The Best of Robert E. Howard Grim Lands
Robert E Howard
(Many errors sorry I have not the original. web. Ed.)
Foreword
The first time we saw the layouts and illustrations for The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, we couldn't believe our eyes. Here was an illustrated book of a variety that no one had tried to produce in decades. It was magnificent. In fact, it was difficult to imagine such a book actually being published in a world that didn't take the time for such things any longer.
Little did we realize that ten years later, that book would have become the first volume in an ongoing illustrated library collecting the works of Robert E. Howard, and that we would find ourselves illustrating the seventh and eighth volumes in that series.
And what a treat it's been.
Every paragraph of Howard's vivid prose has something that fires the artistic imagination. Pirates and knights. Cowboys and barbarians. Warrior women and monsters. Is there an artist alive who can resist such things?
The stories of Robert E. Howard challenge your inner kid--illustrator and reader alike--to come out and play, and stay out past dinner time.
Enjoy.
Jim & Ruth Keegan Studio City, California July 2007
Introduction
The'sall to adventure--signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight.
--Joseph Campbell
No writer has ever answered the call to adventure with greater alacrity than Robert E. Howard, and few have proven superior to him in issuing that call to readers. For all that his stories appeared in the pages of pulp magazines during the era between the World Wars, they are always fresh, always modern,--lways ready,--as David Weber observes,--o teach another generation of writers how to tell the high, old tales of doom and glory,--because they spring from that eternal well of hero tales from which the most enduring writers have drawn. His is the art of the bard, the skald, the cyfarwydd, the seanchai, the griot, the hakawaty, the biwa hoshi. Howard, in fact, may be said to have a direct connection to the oral tradition, as he is well attested to have talked his stories out, sometimes at the top of his voice, while he was writing, and to have been a spellbinding oral yarnspinner among his friends. The tales in this book, and in its companion volume, could well have been told around a fire, the audience listening raptly to the teller, surrounded, just outside the circle of light, by Mystery, and Adventure.
The telling of stories is as old as mankind, and many theorists believe that stories do much more than simply entertain us (though of course there-- nothing wrong with that). They help us find a way to make sense of the world and our lives, to give a narrative structure of meaning to what might otherwise seem a chaotic jumble of events. (In a startlingly postmodernist metanarrative within his loosely autobiographical novel, Post Oaks & Sand Roughs, written in 1928, Howard critiqued the very book he, and through him his fictional self, was in the act of writing: but was too vague, too disconnected, too full of unexplained and trivial incidents--too much like life in a word.--Story helps us connect and explain the incidents of life, helps us understand who we are and where we are and how we are to behave in the world and our society.
Among the oldest and most popular types of stories are hero tales, centered around an individual who performs some notable deed, and in so doing demonstrates some type of exemplary behavior (or, alternatively, behaves in a way that brings about his comeuppance, thereby showing us how not to act). It is this type of story that most appealed to Robert E. Howard, and in this volume and its companion you will find many fine examples. They can be, and all too frequently have been, read superficially, as amusements to while away the idle hour. They work splendidly on that level, and as Joseph Campbell noted,--he storyteller fails or succeeds in proportion to the amusement he affords.--For those who enjoy a fast-paced narrative expressed in direct yet poetic language, Howard succeeds marvelously. But in the best stories, there is more than amusement. The function of the craft of the tale,--says Campbell,--as not simply to fill the vacant hour but to fill it with symbolic fare.--And here, too, Howard succeeds wonderfully. One of the real secrets of his enduring appeal, I think, is that he worked with archetypal materials almost directly, delving deeply into the reservoir of myth and dream to bring forth undisguised images and themes, to free them from the flowery conventions of romance--that had accreted to them over the centuries, and to present them couched in language and in a worldview that was distinctly modern.
As Don Herron observed, at the same time Dashiell Hammett and the hard-boiled--writers of Black Mask were dragging the mystery story out of the drawing rooms of the upper classes and onto the'sean streets--of the lower, Howard was hauling fantasy from the castles and magical forests to which it had long been relegated into a grimmer, darker world that was not so far removed from the experience of postwar readers. His heroes are not always good guys-- they may be thieves, pirates, gunmen, feudists, outcasts guilty of terrible crimes. But they are good men, who adhere to strict inner codes of morality even when doing so conflicts with their self-interest. They match Raymond Chandler's famous description of the hard-boiled private eye:--man'tho is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man't man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it'she best man in his world and a good enough man for any world--The story is this man't adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.--Says Herron,--any critics have taken up the cause of Hammett and the Black Mask writers, arguing for the --oral vision's in their work, but most have missed similar themes in [Howard's] writing.-- It is not within the scope of this introduction to examine the themes and imagery of Howard's tales: Steven Tompkins, in this volume, and Charles Hoffman, in its companion, have done an outstanding job of indicating something of the richness to be found in Howard's work, and there is a growing body of critical literature for those who are so inclined. Read simply for pleasure, or plumbed for the richness of its symbolic content and ideas, the work of Robert E. Howard will reward the reader on multiple levels.
As I noted in the introduction to the first volume, this is largely my personal selection of the stories and poems of Robert E. Howard that I think are his best. However, I was greatly aided by a poll I conducted among longtime Howard enthusiasts and scholars, and I have sought the advice of colleagues when I faced tough choices. To keep the books manageable, we have had to leave out some outstanding tales and verse, of course, and many Howard fans will undoubtedly find some of their favorites missing, as are some of my own. I do hope that, should the stories or poems in this book pique your interest, you will seek out other collections: the excellent website Howard Works (www.howardworks.com) is the best online bibliographical resource.
Many of Howard's contemporaries in the weird fiction field agreed with H. P. Lovecraft that--he King Kull series probably forms a weird peak--to his work, remarkable considering that only three tales featuring Kull saw publication during Howard's lifetime. Two of these (The Shadow Kingdom and Kings of the Night, the latter generally considered a Bran Mak Morn story in which Kull is a guest character) were included in our first volume; the other, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, is presented here. It is a metaphysical reverie that almost amounts to a prose poem, and certainly leads one to wonder how some critics ever got the idea that Howard's barbarian characters were all brawn and no brains.