Category Archives: Weird Tales

Blogging Kull and Conan: Of Axes and Swords

And so we reach the end of our look at the Kull stories (almost; I’ll have some general comments in a separate post) and the first of the Conan posts. I’m looking at both of these because the first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword”, is a rewrite of an unsold Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule!”.

“By This Axe” isn’t a bad story, but it isn’t a particularly good one, certainly not be the standards Howard had set in some of the other Kull installments. There are two main aspects to the plot. First, a group of dissatisfied men, two noblemen, a guard captain, and a poet, have recruited a former diplomat turned bandit, Ascalante, to help them overthrow Kull. This portion of the story is the better half.

The second portion of the plot concerns a young nobleman who wishes to marry a young slave girl who happens to be owned by one of the conspirators. This type of situation seems to be a recurrent theme in the Kull series, mostly in stories not published in Howard’s lifetime. Kull’s Councilor Tu insists that for a nobleman to marry a slave is simply not done; it would violate a centuries old law.

Kull sneaks out of the palace to wander the woods for a few hours. He feels like a slave himself. There’s a great deal of discussion on Kull’s part at various places in the story about how holding a throne is much more difficult than taking it. During his walk in the woods, he encounters a young girl weeping. Not recognizing him, she tells him that she’s a slave in love with a nobleman, who went to the king to request permission to marry. Kull is sympathetic, but argues the king has to abide by the laws himself.

The rest of the story concerns the conspiracy attempting to assassinate Kull and failing. In the end, he uses his axe to smash the stone tablet on which is written the law forbidding slaves and nobility to marry. He declares that he is the law.

It’s easy to see why Farnsworth Wright rejected this story when Howard submitted it to Weird Tales. The whole romance subplot basically ruins the story. The slave girl comes across as both childish and childlike. She speaks of being spanked as punishment by her master at one point. She’s weepy and clingy. And her dialogue reminds me of early Shirley Temple movies or child characters in Victorian novels, all sweetness and earnestness. There’s was no way I was buying that this girl and the nobleman were madly in love. That whole aspect of the story had an almost pedaeophilic tone to it. I’m sure Howard didn’t intend anything of the sort. It’s just a combination of his still developing skill as a writer and my twenty-first century cultural concerns coming together. Still, the whole thing gave me the creeps.

One thing did make me wonder just what Howard was dealing with in his own life when he wrote this story. At one point the girl deeclares: “Why should laws not change? Time never stands still! Why should people today be shackled by laws which were made for our barbarian ancestors thousands of years ago-” It sounds like Howard may have been feeling a little bit shackled and enslaved by the culture he was living in. I know from first-hand experience that small towns in that part of Texas can be extremely conformist in their outlook, and in the 1920s I’m sure it was much worse. Howard was in his early 20s when he wrote this, and I suspect was still feeling some of the natural rebellion of youth that questions why things have to be the same as they were. This is entirely speculation on my part, but it fits with what I know about Howard and my experiences in similar environments.

“The Phoenix on the Sword”, while not one of Howard’s best stories, and certainly not the best of the Conan tales, is clearly the work of a more mature writer. Howard drops the whole romance subplot, and instead introduces a villain whose hand would be felt in a couple of other stories, the Stygian sorceror Thoth-amon. He’s a slave to the bandit as the tale opens, having lost a ring by which he maintains his power. Of course he finds it, and uses it to wreack his revenge by sending a creature from the Outer Darkness against the bandit. This is the only thing that saves Conan. The creature attacks during the assassination attempt. In the Kull story, it’s the nobleman who saves the day.

There’s also a new scene in which Conan in a cream meets a wise man who died fifteen hundred years earlier. This man tells Conan that his fate and that of Aquilonia, the kingdom Conan rules, are entertwined. He places a phoenix emblem on Conan’s sword, which is what allows Conan to kill the supernatural creature.

The scenes retained from “By This Axe”, portions of the conspiracy, Conan complaining about the duties of ruling, and the assassination scence are to a large extent unchanged except for some of the names. Only when Howard made significant changes to the plot, such as the addition of the creature in the fianl fight, does he engage in any extensive rewriting. Since the parts he retained were by far the better passages, this doesn’t hurt the story any.

Unlike the Kull series, the Conan stories weren’t written in any kind of chronological order, but jumpmed about throughout the character’s life. Also, Kull has no interest in women. Conan has plenty. Even a casual reading of the two series will reveal that, while there are similarities, Kull isn’t simply Conan-lite.

So, we’ve looked at all the Kull stories mostly in the order they appear in the current edition from Del Rey. I’ll be jumping around more with the Conan stories, looking at whichever one I’m in the mood to read at a given time. I’ll also be giving fewer spoilers in the Conan posts. With the movie less than a month away, I suspect I’ll pick up one or two new readers. I don’t want to spoil any of the fun for those who haven’t read the originals.

The Adventures Fantastic Interview: Mark Finn, Part 2

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Last week, in part 1 of this interview, Mark Finn discussed his own writing, both biography and fiction. In this installment, he continues sharing his thoughts on other Howard related topics.

AF: Do you think there been any faithful adaptations of Howard to film?

MF: Howard films…I have to tell you a quick story, an anecdote. We managed to get ahold of a copy of Solomon Kane from a friend who taped a bootleg. My wife Cathy was real excited to sit down and watch it. We were five minutes in, and she said, “Was this Robert E. Howard right here?”

And I said, “No.”

Then she said, “Okay.” And we watch a little bit more. He goes through the things he goes through and he’s killing people left and right, and she says, “This has got to be Howard.”

And I said, “No, this isn’t in any of the Solomon Kane stories.”

“Huh.”

I said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you know when the Howard stuff shows up ’cause I’ll probably get real excited about it.”

She goes, “Great.”

Thirty minutes go by. She says, “He’s met the family now. Is this Howard?”

“No, this isn’t Howard.”

We get to about ten minutes before the end, and she says, “Honey, is there any Robert E. Howard in this?”

I said, “Well, the guy’s name is Solomon Kane.”

She said, “Honey, that doesn’t count.”

You know, it’s a little sad that the best one of the bunch is still the old “Pigeons From Hell” Thriller episode. Boris Karloff’s adaptation of “Pigeons From Hell” still stands out as following the storyline. Which is such a novel approach. Why didn’t I think of that? Why not just take something from the books? How simple and how basic. “No, no, no, you don’t understand, Mark, we’ve got to rewrite Conan so that he’s on a quest for vengeance.” Oh, cause that hasn’t been done to death. Yeah, yeah, that makes prefect sense. Yeah, why not, why not? In fact, I got an idea. Why don’t you have a Vikings kill his family. We’ve never seen that before in a film.

It just makes me crazy that these guys in LA have…I don’t think it’s ignorance. I think it’s a willful self confidence there that feeds an ego that has to be the size of C’thulhu. It’s the only thing that makes sense. If I come to them with a proposal set in a savage land in a distant time about a guy who walks into town out of the wilderness and through strength, cunning, guile, his own wits, he pulls himself up by his bootstraps to become the most famous rogue in town. But because he’s still new in town he hasn’t counted on the forces of civilization rallying around him, and so the story ends when he’s betrayed and has to leave town. And they say, “What’s the name of this piece?” and I say, “Krogan the Mercenary”. They’d be like [snaps fingers], “Awesome, we’ll run with it. It’ll be just like Walter Hill did in Last Man Standing. Yeah. We won’t give him an origin. No, it makes him mysterious. Perfect! I love it!”

That should be the Conan movie. That should be the Conan movie. But no, noooo, let’s give him a family. Even though Robert E. Howard’s stuff so seldom uses family for anything, much less a motif for vengeance. Usually it’s an excuse to move away.

The Conan movie’s coming out. I’ll show it at the theater. But it’s not gonna be Conan. I mean there may be more stuff in it. We haven’t seen it, so obviously we don’t know what elements got taken out. But I can tell you right now, if the plot involves him going on a quest for vengeance to get the guy that got his parents, that’s not Robert E. Howard. It’s just not. It may be an entertaining movie. There may be some pieces and parts where you go, “Wow, that’s a pretty Conan-esque type of thing that’s going on right there.” Until they figure out that this stuff works because it’s been around this long and people respond to it on a visceral level, until they figure that out, we’re gonna have this problem. I wish it was different. Moreover, I wish they would fly me out to Hollywood for a week. I’ll take a meeting with them. I can fix this. I just know it. Get the executives out the room and let me talk to the scriptwriter, okay? I’ll even put it in the language of film. There’s a hundred film examples of exactly the kind of thing that can be used for this. Most of the executives are thirty-five and don’t watch movies, so what are you going to do with that? What’s the next question?

AF: What one question would you have for Howard if you could ask him anything?

MF: If I had just one question?

AF: Or a series of questions if you prefer.

MF: I thought about this the other day. I was watching a Ben Franklin documentary and realized the five people that you would have breakfast with, you know, would be…one of them would be Robert E. Howard, of course. I think I would ask him, if I had just one question to ask him, it would be, “Do you…” Actually, this is what I would ask him. “How do you see yourself?” I would want to know how he saw himself because I think that would answer a lot. And I know he writes about it in the letters, but I think in the letters he also puts on a lot of different faces depending on who he’s talking to. If I got the chance to look him in the eyes and see what he says, I want to know how he sees himself because we’ll know. And if I could tell him one thing, it would be “It’s gonna get better.” I’d like to pull him aside at the beginning of 1936 and say, “You will get through this.” Would it help? Who knows, I mean when people have made up their minds that they’re gonna do that, especially when people are clinically depressed, decide they’re taking a path… [sighs]

AF: I think that’s the desire of every Robert E. Howard fan, to talk him off the ledge so to speak.

MF: And the thing is, you know the question is, if you talk him off the ledge in 1936, what’s to say he doesn’t get back on that ledge in ’37? The things that he’s dealing with, presuming he would get through the funeral and make it a few months down the road, where does he go? Does he go with his dad? What does he do? There’s this continual grieving process. For a guy who spent most of his life as a caregiver to his mother, as a guy, who, whether he wanted to or not, identified himself as a caregiver to his mother, that piece of his identity is gone. They’ve done studies about this now, and noted that when children take care of parents in a caregiving role for a number of years, you get all sorts of depressed behavior, and suicide becomes a major thing because the one reason why they’re doing what they’re doing has been taken away. So there’s no guarantees that we would have gotten a whole lot of stories from Robert E. Howard. There’s no guarantees he would have made it to World War II. When you’re dealing with someone who’s been that depressed for that long, who’s to say? But I would ask him what he thought of himself. Or optionally, I would ask him why he never talked about his humor because that was the stuff that put food on his table for most of his writing career. And very little is said about it. He’s always more interested in talking about the horror stories or whatever, but the stuff that he came to rely on for a steady paycheck was the funny boxing and the funny westerns.

AF: What do you see as the state of Howard scholarship and where do you think it’s going over the next few years?

MF: I think Howard scholarship is alive and well. I think we’re in a lull right now because a lot of people’s projects are coming to an end. And the may be the end of the second Howard boom’s scholarship push. The internet has helped since we can react to things that are on there now, that’s been useful in keeping things alive, but until all of Robert E. Howard’s fiction is in print in some form or fashion, we won’t have Rusty and Patrice for the big stuff. That’s what they’re doing. That’s the job they’ve set themselves. As a task, as fans, we should be grateful for that. They’ve had eleven Del Rey books come out. And even though it won’t be the funny stuff. The funny stuff is what’s left, and once that’s done, and they take a mental break, I’m sure both of them are gonna dive into the biography. It’s not that they haven’t wanted to work on it, it’s that they haven’t had time. So I think we have one more big push yet to have happen, and I’m not sure yet if it’s going to be during this big push, this third age of Howard scholarship that he won’t join the American literary canon in the way that Lovecraft has and Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, and all those guys. I think that’s an inevitability, and we’re already moving in that direction anyway. The next five years is when you’re gonna start seeing Rusty and Patrice come out of the cave and start talking about stuff and the biographical debate comes up again. I think it’s around that time, either just before, during, or just after, is when he goes in the Library of the Americas. At that point you’re gonna see a lot of people back off and go “Ahhh. Now I can go read this and enjoy it again.” It tends to be a singular focus when you’re working on this stuff. There’s just one problem you’ve gotta just tackle and tackle until it’s dead and you look up and find another thing. I think of it like that, and I don’t begrudge what anybody is doing. Like I’ve said before, it’s important to have those authoritative texts out. The Foundation has made all the poetry available for the first time ever. Now we’ve got the wonder three volume set of the letters. Essential. So they’re setting up for the next wave. I think that’s what all this is right here. And if the academics continue to come to this, as we’ve seen starting with last year, with a couple of very strong academics, Justin and Diedre, I think they’re going to be instrumental in leading some more academics to Howard. I think that’s when the real interesting stuff will begin.

AF: Last question. What question would you ask that I haven’t if you were conducting this interview?

MF: I would have asked me if I had any regrets about what I’d done in Howard studies. But, I don’t have any regrets, so that’s kind of a boring question. [laughs]. I wish the REH Manifesto had been a little bit shorter because I wrote it ostensibly to just tell the people: If you going to shoot your mouth off and you’re going to come out with some alleged knowledge, don’t tell me “I’ve read a few Conan stories, and here’s what I found out about Robert E. Howard.” You’re reading the one character that he commercially engineered over any of his other material to be something that he could sell to Weird Tales. That’s not to say that Howard didn’t enjoy it and that’s not to say he didn’t invest in it, but the elements in the stories that a lot of people had a problem with, if you view Conan as the thing he constructed to try and get Farnsworth Wright’s attention and knew that certain things like women wearing certain things like gossamer silk robes and being whipped by other women, if he knew that stuff like that made it into Weird Tales and got cover space, which usually was a little bit more money, and became things that Farnsworth Wright featured. And he put that in there, then the Conan stories become the anomaly, not the rule. “Sword Woman”, which was unpublished in Howard’s lifetime, is much more Howardian in tone. It’s not until those early Conan stories, where he’s trying to find his way, which tend to be some of the best ones, and then the later Conan stories, when he’s trying to break away, tend to be some of the best ones. In the middle you’ve got some fairly formula Conan stories, and these were the ones that Wright was featuring; these are the ones that Wright was lapping up. So, was Conan the way he always did things, or was it the exception to the rule. I think Conan was the exception, but then again , I’ve been steeped in this for a decade now. I’ve read the Conans over and over, and I’ve all the other stuff, and I”ve looked at all of this. I don’t expect BobaFett1972 at aol.com to know that. I wrote the manifesto as basically, if say I don’t like him, he’s too bloody for my taste, I’m not a big fan of the subject matter, and I tend to like my fantasy a little more epic and a little less down in the dirt, I can’t say anything bad about that. But if you tell me that Howard clearly had a problem with women, and after reading three Solomon Kane stories it’s clear that he was a virulent racist, I have to put the brakes on that. I wrote the Manifesto to basically tell people think before you type. What they took from that was “God, he doesn’t like it if anybody says anything negative about Robert E. Howard.” Which is not the case. I would love to read a negative critique of Robert E. Howard based on what’s in there. Not what you think is in there, not your mind tells you your mind tells you is in there, not what you remember from your D&D days as being in there. So far I haven’t seen that critique yet, but maybe one day we’ll get it.

AF: Thank you very much.

MF: You’re welcome.

Blogging Kull: The Striking of the Gong

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Kull: Exile of Atlantis
Del Rey
trade paper, 317 p., $17

This is one of the shorter Kull stories, only three and a half pages in the Del Rey edition. In fact it’s more of vignette or a philosophical meditation than an actual story. In it Howard reflects on some of the philosophy he’d been reading and meditating on.

The story, to the extent that it is a story, consists mostly of a dialogue between Kull and an old man. Kull finds himself in darkness, a great throbbing in his head. He’s not sure where he is or how he came to be there. He rises to his feet, sees a light, and begins to walk towards it.

Encountering an old man, Kull inquires as to where he is. The man tells him he’s come through the Door. Kull is able to recall that he heard a gong striking and then he woke up in the darkness. What ensues is a discussion about life and death and what constitutes either. Universes within universes are considered, as well as the rise and fall of races and kingdoms. “Time and space are relative and do not really exist,” the old man declares. He continues by saying, “The ‘everlasting’ stars change in their own time, as swiftly as the races of men rise and fade. Even as we watch, upon those which are planets, beings are rising from the slime of the primeval, are climbing up the long slow roads to culture and wisdom, and are being destroyed with their dying worlds. All life and a part of life.”

Some of the discussion echoes one of Howard’s letters to Harold Preece in early 1928. “The fact is that life is simply a passing phase of this planet, not the real reason for the planet’s existence, but simply a result of its growth. Life, and especially man’s life, is simply result then, and not a cause. There may be, may be, I say, a real reason for the existence of matter and energy, but whatever that reason, that purpose is, man is no more essential to its culmination than any weed or tree.” [Collected Letters, v. 1, p. 198]

Kull then comes to his senses to learn that he was attacked by an assassin and suffered a head wound. The whole conversation, and the moving of the stars that Kull and the old man watched, took place within a matter of minutes.

This is by far one of the most philosophical Kull tales, if for no other reason than the philosophy takes up most of the story. For some reason, Howard didn’t submit this one to Weird Tales, perhaps because Farnsworth Wright had already rejected some of the Kull stories. I don’t know if Wright’s rejections of those stories still exist. I’m not aware that they do, but I have to wonder if he rejected them on the basis of too much philosophy and not enough action. For whatever reason, Howard chose to send this one to Argosy. They didn’t accept it, either, and “The Striking of the Gong” remained unpublished (in its original version) until 1976, when it was published in The Second Book of Robert E. Howard.

Henry Kuttner’s Prince Raynor: The Citadel of Darkness

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Elak of Atlantis
Henry Kuttner
Planet Stories
$12.95, trade paperback, 224 pgs.

This is the second and final tale of Prince Raynor that Kuttner wrote. I don’t think it’s quite up to the standards of “Cursed be the City”, which I discussed earlier in the week. But it’s still a good yarn.

The story opens with Raynor and his Nubian servant Eblik coming upon a dying archer in the forest. He’s part of a group of refugees they, along with the warrior maid Delphia, had put together after the close of the previous story. Prince Raynor’s horse had gone lame the previous day, and he and Eblik had fallen behind the group. The archer is the only survivor except for Delphia, who has been kidnapped. Raynor and Eblik set out in pursuit.

While waiting for the moon to rise, they are approached in the forest by an old man in a robe. From his description, he sounds a lot like Gandalf, and his name, Ghiar, isn’t that far off. Only this story predates The Lord of the Rings by a number of years.

Ghiar tells them Delphia has been kidnapped by Baron Malric and gives them a talisman by which they can recover the girl. There’s a lot of talk about the zodiac, but it’s a different zodiac from the one today. The signs are different, and there are only seven of them.

Raynor and Eblik go to Malric’s castle and in the commotion of rescuing Delphia, Ghiar shows up and takes off with her. Seems he needs her for a sacrifice in order to renew his youth. Things get nicely weird when they arrive at Ghiar’s castle, which is on an island surrounded by black flowers. Of course they’re the kind that induce sleep. It’s only the thought of Eblik in danger that enables Raynor to overcome their effects.

Once inside there are several fights and eventually they overcome Ghiar. The manner is a little unconventional in that both magic and strength are used. Ghiar’s motivation and actions don’t always make a lot of sense unless you remember his early speech about signs of the zodiac and which ones are in ascendance.

I liked the weird elements in this one, especially the battle with the serpent inside Ghiar’s castle and the consequences of that. The black flowers were a nice touch, if not particularly original. Both of these elements reminded me of Robert E. Howard (which is probably why I liked them). It’s an established fact that Kuttner was influenced by Howard, and many of his early stories show the influence Howard as well as other writers in their contents. Still, if you’re going to copy another writer, always copy from the best.

While the influence of Howard is definitely here, Kuttner by this time was too good of a writer to simply cut and paste another author’s style. Kuttner shows a greater depth in the interactions between Raynor and Eblik than in “Cursed be the City”. Early in the story Raynor calls him a fool and orders him about, something that would be entirely appropriate for a prince to do to a servant. Still, when Eblik needs his aid, Raynor manages to find the motivation to save him where he wasn’t finding the motivation to save himself.

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

The Raynor stories were both published in Strange Stories in 1939, which implies, given the delays between composition that were common in the pulps in those days, that the first of the two had to have been written in 1938. Kuttner was beginning to transition at this time to science fiction, where he would ultimately write in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore some of the great classics of the field such as “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”, “The Twonky”, “The Proud Robot”, and “Vintage Season.” Just to name a few. We’ll look at some of these in an in-depth post I’m working on.

It’s easy, and perhaps oversimplifying things, to say that Kuttner wrote no more Prince Raynor stories because the market folded. Strange Stories only ran for 13 issues between 1939 and 1941. But Weird Tales was still going strong. I’ve seen somewhere, and I don’t recall where or I would say, that Dorothy McIlwraith didn’t like the Elak stories and wouldn’t buy any when she became editor of WT. If I’m recalling correctly, the author of that statement was offering it as speculation.

I have a different idea. Kuttner was trying to establish a professional writing career. Weird Tales had a reputation, much deserved, for being slow in paying. And not always paying that well. There were a lot more science fiction markets than there were fantasy. Kuttner didn’t restrict himself to just fantasy and science fiction, but also wrote weird menace and mysteries, and he continued to write fantasy for a number of years, especially for Unknown. However, he had his greatest success in science fiction. It seems to me, and this is just speculation, that Kuttner began to focus on writing more science fiction because he could make a better living at it. The timing of the two heroic fantasy series ending coincides with an increase in Kuttner’s science fiction output and makes the possibility one that should be considered.

“The Citadel of Darkness” ends with the three companions, Raynor, Eblik, and Delphia, riding off together, one supposes to have more adventures. It’s a shame Kuttner never recorded them.

Henry Kuttner’s Prince Raynor: Cursed be the City

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Elak of Atlantis
Henry Kuttner
Planet Stories
trade paperback, 221, $12.99

In addition to the four Elak stories collected in this book, the only two stories Kuttner wrote about Prince Raynor are also included. These stories were published in Strange Stories, a rival of Weird Tales published by Better Publications. Started in 1939, this pulp was often seen at the time as a dumping ground for stories rejected by Weird Tales. It only lasted until 1941.

In a way I prefer the Prince Raynor tales to those of Elak. They are set in a more recent prehistory, one in which the ancient kingdoms we know existed are beginning to take shape, rather than some mythical past. As a result, any anachronisms are less glaring. Also, the prose is leaner and more polished than in some of the early Elak tales, especially the first one, “Thunder in the Dawn”.

Both “Cursed be the City” and its sequel, “The Citadel of Darkness”, open with quotes from something called “The Tale of Sakhmet the Damned”. What this is exactly, we’re never told, nor does anyone named Sakhmet ever appear. It’s a nice touch, though.

The story opens with the fall of Sardopolis, capital city of the kingdom of Gobi. The king is killed by the conqueror Cyaxeres, and the king’s son Prince Raynor is taken to the dungeon to be tortured. Cyaxares has a companion and adviser, Necho, who may not be human. Raynor is rescued by his Nubian friend and servant Eblik. Together they make their way to the temple of Ahmet. There a dying priest tells them that when Sardopolis was founded, a great forest god was displaced, but it was prophesied that he would one day return to set up his altar again in the ruins of Sardopolis. That day is at hand. Raynor and Eblik are given the task of going to a group of bandits led by the Reaver of the Rock and informing them of the fall of Sardopolis. They’ve been waiting for generations for the old god to return.

Cyaxares’ men follow them. The Reaver and his men stay to fight. Raynor and Eblik, guided by the Reaver’s daughter Delphia, a formidable fighter in her own right, take a talisman to free the forest god. Most readers will recognize the name of the forest god.

The story moves well and has a satisfying, if not exactly upbeat, resolution. In fact, the story ends on a pretty dark note.

Kuttner continues to break from pulp conventions here. Eblik is more than just a black sidekick, and Delphia takes an active role in the events. The tone and feel of this story, as well as that of “The Citadel of Darkness”, is much more Howard-esque than the Elak stories. In those, Kuttner tended to play the sidekick Lycon for comic relief. None of Howard’s fantasy heroes had true sidekicks, although at times they had companions, who were treated as equals. In the Prince Raynor stories, while Eblik may be a servant, and upon occasion is reminded that he is, he’s still portrayed as a companion, not a stereotype to be played for laughs. This was an uncommon portrayal of someone of African descent in the pulps of this era.

By this time C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry had made her appearance, so a strong active woman wasn’t exactly groundbreaking. Still, to cast Delphia as a competent fighter and one of the leaders of the bandits was a departure from the typical standards of the day.

So to sum up, if, as some have stated, Kuttner was trying to fill the void in sword and sorcery stories left by Robert E. Howard’s death, I think he succeeded more with Prince Raynor than with Elak. It’s unfortunate that he only wrote two stories featuring the character. We’ll look at the other tale in a future post.

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Blogging Kull: The Screaming Skull of Silence

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Kull: Exile of Atlantis
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paperback, $17.00, 317 p.

This is the first of four extremely short stories in the annals of Kull, or at least first in the order of arrangement in this volume. This one is different from any of the Kull stories that have come before it. It was submitted to Weird Tales, but Farnsworth Wright obviously didn’t care for it since it wasn’t published until 1967 in the Lancer Books volume King Kull.

The tale opens with Kull listening to Brule, his chancellor Tu, Ka-nu the Pictish ambassador, and the slave and scholar Kathulos discussing philosophy (nothing new there). Kathulos is saying that what we perceive as reality is an illusion. To make his point, he gives an example of sound and silence, saying that sound is the absence of silence, while silence is the absence of sound. Kathulos mentions that Raama, the greatest sorcerer who ever lived, thousands of years ago locked a primordial silence in a castle in order to save the universe.

When Brule mentions the castle is in Valusia and he’s seen it, the comment gets Kull’s attention. He decides he wants to see the place. Although the other try to dissuade him, he takes them and a hundred of the elite Red Slayers with him. They find the castle on a hill after days of riding around looking for it. How the kingdom continues to run or why Brule doesn’t remember the location of the castle is never explained.

As they approach the castle, Kull can sense waves of silence emanating from it. The only door is sealed. Next to the door is a gong, green in color and varying in its depths, sometimes seeming to be quite deep and at other times appearing shallow. Despite the warnings carved on the castle, Kull breaks the bonds.

What rushes out is a palpable silence that knocks all but Kull to the ground. The men are all screaming, but no sound proceeds from their mouths. Sensing the silence wants to destroy all life, Kull tries to resist the silence but eventually staggers and falls. As he does so, he strikes the gong. Although he can’t hear it ring, Kull senses the silence draw back. He takes the gong from its stand and begins to ring it, forcing the silence into the castle and eventually destroying it. This is a pretty good trick since not even Raama was unable to destroy this silence. The silence screams as it dies.

And that’s all there is to this one. It has some unique points. For starters, Kull finds his usual weapons, in this case his sword, useless against a malevolent silence. He is forced to use his brains rather than his brawn. For Kull that’s not too much of a stretch since he uses his brain on a regular basis. It was nice to read that something other than a blade is needed every once in a while.

There’s nothing remarkable about the prose, at least by Howard’s standards. It’s good, serviceable, and pulls the reader in. It’s just not his best. Even so, it’s still better than most of his imitators have done when they were hitting on all cylinders.

The appearance of Kathulos provided the right amount of philosophy needed as a framework to get the action moving. Howard was reading a lot of philosophy during this period, as evidenced by his correspondence that has come down to us. I may slow down this series of posts in order to research some of the philosophers who were influencing his work. Or I might devote an entire post just to that. We’ll see. Time constraints will determine that.

This is the second and last story in which Kathulos will appear. The sorcerer who manipulated him, Thulsa Doom, never appears again in the Kull stories, at least in none of the ones written by Howard. (I’m not going to consider the comics here.) For the Lancer Books edition of King Kull, Lin Carter “finished” an untitled draft, eliminated all references to Karon the Ferryman (!), had Felgar be Thulsa Doom in disguise, and called it “Riders Beyond the Sunrise”. But the more we discuss Carter’s violations of Howard’s works, the more we legitimize them, so that’s the last we’ll talk about Carter in this post.

Like I stated, this is one of the shortest of the Kull stories. In some ways it’s one of the more interesting ones because of the nature of the villain Kull has to defeat. It certainly adds variety to the series.

The Frost King, The Frost-Giant, and Their Daughters

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It’s been bitterly cold here on the South Plains of Texas for much of the last week. Temperatures were near record lows for several days. Just when it looked like things were going to warm up again, we got more snow Sunday. And that made me think of “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter”, which made me think of “The Frost King’s Daughter”. And I knew what the next post on this blog would be.

The tale (or tales, if you prefer) concerns the lone survivor of a battle in the frozen north. Having just killed the only member of the opposing army left standing, he sees a beautiful young woman wearing only a gossamer veil walking among the dead. She taunts him with her body, and he pursues hers. Of course, this is a trap. After a time, she calls her brothers forth, two ice giants, to kill the man. Instead, he defeats them, captures the girl, and is about to ravish her when she calls on her father, Ymir. The girls is transported into the sky in a blaze of blinding light that leaves the hero unconscious. He is awakened by a band of his allies who were delayed by an ambush. After he tells his story, one of the older men in the group tells the warrior he saw Ymir’s daughter Atali, who haunts battlefields and lures survivors to their deaths so that she might present their hearts to her father. The old man claims to have seen her as a youth when he was too wounded to follow her. Everyone thinks the old man had his brains addled by a sword stroke until the hero unclenches his fist to find a veil.

This pair of stories are essentially the same, only the names have changed. “The Frost King’s Daughter” concerns Amra of Akbitana, while the “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” is an early Conan story that was rejected by Farnsworth Wright (more on that later) and wasn’t published until the August 1953 issue of Fantasy Fiction. Unfortunately, that version was rewritten by L. Sprague de Camp. It wasn’t until 1976 that Howard’s version saw print in Donald M. Grant’s Rogues in the House. This was a hardback collectible volume, not a mass market edition. “The Frost King’s Daughter”, on the other hand, was published in the March 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan. You probably couldn’t afford an original copy of that little fan publication, provided you could find one. Fortunately, the entire run has been reprinted in facsimile (details on how to order are here.)

The first mass market publication of Howard’s original version of “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” wasn’t available until 1989, when both stories were printed side-by-side in Karl Edward Wagner’s Echoes of Valor II. If you aren’t familiar with the series, it ran to three volumes (as far as I know; if there was a fourth I missed it). Wagner, a fan and writer of sword and sorcery who deserves to be better remembered, compiled collections of rare heroic fiction. While many of the stories Wagner selected have been reprinted in recent years, especially the Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore pieces, there are still some tales that haven’t seen the light of day since and make the volumes worth seeking out.

In his introduction, Wagner states that Howard wrote “The Frost King’s Daughter” first and that the Conan version, “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” was the rewrite. How he knows this to be true, Wagner doesn’t exactly say. He supports his case by saying that “The Phoenix on the Sword” was a rewrite of the Kull story “By This Axe I Rule” (documentably true), and that “Frost-Giant” was a rewrite of “Frost King”. We know Howard would recycle stories if they didn’t sell, at times changing the names of major characters, and we also know that sometimes the details of his stories would change from one draft to the next. Furthermore, there is evidence that Howard was still developing the character of Conan as well as the Hyborian Age for the first several Conan stories. Patrice Louinet, in his essay “Hyborian Genesis” (The Coming of Conan), does a thorough job of showing this development.

And here we encounter a small problem. Louinet suggests that Howard changed the title of the story and Conan’s name to Amra when he sent the story to The Fantasy Fan. His evidence seems to be the publication date of “Frost King” as well as an unreferenced letter from Howard to Charles D. Hornig, editor of The Fantasy Fan. Patrice Louinet is one of the leaders in the field of contemporary Howard scholarship. Wagner was one of the foremost authorities of his day. So who is correct? Was “Frost King” the rewrite, or was “Frost-Giant”?

As far as their respective texts are concerned the stories are almost identical. I compared them, and there was only one significant deviation I found. This one:

“Far have I wandered, from Zingara to the Sea of Vilayet, in Stygia and Kush and the country of the Hyrkanians; but a woman like you I have never seen.”

So who do you think said this, Conan or Amra? Based on the place names, which are the settings of other Conan stories, you would probably think Conan, right?

Well, you would be wrong. Amra said this. In the Conan version of the story (Frost-Giant), the wording is “Far have I wandered, but a woman like you I have never seen.” Conan’s wanderings and the Hyborian geography are never mentioned. The only reason that I can think of for Howard to add place names from the Conan stories to a rewrite of a Conan story in which he changes the name and nationality of the viewpoint character is to clue readers in that Amra is really Conan. And since it had been established by the time “Gods of the North” AKA “The Frost King’s Daughter” was published in The Fantasy Fan that Amra was one of the names Conan was known by, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that this was Howard’s motivation. But why would he do this? The only explanation I can come up with was that because Conan was a Weird Tales character, either Howard had an agreement with Farnsworth Wright not to try to sell a Conan story to another market (I’m unaware of any such agreement) or he felt that do sell a Conan story to another market would, in a sense, be dishonorable. It was standard practice in the pulp days for an author’s character(s) to only appear in one magazine.Howard may have been abiding by that practice.

On the other hand, it could be that “Frost-Giant” is the rewrite. The passage quoted above, the one with the place names, tends to disrupt the flow of the story. Certainly, its prose is more purple than the same passage without the travelogue. It could very well be, since as far as I know the exact composition date of either version of the story is unknown, that Howard was already working out the geography of the Hyborian kingdoms and simply hadn’t settled on a final name and nationality of his principle character. I will be the first to admit that the evidence isn’t conclusive either way, but this is the interpretation I favor. I’m sure if there’s information I’ve overlooked, Howard fandom will let me know about it. Quickly.

There’s one other thing I want to address. Wagner says Wright rejected “Frost-Giant” because it was too racy. Considering the sexual imagery in some of C. L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories (another topic for another day), not to mention the sex implicit in some of the other Conan tales, I’m not sure I buy this line. If Wright was that uptight, why did he publish some of those Margaret Brundage covers? (I know, I know, racy covers on pulps had nothing to do with the contents.) Wagner says Wright’s view of Conan was of “a noble barbarian out to perform deeds of chivalrous heroism.” Again, Wagner doesn’t provide details to back this position up. In fact, Wright’s rejection of the story, which Wagner quotes, simply says Wright didn’t care for the story and gives no reasons as to why he didn’t care for it. The general consensus I’ve heard for years on this point was that Wright didn’t like the hero attempting to commit rape.

But is this what Conan/Amra really does? In the interest of stirring up trouble taking a deeper interpretation of the story, let’s look closely at what happens, shall we? Atali taunts Conan. “Spreading her arms wide, she swayed before him, her golden head lolling sensuously, her scintillant eyes half shadowed beneath their long silken lashes. ‘Am I not beautiful, oh man?’ ” Sounds to me she’s trying to entice him to pursue her. This is born out at the end of the story, when the old man Gorm tells Conan Atali lures men to their deaths. Gorm also describes her as beautiful and naked. Atali continues to taunt Conan, essentially daring him to follow her. Conan’s reaction is described as a madness that sweeps away his pain and fatigue. Howard makes the pursuit sound as though Conan were possessed.

Rather than trying to commit rape, I read the story as Conan being put under a spell of desire by Atali. Only Conan is stronger than she bargains for. When he kills her brothers, she realizes she can’t control him nor reverse the spell. Otherwise, why would she have to call on Ymir for help? Am I saying Atali was asking for it? You bet. Even a casual reading of the story would tend to show that was the case. What I’m NOT saying is that every (or even any) attempted rape victim was asking for it, so please don’t read that into my remarks. I don’t consider what Conan/Amra does here to be attempted rape because I don’t interpret his actions as being of his own free will. This is a fictional story, a fantasy, in which an evil woman’s spell goes wrong and she can’t control the desires she has deliberately cultivated in a man, with the outcome being other than what she intended. I don’t for a minute think that’s how the real world works, and in spite of some of Howard’s detractors, I don’t think Bob meant that here either. I think he was telling an entertaining story in the best way he could with a character whose personality he was still developing and exploring. And in that, he succeeded.

So, to sum up. I think “Frost-Giant” is probably a rewrite of “Frost King”, and furthermore Conan has gotten a bad rap these many years, accused by some critics of attempting a crime of his own free will when in truth he had no choice about. Those are my thoughts on this cold winter night.

Happy Belated Birthday C. L. Moore

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The last couple of days have been hectic, so I’m a little late in posting this, but yesterday marked the centennial of the birth of one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy authors of all time, Catherine L. Moore.

Although her writing was primarily collaborative after she eventually married fellow author Henry Kuttner, with whose works readers of this blog should be familiar, Ms. Moore was a major author in her own right. In fact many critics and historians of the field consider her to have been the better writer of the pair. Indeed, her work is more poetic and shows more emotional depth than Kuttner’s solo work.

After Kuttner’s death, Moore wrote no more fantastic fiction. I’m not sure why, although I’ve heard it was because her second husband didn’t approve of science fiction and fantasy. Whether this is true or not, I can’t say. I have difficulty believing the woman who gave us Jirel would ever go along with that kind of restriction. Whatever the reason, as much as her “retirement” was a loss to the field, her influence is still being felt.

Her first published story, “Shambleau”, introduced Northwest Smith, a (superior) forerunner to Han Solo in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales. This was the first of a number of tales featuring the space adventurer, although to call them science fiction is a bit of a stretch at times due to the fantasy elements they often contain.

Moore’s next series character was Jirel of Joiry, the first warrior woman of sword and sorcery. Jirel could give the men a run for their money in the fighting department, and usually did. Both the Northwest Smith and the Jirel stories are in print, as are collections of her solo fiction and her collaborative work with Kuttner. Given the versatility of her work, you should probably check out more than one volume just to get a good feel for Moore’s talent and range as a writer.

I plan to look more in depth at the Jirel and Northwest Smith stories here, but those posts are some time in the future. Until then, check out these tributes by Ryan Harvey and C. S. E. Cooney. Better yet, read some of C. L. Moore’s work as well.

Blogging Kull: The Shadow Kingdom

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Kull: Exile of Atlantis
Robert E. Howard
Illustrations by Justin Sweet
Del Rey
Trade Paperback, 319 p., $15.95

Just so you know, this post will contain spoilers.

“The Shadow Kingdom” was the first of the Kull stories to see print, and it appeared in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales. In this story Kull has, with the help of some dissatisfied nobles, seized the throne of Valusia from the tyrant who’s sat on it for a while. Apparently he’s been on the throne long enough for the luster to have faded, for Kull makes it very clear he prefers the straightforward manner of his barbarian kinsmen. You know, the ones who’ve exiled him.

After a parade in his honor, Kull is holding court when an emissary from the Pictish ambassador requests a private council with him. Kull grants it and takes advantage of the opportunity to bait the man, the Picts being ancient enemies of the Atlanteans. The emissary, a warrior, requests that Kull come alone that night to a banquet with the Pictish ambassador, Ka’nu.

Kull’s suspicious, but goes. Ka’nu informs Kull that only Kull can usher in an era of “peace and goowill”, of “man loving his fellow man”, to Valusia and the Seven Kingdoms. This is somewhat ironic seeing as how Kull is a warrior king who carries deep hatreds. It’s also not what you would normally expect in a Robert E. Howard story. In order to do this, Kull has to live. The next in line to the throne is a figurehead controlled by a race of serpent men, if not actually a serpent man himself. Ka-nu will send proof of this through Brule the Spearslayer. Kull will recognize Brule by the armlet he’ll be wearing. To show he can be trusted, Ka-nu reveals to Kull that he has a jewel stolen from the Temple of the Serpent. If the priests of the Serpent knew its location, Ka-nu would have a very short life expectancy.

The next night, Brule appears. He’s the Pictish warrior who brought the message from Kan-nu in the first place. He reveals to Kull a secret society of serpent people who have the bodies of men but the heads of snakes. Through some type of sorcery they are able to assume the faces of any person they wish. When they die (read are killed by Kull or Brule), their heads revert to their natural forms.

You can probably figure out that there will be a lot of people who turn out to be other than who they appeared. It turns out the serpent men are an ancient, mongrel race who have a long history in Valusia, although it’s a history that most of Valusia’s citizens are ignorant of.

Naturally, Kull triumphs, but not easily. Brule and Ka-nu are afraid he dies from his wounds, although he only loses consciousness. The intriguing part of the story, for me at least, is the depth at which Howard shows us Kull’s thoughts. Kull wonders which is the real Kull, the monarch “who sat on the throne or was it the real Kull who had scaled the hills of Atlantis, harried the far isles of the sunset, and laughed upon the green roaring tides of the Atlentean sea.” This brooding is provoked of course by Kull’s discovery of the Serpent Men and the masks they don to deceive people for evil means, something he had already encountered in his courtiers, albeit in a less literal sense.

Evidence indicates “The Shadow Kingdom” was written, or at least begun, in 1926, the year Howard turned 20. It’s a common occurrence to many men and women around that time in life to discover that people aren’t always what they seem, but don masks to further their own ends. I think it’s safe to speculate that perhaps some of that discovery of the realities of life was making it’s way into Howard’s fiction. Many a child and teenager is dismayed to discover that becoming an adult isn’t all the fun and privilege it seems when you’re young. I know my eight year old certainly has the illusion that being an adult is more fun than being a child because it means getting to stay up late and eat and drink close to bedtime. Would that it were that simple.

Another thing common to young adults and teens is the fear that they can’t cut it as an adult. This is a fear that can return later in life when a person experiences a major upset, often but not always the loss of a job or business. Affirmation that a person can function as an accepted member of adult society is one of the purposes of a rite of passage. Entire books have been written on this topic. I have to wonder if Howard was feeling some of that uncertainty about this time in his life. I know he made a deal with his father to give writing a try for one year and if at the end of that year he wasn’t making a living, he would find a regular job. Kull has thoughts along these lines more than once in the story.

The first incident occurs during the brooding quoted in the paragraph above when Kull thinks of himself as “the futile king who sat upon the throne – himself a shadow.” The second occurs at the climax of the story when Kull and Brule have escaped a trap in which the serpent men have disguised themselves as his council in order to assassinate him. Hurrying back to the council chamber, they find the real council in session with a serpent man disguised as Kull himself. For a moment Kull wonders “Do I stand here or is that Kull yonder in very truth and am I but a shadow, a figment of thought?” Maybe I’m reading too much into the text, but it sounds to me as though Kull is experiencing a little insecurity. Not something you would expect from a Howard hero.

After all the serpent men in the palace have been dispatched, Kull swears an oath to destroy all the remaining ones. He swears this oath on his own identity as Kull, king of Valusia. While I may be stretching things a bit to interpret this ending as a metaphor for Howard striving to make his way in the world as a writer, I don’t think I’m too far off the mark.

“The Shadow Kingdom” has been called the first true sword and sorcery story, a statement that is not without some controversy. I’m willing to go along with that premise, at least for the sake of this post, because it points out something that I think can’t be understated. Sword and sorcery has been dismissed by its critics as shallow and cliched, without depth, power fantasies of social misfits and closet homosexuals, and mind candy or softcore porn for adolescent boys. What “The Shadow Kingdom” is, at least as I read the story, is a reflection on identity. While this is certainly an issue of adolescence, it’s also an issue that concerns everyone at most stages of life, to a lesser or greater degree. Furthermore, I see it as a meditation on the meaning of life, especially the role one will play in that life. Until he sets out to eradicate the serpent men, Kull is lost, searching for meaning after achieving his goal of becoming king and finding it unfulfilling. I’m fairly sure Howard didn’t consciously set out to create a new form of literature when he wrote “The Shadow Kingdom”, but on some level was dealing with the issues in his life in the best way he knew how: by fictionalizing them. Creating sword and sorcery was to some degree incidental. That’s a pretty impressive legacy, to create a new genre with those themes at its core. Not bad for “escapism”, huh? So the next time you hear someone dissing sword and sorcery as not being real literature or worthy of serious consideration, give them a copy of “The Shadow Kingdom.”

A Little Something for the Season: "Roads" by Seabury Quinn

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Roads
Seabury Quinn
Battered Silicon Dispatch Box
hardcover $25 Cn
paperback $15 Cn

So I was wanting to post something in the spirit of the season. I thought about The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum. Way too long. Then I read a couple of passages. Waaayyyy too much saccharine.

Instead, I chose “Roads”. Back in the 1930s, when Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith were writing many of the tales that would one day make them famous, there was only one person who gave them any competition in popularity in Weird Tales. That person was Seabury Quinn. Today he’s mostly forgotten except by fans of The Unique Magazine and historians of fantasy and the weird tale. If he’s remembered at all, it’s usually for his occult detective, Jules de Grandin.

But Quinn was also a versatile writer who could pen a good tale that wasn’t part of a series. “Roads” made its appearance in the January 1938 issue of Weird Tales. It tells the story of a gladiator in the arena of Herod the Great. Known as Claudius by the Romans, Klaus (you can see right away where this is going) has finished his contract and is wanting to go home to the northern climes he calls home. Continue reading →