearted vein (see One Who Walked Alone p. 262-63 for the whole thing) as Howard discusses his mustache:

I noticed your sinister insinuation regarding my whiskers. Shave, in this weather? Do you want to expose me in a practically nude condition to the icy blasts of the Arctic blizzards? They say the Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, but they don’t say anything about Him tempering the wind to the shorn jackass. Perhaps when the gentle heifers — or maybe it’s zephyrs — of summer gambol and frolic lightly through the post oaks I may employ the shears on my rugged countenance, but not in this weather.

The bulk of the letter deals with his spicy story markets, and what style and rules needed to be followed in order to write for them. That is all of great interest, fascinating stuff — but what I found most intriguing was Howard’s comments about his agents, which were notable to me for the way they manage to contradict one of the sillier criticisms of Howard leveled by E. Hoffmann Price. In his at times moving, at times self-serving remembrance of Howard in The Book of the Dead, Price at one point proclaims:

Like many a “natural,” Bob had little market sense; and he dallied far too long in engaging an agent. Indeed, I am far from sure that he ever did have one — Dr. Howard did set Otis Adelbert Kline to work, selling REH’s literary remains. No agent would have let Bob do so much pay on publication work for any outfit which paid as slowly as did the Weird Tales group. A client as talented as REH would have been hustled into the better markets in jig time!

As we of course now know, REH had in fact hired Kline to be his agent years before. And not only that, but in this 1936 Valentine letter he reveals to Novalyne that:

Yes, Kline’s still my agent, and I’m doing a little business with a fellow named Kofoed, of Philadelphia, former editor of Fight Stories, and now editor of Day Book, who does a little agenting for me on the side, much to Kline’s disgust, I fear.

Ha! So far from being the agentless dope with no market sense of Price’s imagination, Howard had two agents playing off each other, competing for his business! And speaking of market sense, when Howard made the deal with Kline he specifically retained the right to submit to Weird Tales himself, as it was a market he had built up all on his own. The significance of this in light of Price’s statement is startling: yes, REH did quit Weird Tales once his western markets were going well, and after he found himself drifting towards western themes and subjects. But think through Price’s boneheaded scenario: REH is remembered not for his westerns but for his Weird Tales work, right? So if he had taken Price’s advice and let Kline talk him out of submitting to WT in “jig time,” say by early 1933, then poof!, there goes Howard’s legacy and main claim to fame, his Conan stories.

So we have Price following the markets with mercenary tunnel vision — and now largely forgotten. While Howard expanded his markets as Price did, but while simultaneously sticking with the lower-paying market that gave him artistic freedom and a forum for his very best work. In doing that, in not always putting money before his Muse, REH created a body of work that has grown magnificently in both popularity and critical esteem over the last century. Methinks Howard could have taught Price a few things about sense.

The sole grave passage in Howard’s Valentine letter concerned, of course, his precipitously failing Mother: “You ask how my mother is getting along. I hardly know what to say. Some days she seems to be improving a little, and other days she seems to be worse. I frankly don’t know.” Alas, he would know, all too soon.

So how did Robert E. Howard wrap up his letter to Novalyne? After all, he had rambled on about the mumps, his mustache, his writing career, spicy stories, his mother. Any talk of the holiday itself? As a matter of fact, there was. But in this, the only record we have of Howard discussing Valentine’s Day, what do we find? Talk of romance? Immortal love? Flowers and chocolates and cupid run amok?

C’mon — this is the creator of Conan we’re dealing with here:

This being Valentine’s Day, I suppose I should make the conventional request for you to go and join the army. That may sound a bit wobbly, but look: Valentine comes from the same word from which “gallant” is derived; a gallant may be a suitor, but is also a cavalier; a cavalier is a knight; a knight is a cavalryman; a cavalryman is a soldier. To ask one to be one’s Valentine is equivalent to asking him, or her, to be a soldier. And one can’t be a soldier without joining the army. So, a request to become a Valentine is approximately a demand to go and join the army.

Good old Two-Gun, still reaching for the humor and joy in life even as his own dwindled to its conclusion! With less than four months to live, and with his life slowly disintegrating around him, his letter remains all the more poignant given the circumstances we know were torturing him during that time. “I’ll be seeing you, I hope.” he says somewhat forlornly to Novalyne at the letter’s conclusion. And boy, did he ever.

Only two weeks later, on February 24 1936, Novalyne would submit Howard to a meeting of frankly inexcusable cruelty, taunting him about his mustache while making light of the suffering he was going through over his Mother’s impending death. The record of the conversation in Novalyne’s book is courageous in its refusal to whitewash what happened. “God knows how many nights I haven’t slept,” Howard mourns exhaustedly, while she airily wonders aloud why hiring a nurse couldn’t just fix all those little worries of his right up. “I want to live!” he later exclaims, the ultimate suicide’s cry for help, “I want a woman to love, a woman to share my life and believe in me, to want me and love me. Don’t you know that? My God, my God. Can’t you see that? I want to live and to love.” Faced with this declaration, Novalyne replies with an icy riposte that slams into Howard like a stake through the heart: “Well, shave your mustache and maybe you’ll find one,” prompting Howard to quite understandably stare at his friend in shock and gasp, “My God, you say a thing like that when everything has crashed around me?”

It’s hard to say when Howard snapped, when the last ray of hope shut off in his mind and he resigned himself to the abyss gaping hungrily ahead of him. But to my mind, the nascent Prague Spring created by that Valentine’s Day missive, followed by the crushing events of two weeks later, was as much a fulcrum event as any other, slamming the Gates of Life shut for good.

Sadly, on this — his final Valentine’s Day — Howard remained always and forever, to the bitter end, One Who Walked Alone.

The above photo is well-known to those of us who have read and reread Dark Valley Destiny. In that book, the caption states: “Robert E. Howard, Dr. Isaac M. Howard, Dr. and Mrs. Solomon R. Chambers, Galveston, Texas, probably 1918.” It’s a photo that has always intrigued me, mostly because of the amazing pose REH is caught in, gazing wistfully up at the sky as if daydreaming his first stories, so distracted by the tales floating around in his mind that he can’t bring himself back to reality long enough to pose properly for the photo being taken. Dr. Howard and the Chamberses do their part to make the photo interesting, too, with Isaac standing imperiously and confidently as the nexus of attention while the others almost recoil from the towering man dominating the center of the composition.

Over the years I have been in Howard fandom, I’ve often wondered what the provenance of this photo was. Dark Valley Destiny says:

Late in 1917, Dr. Howard delivered the Chamberses’ new baby, Norris, and thereafter Dr. Chambers became restless. As he had earlier discovered that the active practice of medicine kept him away from home more than he liked, so now he found his duties at the drugstore too confining. After the Armistice of November 11, 1918, he decided to move his family to Galveston, on the Gulf of Mexico, and take up truck farming.

Of course, Dark Valley Destiny also calls the newborn Norris “Robert’s schoolmate,” and then debunks one of REH’s childhood memories by saying that schoolmate Norris didn’t remember it, so Howard probably made it up. But as we just read in the DVD excerpt above: Norris was born in 1917, making him a full eleven years younger than Howard, and so couldn’t possibly have been his schoolmate. Call me wild and crazy, but it’s small wonder he didn’t remember anything about the incident Howard wrote of considering he might not have been born yet when it happened.

Until recent years Dark Valley Destiny was the first and only place this photo was published, albeit severely cropped compared to the raw version above. I suppose de Camp got this and most of his other photos from Glenn Lord, who had been patiently hunting down and securing copies of such photos for decades. The copy above is the one Glenn has in his files, with the names written across the top like that. Glenn in turn must have got a copy from Norris, or from one of the other Chamberses.

In June of 2005, Don Herron and I went to White Settlement, Texas and interviewed Norris Chambers at length (the results of which can now be read in TC V3n10, with a further tantalizing excerpt available in V3n6). During the course of that interview I learned that Norris’ sister’s name was Deoma, which immediately set off alarm bells in my mind, because the name written on the photo above also says “Deoma.” Norris’ Mother’s name was Martha. Hmmmm. (in case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of opportunities to say “hmmmm….” in REH scholarship).

When I got home from Texas, I looked up Deoma in the Social Security Death Index, and she is listed under Deoma E. Morgan (according to this genealogical listing on Norris’ website, Lilburn Morgan was her second husband, Lonnie Triplitt was her first). That record tells us that she was born in 1899 and died in 2000 (she was 101 years old!) That would make her around nineteen at the time of the above picture. Hmmmm — come to think of it, the lady (girl?) in that picture has always looked a little young to be the wife of the then fifty-year-old Solomon Chambers (1868-1950).

It appears, then, that de Camp assumed that Deoma Chambers was Mrs. Solomon (Martha) Chambers and wrote his caption accordingly. But now twenty-three years after the fact we finally know that the woman in the picture in not Solomon’s wife but his daughter, and hence Norris’ older sister. Those of you who already own TC V3n10 knew this already, of course — one of the perks of subscribing.

During my interview of Norris in 2005, I asked him whether he had the original of this photo, in the hope that it perhaps had some writing on the back that might pinpoint the date a bit better, or provide any additional information. He said that he didn’t have it and wasn’t sure who did, but he suspected that Deoma’s only daughter Marjorie Leeton — who is 84 years old and still living in Texas, might know where it went off to, along with several other photos Norris recalls were taken with the Howards on that Galveston trip.

Well, I contacted Marjorie, and sure enough she does have the original photo, although there are no others that she is aware of. According to her, the splotches you see on the print reproduced above are there on the original, too, perhaps caused by dripping photo developer or something at the time it was made. And most importantly, on the back of the photo itself is written the names of the subjects along with the following additional information: “Feb 1918 near Alta Loma, Texas.”

Alta Loma is a very small town in the Galveston area — you can read about its history here at the Handbook of Texas Online. Note that in recent years it’s been swallowed up and incorporated into the larger town of Santa Fe. Cimmerian readers have read all about how the Chamberses moved down there to farm and sell fruit door-to-door. Reading the Handbook of Texas entry brings home how difficult a life that must have been during those years.

So that confirms de Camp’s guess (probably a guess Norris gave him) of “probably 1918.” But it brings up another problem with the dating. If, as de Camp states, the Chamberses didn’t move down to Galveston until “after the Armistice of November 11, 1918,” then how could this photo have been taken the previous February, a full nine months before they moved? Doesn’t make sense. Perhaps they went down on a scouting trip of sorts with the Howards in February? Or perhaps de Camp’s information about them moving in November of 1918 was wrong, and they actually moved a year earlier? Norris sounded a bit vague on exactly when they moved down there, and he himself was far too young to have any memories of the years the family spent down south, so it’s possible he misremembered to de Camp. Someday I’d like to spend enough time at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, where the de Camp papers are kept, to get to the bottom of this and many other mysteries.

I’m having Norris make me a scan of the photo, both sides, so I’ll know more information directly, and will report any updates here. It will be interesting to see how much more detail is in the original photo, if any. I dearly wish the other three or four rumored photos had survived — who knows what they would have shown us? A group photo of the entire Howard trio at that age would be wonderful to see. Maybe they are still out there somewhere, waiting to be found. Stranger things have happened — Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet found the photo of REH outside his house with Patch a mere few years ago, at the house of another old lady who knew the Howards in her youth. I’ve got to get Rusty to write up that interview and experience in The Cimmerian, it’s a doozy of a yarn.

Thank God for people like Norris Chambers and Marjorie Leeton, keepers in their own small way of the Howard flame, both via their memories and by way of a most miraculous photograph.

Guest blogger Morgan Holmes offers his own take on the pros and cons of the Lancer series….

MORGAN HOLMES: Leo’s post contrasting the Lancer and Del Rey editions was the latest in an ongoing debate of what is or was the best Robert E. Howard edition. I had been thinking for some time why the Lancer paperbacks had such an impact that later book editions never were able to duplicate.

There were advantages that Conan the Adventurer had in 1966. First was suppression of Sword-and-Sorcery fiction. It was something new to most people in 1966. Sword-and-Sorcery fiction was rare for fifteen years. In the early 1950s, you could still find Robert E. Howard influencing stories in pulps such as Poul Anderson’s “The Virgin of Valkarion” in Planet Stories. The pulps were meant to be cheap entertainment. In the early 1950s a copy of Planet Stories cost $.25, thus within the reach of a young reader. The last pulp science fiction magazines also died in 1955 when the distribution system collapsed. Science fiction was also king in the 1950s, driving fantasy and horror figuratively underground.

The Gnome Press editions of Robert E. Howard started in 1950, but Gnome was a small press. Most of its business was direct mail order or from specialty mail order book dealers. Plus the Gnome Press hardbacks were $3.00-$4.00. In today’s dollars, $3.00 would be $22.65. These books were aimed at older fans wanting the stories in book form. The small print runs would prevent creating many new ones. A teenager would have to save up in order to get a Gnome Press book in the 1950s, provided he knew of them or ever heard of Robert E. Howard.

The baby boom started in 1946 and ended in 1964. That means you had a growing population in their teens — the prime group for buying fantasy fiction. The mass-market paperback had stepped in as the replacement for the pulps as a source of inexpensive fantastic fiction. There was a massive rebirth of Edgar Rice Burroughs in paperback in 1963 when it was discovered copyright was not in effect for those stories. Ace Books published wonderfully packaged books with covers by Roy Krenkel and Frank Frazetta.

Just months before the release of the Lancer Conan was another important event that helped prime the pump. Ace Books discovered a copyright loophole and published The Lord of the Rings with Jack Gaughan covers. Ballantine Books published the authorized editions in 1966 with the psychedelic flamingo covers. Burroughs and Tolkien were major factors in preparing the scene for Howard. Plus you had two of the L. Sprague de Camp edited anthologies, Sword and Sorcery (1963) and The Spell of Seven (1965) that would have introduced some readers to Robert E. Howard for the first time. There were no trade paperback science fiction books, as trade paperbacks were mainly meant for the college market.

The Lancer paperbacks were for the most part sold in drugstores and some grocery stores. You did not have the bookstore chains like you do today. There were regional distributors who supplied paperbacks to the places that sold the books. A regional distributor knew that one place might sell more westerns and mysteries while another might move science fiction paperbacks. In some ways, the Lancer paperbacks may have been available in more places than the average paperback would today. Someone going to the drugstore to get the newest issue of Eerie or Creepy would have stumbled across the now iconic image of Conan as created by Frank Frazetta.

Then there is the question of cost. The first Lancer paperbacks were $.60, going to $.75 and then $.95 in 1968. Sixty cents in 1966 would convert to $3.81 today! That is incredible — science fiction and fantasy paperbacks are $7.99 today. That would convert to $1.25 in 1966. So the Lancer paperbacks were a great deal. More so, the minimum wage in 1966 was $1.25 an hour. That converts to $6.83 an hour today. Western writer and Robert E. Howard fan, James Reasoner, once told me that mass-market paperbacks should cost one hour at the minimum wage. Paperbacks are often an impulse item. The higher the cost, the more a potential buyer has to agonize if that book is worth it. In 1966-67, a teenager working a few hours a week could stop at the local drug store and pick up a Lancer paperback and still have money to pick up the latest 45 record like “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “Ruby Tuesday.”

There were some other factors — horror had made a comeback by the 60s after having a low profile in the 50s. Our theoretical teenage buyer could see the latest Hammer horror flick before picking up Conan the Adventurer. What impact did the Italian sword & sandal movies have, the ones starring Steve Reeves or Gordon Scott, and all those Hercules/Maciste/Samson/Goliath movies?

So, you have an intersection of demographics, cost, distribution, interest, and of course the Frazetta look that combined to create something that will probably never occur again. The nearest you could get today to recreating what the Lancer Conan paperbacks would be to have Leisure Books publish Robert E. Howard at $4.99 (price of their westerns) with distribution to truck stops and grocery stores. Plus you need an artist to create something totally new, and there is only one Frank Frazetta. Why are western paperbacks $4.99 but science fiction and fantasy paperbacks $7.99?

Don Herron alerts me to a post Scott Sheaffer wrote on the REH Inner Circle e-mail list alerting Howard fans to Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon’s new story appearing in installments for the Sunday New York Times magazine. The tale is titled “Gentlemen of the Road,” is influenced by various pulp authors, and is set in the Russian Dark Ages during a time of (I assume) swordplay and adventure. Best of all, in a Q&A with readers Chabon cites Robert E. Howard as an important influence:

I also, maybe more importantly, re-read some of my lifelong favorite writers of historical swashbuckling romance: Alexander Dumas, Rafael Sabatini, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock (to whom the story is dedicated), George MacDonald Fraser. The tone of the writing, the style, the approach to the idea of heroic swordsmen and their personalities (of which I favor the ironic variety found in the last three authors named and perhaps in Dumas, as well), all that was in many ways more of a challenge than the details of period, which are just a matter ultimately of reading and using the imagination. Though the Khazars and their world have a basis in general fact, I freely invented the situations and characters.

The first two chapters of the story are behind the usual draconian NYT firewall, but you can read the third chapter here (and the others if you have a password).

In a post a few days ago on the 2007 World Fantasy Awards, I gave readers some suggestions on getting Howard projects nominated again this year. In all the hubbub and excitement I forgot to mention one of the most obvious ones: [redacted]’s Blood & Thunder for “Special Award: Professional.” It would be nice to see that book win and provide Howard with a World Fantasy Award to bookend the Award given to Tom Shippey in 2001 for J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Be sure to remember Mark when you’re filling out your ballots.

Over the three years of The Cimmerian‘s existence, we’ve had our fair share of typos and errors of fact, and I’ve learned not to sweat them to [sic] much. Comes with the territory even when slaving for years on a book, much less hurriedly throwing together a journal every month. In the past I’ve stated that contributor Brian Leno was from Bismarck, Nebraska despite having his address on file and despite having studied US state capitals in grade school. There have been a handful of others — calling an old Arkham House book Dark Man, Dark Heart instead of the correct Dark Mind, Dark Heart, printing a Darrell Schweitzer letter where he presents a numbered list of arguments and uses the #6 twice, listing the wrong page number for an article on one issue’s Table of Contents. Things like that, each one of them slipping quietly past me and my eagle-eyed proofing team. Readers are good at correcting this kind of thing after the fact, and no real loss of information or comprehension has resulted.

But this morning I just received a call from Donald Sidney-Fryer, who said he had found a much worse problem in the printed version of his recent V3n12 essay, “Robert E. Howard: Epic Poet in Prose.” Specifically, there seems to be a whole missing line of text. I checked, and sure enough, there’s one line missing at the bottom of a column. Head on over to page 11 of V3n12 (December 2006) and you’ll see the following:

One of the most characteristic of the epic devices is the epic listing or catalogue, often featuring the names — typically highfalutin’ or exotic or both — of the different armies or tribes making up the fighting

[missing line]

the divertissement — the long and elaborate suite of dances in a full-length classical ballet….

As you can see, there is something missing between the bottom of the first column on page 11 and the top of the second. I went through the original files, and it appears that all of the various proofed versions my team checked have the correct wordage, but during the process to create a final booklet file with rearranged “imposed” pages for printing the line got dropped by the layout program I use, Adobe InDesign. It seems like one of those strange once-in-a-blue-moon quirks that happens when pages have to be reordered — each column gets locked down as-is instead of being allowed to flow into the next column, and on page 11 this time the program erroneously judged that the last line of the column didn’t fit in the space provided and so dropped it. Very strange, but one gets used to that when pushing computers to their limits. I made a slight tweak to the imposer file, and all future purchases of V3n12 will have the proper line reading intact.

For those of you with V3n12 already in-house, here is how the passage should read, with the added text enclosed in brackets:

One of the most characteristic of the epic devices is the epic listing or catalogue, often featuring the names — typically highfalutin’ or exotic or both — of the different armies or tribes making up the fighting [assemblage on either side of a pitched battle. As in] the divertissement — the long and elaborate suite of dances in a full-length classical ballet….

In the past Don Herron has patiently explained to this typing monkey the concept of “points” in collecting, how little errors such as this — called “points” — help collectors determine the various collectible states of a book. So consider those missing ten words a big-ass point, and hence your flawed copy of The Cimmerian ever-so-slightly more collectible. Or send your flawed copy back to me, and I’ll send you a corrected one free of charge. Your choice.

Points. Yet another way The Cimmerian is striving to give you more (of everything!) than the competition.

Fans of Sword-and-Sorcery have cause to rejoice at the impending release of The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien, an author I hold in unparalleled esteem for reasons largely beyond my ability to explain.

Tolkien was my first and my best, the man who set me atop a sorcerous, literary Lonely Mountain from which I have blissfully viewed the world ever since. He taught me that history was magical, and that myth was but truth under another name. To this day I marvel at the fell majesty and cadence inherent in even his most mundane passages, how every word chimes like notes from a perfectly tuned instrument. He was a master at enclosing whole worlds within outwardly innocuous words — in The Road to Middle Earth and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, two of the most revelatory volumes written about Tolkien, philologist Tom Shippey demonstrates to devastating effect how precise the author was in choosing words with fascinating etymologies that point like bony fingers towards long forgotten historical deeps. As a fantasist’s fantasist, his legendarium contains seemingly endless layers of rich literary sediment and mythological substrata, with ages of fallen cities and relics and histories and theology waiting — sometimes for decades — to be unearthed by a perceptive reader. More than any other author I’ve read, his work defies attempts to subjugate it, to feel as if you have gathered its full measure and discovered all its secrets. The scope of the various tales he wrote of Arda and Middle Earth can only be compared to the near infinite and daunting immensity of real history — perhaps because so much of Tolkien’s work is tied not to fantasy but to reality, with deftly utilized words chosen for deep-seated philological reasons that resonate often unconsciously in our minds, each of them Wonderstrands as intricate as they are beautiful.

You see, I told you I couldn’t explain it. Suffice it to say that Tolkien reached literary heights that most fantasy authors haven’t even dreamed of, much less accomplished. Oftentimes the “high fantasy” genre that has sprung up at the feet of his achievement feels so desiccated precisely because he set the bar so unfathomably high. Knowing this, it is no small matter that The Children of Húrin is on its way to bookstores this April 17, for the tale housed within constitutes the Englishman’s most bloody, war-torn, and tragic story, one that virtually demands comparison to Howard’s gloomy dreamscapes in the sister realm of Sword-and-Sorcery.

Most of what we’ll read in The Children of Húrin has been published before, either in The Silmarillion or in sundry volumes of The History of Middle Earth. The difference here is that for the first time all of these disparate gems are now to be united into a towering, 320-page masterpiece that threatens to bring the pathos of the story home with a forcefulness not seen since The Lord of the Rings thundered onto the scene fifty years ago. The tale contains some of the very best things Tolkien ever wrote, passages that (to use an analogy oft employed by fellow blogger Steve Tompkins) perform open-heart surgery on the reader, scenes that I cherish above all others in literature. My gut tells me Howard would have valued them, too. Listen:

Then all the hosts of Angband swarmed against them, and they bridged the stream with their dead, and encircled the remnant of Hithlum as a gathering tide about a rock. There as the sun westered on the sixth day, and the shadow of Ered Wethrin grew dark, Huor fell pierced with a venomed arrow in his eye, and all the valiant Men of Hador were slain about him in a heap; and the Orcs hewed their heads and piled them as a mound of gold in the sunset.

Last of all Húrin stood alone. Then he cast aside his shield, and wielded an axe two-handed; and it is sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll-guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time that he slew Húrin cried: “Aure entuluva! Day shall come again!” Seventy times he uttered that cry; but they took him at last alive, by the command of Morgoth, for the Orcs grappled him with their hands, which clung to him still though he hewed off their arms; and ever their numbers were renewed, until at last he fell buried beneath them. Then Gothmog bound him and dragged him to Angband with mockery.

I’m hoping that this new release serves as an Athelas salve of sorts for me. The last few years have been bitter ones for this Tolkien fan, as the Peter Jackson movies methodically reforged the Englishman’s masterpiece into a often silly and irreverent roller-coaster ride for audiences addicted to a Six Flags level of momentum and excitement. The arguments I’ve heard in favor of Jackson’s vision — epic widescreen compositions worthy of Kurosawa or Leone, actors who bring a Shakespearian eloquence and grandeur to the proceedings — seem to be hopelessly offset by the reductio ad absurdum of Jackson’s painfully offensive ghettoizing of Tolkien’s meticulously constructed story. Trash-talking dialogue (“Let’s hunt some Orc, yo!”), hip-hop battle tactics (Legolas bustin’ moves on Oliphants and poppin’ caps into cave trolls and Uruk-hai) and hobbit fart jokes mix uneasily with Fabio-inspired romance to create a Frankenstein’s monster Rings that occasionally wows or moves but in the end fails utterly to convey the grand themes that were Tolkien’s life’s blood. Say what you will of John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian — even at his worst he directed the material with a refreshing seriousness, and his attempts at comedy and battle prowess grew organically out of a fundamentally grave story and characters. By the end (the sixth consecutive end, by my count) of Jackson’s Return of the King I felt insulted not only for Tolkien but on behalf of legions of dead lying forgotten under poppy-strewn fields and ancient Saxon ruins. One of the few assuagements to be had in a post-Jackson world dominated by Armani Aragorn and Aerosmith Arwen is knowing that Christopher Tolkien shares my dismay in spades, a hollow triumph to be sure, but one which helps reduce my feelings of loneliness whenever the Moviegoing Majority sings the praises of travesties like Jackson’s predacious Faramir or his puffed-up and self-important Théoden.

I’m also tired of the artistic talent dominating modern Tolkien publishing — Alan Lee doesn’t do it for me, never has. His desaturated and dreary vision too often transforms Middle Earth into a chilled morgue viewed through a pale shroud. For all of the perceived faults of the greeting card school of Tolkien illustration — Darrell K. Sweet, the Brothers Hildebrandt — at least their work overflows with color and vibrant emotion, both features of Tolkien’s prose that I delight in. In my mind’s eye Tolkien’s universe is awash in primary colors: orange torchlight and campfires, stunningly green woodlands, and skies the rich blue of lapis lazuli. Above all Lee fails the Elves, a race haunted by sadness and loss, yes, but who for all of that remain hopelessly devoted to a beauty the likes of which we might only see today in a particularly exceptional National Geographic photo essay. The pseudo-Celtic, Enya-esque conception of the elves as envisioned by Lee — ghostly hypnotic figures sleepwalking through monochromatic woods of perpetual torpor — make the Elves seem less like God’s Elder Children and more like phantoms from a 70s “be-in.”

Take a good look at the frowning, severe, and morose Lee-and-Jackson-designed Elves above, and then ponder Tolkien’s lighthearted exchange between these selfsame Elves and Bilbo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring, after Bilbo has recited a poem for their amusement in Rivendell:

The chanting ceased. Frodo opened his eyes and saw that Bilbo was seated on his stool in a circle of listeners, who were smiling and applauding.

“Now we had better have it again,” said an Elf.

Bilbo got up and bowed. “I am flattered, Lindir,” he said. “But it would be too tiring to repeat it all.”

“Not too tiring for you,” the Elves answered laughing. “You know you are never tired of reciting your own verses. But really we cannot answer your question at one hearing!”

“What!” cried Bilbo. “You can’t tell which parts were mine, and which were the Dúnadan’s?”

“It is not easy for us to tell the difference between two mortals,” said the Elf.

“Nonsense, Lindir,” snorted Bilbo. “If you can’t distinguish between a Man and a Hobbit, your judgement is poorer than I imagined. They’re as different as peas and apples.”

“Maybe. To sheep other sheep no doubt appear different,” laughed Lindir. “Or to shepherds. But Mortals have not been our study. We have other business.”

Imagine that: Elves laughing and joking and smiling and applauding! The above scene, along with so much else in Tolkien’s original epic, remains inconceivable in Jackson and Lee’s stylized, reductive renderings of Middle Earth. The cover to The Children of Húrin, revealed just this morning, is one of Lee’s less objectionable efforts, but I’m dreading the moment when I have to view the interior plates, and hope that there will eventually be an illustration-free hardcover edition. I yearn for something different: set Darrell K. Sweet’s often artificial fantasy work aside for a moment, and take a gander at his outstanding western paintings — that’s the full spectrum and sweeping majesty that Middle Earth demands. Or consider another artist likely to elicit groans from the Frazetta-lovers of Howardom: Thomas Kinkade. The self-proclaimed “Painter of Light” has seldom demonstrated a facility for painting characters or portraits, but his unsurpassed ability to tinge outwardly mundane landscapes with innate magic and immortal beauty is perhaps the closest any artist has come to hinting at what Tolkien’s Rivendell, Lórien, Vales of Anduin, or Grey Havens should look like. Such artists, their abilities properly channeled, would provide a welcome antidote to Middle Earth’s decades-long, Lee-conjured cloud cover.

I love how Amazon.com declares that Húrin is “the first complete book by J.R.R. Tolkien in three decades,” as if the redoubtable professor were still alive and hunched at his desk, methodically teasing and conjuring new stories from his invented world. Of course that’s not far from the truth, because Tolkien’s work yet seethes with passion and sorrow and tears unnumbered, attracting readers both new and old to black axes and white flames, to starlit hopes and mires of blood, to armies “ten thousand strong, with bright mail and long swords and spears like a forest.” His tales ever remind us of both our need for heroes and our penchant for hubris — of the power of evil, and the redemption of sacrifice:

By the command of Morgoth the Orcs with great labour gathered all the bodies of those who had fallen in the great battle, and all their harness and weapons, and piled them in a great mound in the midst of Anfauglith; and it was like a hill that could be seen from afar. Haudh-en-Ndengin the Elves named it, the Hill of Slain, and Haudh-en-Nirnaeth, the Hill of Tears. But grass came there and grew again long and green upon that hill, alone in all the desert that Morgoth made; and no creature of Morgoth trod thereafter upon the earth beneath which the swords of the Eldar and the Edain crumbled into rust.

April 17 can’t come soon enough.

This Sunday night Masterpiece Theatre becomes Monsterpiece Theatre to present a new BBC version of Dracula starring Marc Warren, David Suchet, Sophia Myles, and Stephanie Leonidas. This latest re-imagining is a skimpy 90 minutes long and jettisons Renfield, plus the reviews, while mostly favorable, indicate that the concerns of Stewart Harcourt’s screenplay are as much venereal as arterial. Still, I will be tuning in, in part because of memories of what a big deal the 1973 made-for-television Dan Curtis/Richard Matheson/Jack Palance version was when I was in junior high school, and in part because this blog’s reason for being might have plunked himself down in front of the TV, if we can extrapolate from The Robert E. Howard Bookshelf, which notes the following in a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith on October 5, 1923:

I’ve had two cousins visiting me, whom I hadn’t seen for fifteen years. They’d read the International Adventure Library and from what they said, ‘Dracula’ is a humdinger.’ I’m going to order the set right away.

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