Category Archives: Robert E. Howard

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”: Robert E. Howard Relates a Myth of the Battle of the Little Bighorn

Here’s another guest post by John Bullard. Today, June 25, is the 145th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Detail from Paxson’s painting of the Little Bighorn Battle.

Robert E. Howard was definitely a born story-teller, and in his letters to his author pen-pals, he definitely followed the rule to never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Since the anniversary of the battle has just passed, let’s look at what Howard had to say about it. In the middle of his August 9, 1932 letter to H.P. Lovecraft, Howard segues from talking about Texas gunfighters to the Battle of the Little Bighorn: Continue reading →

Ambrose Bierce’s Birthday, with a Guest Appearance by Robert E. Howard, Part 2: The Effects of Psychological Horror and Snakes

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Today we have another guest post by John Bullard.

Ambrose Bierce

Today, June 24^th, is the birthday of writer, reporter, and Civil War veteran, Ambrose Bierce. I originally wrote this piece last year after having thought about Bierce’s influence on some of Robert E. Howard’s stories. Well, I have recently read another Bierce story that Howard may have read, and influenced a story he wrote. At the very least, they both wrote a story on the same idea- the psychological effects of horror on a person’s mind involving snakes. Did Bierce’s story influence Howard in writing his story?

Massive Spoilers follow for both stories.

Continue reading →

Robert E. Howard Days, 2021

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(i. to r.) Your Intrepid Blogger, Jason M. Waltz, and James McGlothlin visit the Howard family plot.

This past weekend was the 2021 Robert E. Howard Days. After last year’s cancellation, it was a much needed gathering. And while many of the regulars weren’t able to attend, the number of first time attendees made up the difference. The gift shop sold out of almost all the books they had in stock.

Roy Thomas was the Guest of Honor. The schedule was a little different this year, with a fewer panels and later starting times.

Mark Finn did the Fists at the Ice House panel solo after the banquet on Friday night. That panel is different every year and depends on who is there. Mark listed his ten favorite Howard boxing stories and read excerpts of each one. If you’ve not read Howard’s boxing stories, you’ve missed a major portion of his output. Howard’s send of humor really comes through in his humorous boxing stories. The four volumes of the collected boxing stories are almost our of print, so move quickly if you want to get copies of the first printings. They are available from the Robert E.Howard Foundation Press. Continue reading →

Nominations for the Preliminary Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards for 2020 and 2021 are Now Open

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Preliminary nominations for the Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards are now open. Due to CoVid19 throwing everything into confusion last year, the 2020 Awards were not done. The Foundation now plans to remedy this by giving awards for 2020 and 2021 this year. This means that members can make nominations for articles, books, blogs, essays, art, etc. that came out in 2019, as well as for 2020, and there will be a set of awards given for each year. Members eligible to make nominations MUST have been REHF members in the calendar year of the nomination, i.e. you must have been an REHF member in 2019 to make nominations for the 2020 awards, and an REHF member in 2020 to make nominations for the 2021 awards. So get busy and think back to all of the Howard-related stuff that came out during the time of January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2019, for the 2020 awards, and from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020 for the 2021 awards. Send all nominations to the following email address with the AT and DOT replaced by their respective symbols:

rehawardsjb(AT)gmail(DOT)com

If the article, essay, blog, art, audio-visual piece, etc. is available on the internet, please include the link to the work with your nomination. Also, please make sure that your nominations are identified by the year they are applicable to, i.e. 2019 items are tagged with 2020, and 2020 items are tagged with 2021. *You may nominate up to five candidates per award for each year (2019 and/or 2020) in which you were a member, e.g. up to 5 Atlantean nominations for 2019 and 5 Atlantean nominations for 2020 if you were a member for both years.

Preliminary nominations will be closed at 11:59 PM Central Daylight Saving Time (CDST), Monday, April 12, 2021. The top three nominees in each category will be selected by the Legacy Circle members of the Foundation, and the resulting final ballot will be voted on by all dues-paying (2019 and/or 2020) Foundation members. (Categories with more than 3 nominees represent a tie in the nomination voting). The list of nominees for Legacy Members to vote on to determine the final ballot list will go out *by* Tuesday, April 20, 2021, with the final date for Legacy Members to vote on the Legacy Ballot ending at 11:59 PM (CDST), Friday April 30, 2021. The final ballot of nominations taken from the Legacy Ballot will be posted online at the Foundation website and sent to members for voting *by* Thursday, May 6, 2021. The final vote on the REHF Awards for 2020 and 2021 will end at 11:59 PM (CDST) on Saturday May 15, 2021, with the winners announced at Howard Days 2021.

Here are the categories:

The Atlantean — Outstanding Achievement, Book (non-anthology/collection)
(Books may be print or digital, must be a minimum of 50,000 words, and must be substantively devoted to the life and/or work of REH. Reprinted works without significant revisions are not eligible.)

The Valusian — Outstanding Achievement, Book (anthology/collection)
(Books may be print or digital, must be a minimum of 50,000 words, and must be substantively devoted to the life and/or work of REH. Reprinted works without significant revisions are not eligible.)

The Hyrkanian—Outstanding Achievement, Essay (Print)
(Essays must have made their first public published appearance in the previous calendar year and be substantive scholarly essays on the life and/or work of REH. Short pieces, interviews, reviews, trip reports, and other minor works do not count.)

The Cimmerian—Outstanding Achievement, Essay (Online)
(Essays must have made their first public published appearance in the previous calendar year and be substantive scholarly essays on the life and/or work of REH. Short blog posts, speeches, reviews, trip reports, and other minor works do not count.)

The Venarium — Emerging Scholar
(Candidates will have recently begun making significant contributions to Howard scholarship through publications and/or presentations over the past few years. Previous winners are not eligible.)

Previous Venarium Winners:

2005 – Mark Finn
2006 – Rob Roehm
2007 – John Haefele
2008 – No Award
2009 – No Award
2010 – Barbara Barrett
2011 – No Award
2012 – Jeffrey Shanks
2013 – No Award
2014 – Patrick Burger
2015 – Karen Joan Kohoutek
2016 – Bobby Derie
2017 – Todd Vick
2018 – Dierk Guenther
2019 – Bob Byrne

The Stygian—Outstanding Achievement, Website or Periodical
(Eligible candidates are limited to print or digital magazines, journals, blogs, or internet sites with substantive material that is primarily devoted to scholarship on the life and works of Robert E. Howard. Websites must have been updated with new content at least once in the previous calendar year. Print periodicals must have had an issue published in the previous calendar year. Non-static social media like Facebook and Twitter would not be eligible.)

The Black Lotus – Outstanding Achievement, Multimedia
(Eligible candidates have produced a multimedia or audio/visual work or series of works, such as videos, documentaries, podcasts, animation, etc. related to the life and work of REH)

The Black River—Special Achievement
(Candidates will have produced or contributed something special that doesn’t fit into any other category: scholarly presentations, biographical discoveries, etc.)

The Rankin — Artistic achievement in the depiction of REH’s life and/or work
(Art must have made its first public published appearance in the previous calendar year.)

Black Circle Award – Lifetime Achievement
(Individuals who have made significant and long-lasting contributions to REH scholarship, publishing, or the promotion of Howard’s life and works. Eligible candidates must have been publicly involved in Howard-related activities for a minimum of two decades. Sixty percent of the vote is required for induction into the Black Circle)

Current Black Circle Members Living and Deceased:

2005 – Glenn Lord
2006 – No Award
2007 – Rusty Burke and Don Herron
2008 – Novalyne Price Ellis
2009 – No Award
2010 – No Award
2011 – Bill Cavalier
2012 – Dennis McHaney
2013 – Damon Sasser
2014 – Patrice Louinet
2015 – Karl Edward Wagner
2016 – Roy Thomas
2017 – No Award
2018 – No Award
2019 – No Award

**REMEMBER**Qualified Members can nominate up to 5 nominees in each category per year (i.e. 5 for 2020, and 5 for 2021) that they were a member in.

Robert E. Howard Days Are Back!

“There’s Nothing I Enjoy More Than Discussing These Old Scoundrels.” Robert E. Howard on Ben Thompson and John King Fisher, Two Texas Gunfighters

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Today’s guest post is by John Bullard. Take it away, John.

Robert E. Howard loved the history of the American Southwest, and greatly enjoyed talking about it with and teaching it to his famous Eastern writer friends. For a while there in his correspondences with Lovecraft and Derleth, Howard could barely let a letter go by without talking about Billy the Kid or John Wesley Hardin’s exploits. However, two famous Texan gunmen that Howard talked about have been all but forgotten today, and with the anniversary of their violent deaths having just passed, I thought it would be interesting to talk about them again, just as Howard did. Continue reading →

Remembering Novalyne Price Ellis

“Red Nails”: Did Howard Create the City of Xuchotl From a Real-Life Inspiration?

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We’ve got another guest post by John Bullard for you today:

Robert E. Howard’s final Conan story, “Red Nails”, relates how Conan and his fellow adventurer Valeria come upon a giant, totally enclosed city, Xuchotl, where the inhabitants have divided up into two factions and are in a deadly war to wipe each other out. As is well known, Howard used a lot of real life historical incidents and places as inspiration to write many of his stories. Howard’s two trips to New Mexico in 1934 and 1935 with his good friend Truett Vinson provided ideas for his stories. Patrice Louinet, in his essay¹ on Howard’s writing of the Conan tales argued that the feud of the inhabitants of Xuchotl was inspired by Howard’s June 1935 trip to New Mexico, when he and Truett Vinson stopped at the town of Lincoln, home of the famous Lincoln County War, to see the sites of the notorious conflict. Howard had a great interest in the Lincoln County War and its most famous fighter, Billy the Kid, and wrote of the events in many letters to H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth. Howard also wrote a travelogue of the 1935 New Mexico trip in two letters to Lovecraft and Derleth. His letter to H.P. Lovecraft in July 1935 contains a long, extensive narrative of the trip, and that letter’s sections dealing with Howard’s experiences and impressions of Lincoln definitely show its influence on his conception of the deadly feud in Xuchotl as well as the atmosphere of the city itself.

But, did Howard draw upon a place or places in the real world which inspired his creation of the physical description of Xuchotl itself? It is my belief that Howard did indeed draw upon real life places for creating Xuchotl, and that it was on this 1935 trip that he found that inspiration. These two letters reveal the clues as to what those places in New Mexico were, with two in particular probably being the real-life inspirations for the layout of the incredible city of Xuchotl.

The Letters

Howard traveled with Vinson to New Mexico in June, 1935, as Vinson wanted to visit people in Santa Fe. Along the way, the pair stopped to visit Lincoln to see the buildings where much of the action in the Lincoln County War took place. They then continued on to Santa Fe. Howard hoped to continue traveling on into Colorado and Arizona, but Vinson wanted to end the trip and return home to Texas quickly after they had reached Santa Fe. It was while they were in Santa Fe, that Howard writes in the two letters the clues of what led to his creating the physical layout of the doomed city of Xuchotl: Continue reading →

Blogging Bran Mak Morn: Worms of the Earth

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So for Howard’s birthday (January 22), I thought I’d look at a story I haven’t read in a long time, “Worms of the Earth”. This is one of the Bran Mak Morn tales. There aren’t a lot of them. Some weren’t published in Howard’s lifetime, but this one was, in the November 1932 issue of Weird Tales.

The opening is one of Howard’s best. A Roman governor, Titus Sulla, is showing a Pictish ambassador Roman justice by executing a Pict by crucifixion. The ambassador watches stoically without saying anything. The ambassador is of course the Pictish king Bran Mak Morn in disguise.The dying man provokes one of the guards into killing him, which angers the Sulla. It was the quickest death the Pict could experience, and the governor wanted him to suffer. The guard is sentenced to jail. Continue reading →

Klar-Kash-Ton

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Today, January 13, is the birthday of one of the greatest writers of fantasy of the Twentieth Century or any other. Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was one of the big three in what many consider to be the best years of Weird Tales. The other two are Robert E Howard and H. P. Lovecraft.

I last looked at some of Smith’s work last summer when I reviewed Zothique from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. I had started Hyperborea, which was the next volume Lin Carter published in that line, but summer school started. Trying to figure out how to teach online in a summer session was time consuming, and I never got back to it. I’m going to try to get back to in sometime in the next few months.

Smith doesn’t seem to be as well-known these days as REH and HPL. Part of that, I think, is because his writing isn’t light and breezy. Neither are Howard’s nor Lovecraft’s, but Smith used a vocabulary that was extensive. As a result reading him can be something of a challenge. You see, kids, back in the day, we had these things called dictionaries, and anytime we didn’t know what a word, meant, well, we just looked ’em up. Now git off my lawn.

I’m not sure what story of Smith’s I’m going to read tonight. Maybe I’ll reread “The City of the Singing Flame”. It was the first story by CAS I ever read. I was in the seventh grade, and the junior high library had a nice collection of Robert Silverberg anthologies. It was in one of those.

Regardless, I’ll raise my glass to Clark Ashton Smith and enjoy some of his fiction this evening.

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