What follows is a guest post by John Bullard.  It is the first of three parts and contains spoilers for Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”.

Weird Tales, May 1935, first installment of “Beyond the Black River”

Robert E. Howard’s Conan story, “Beyond the Black River” is considered to be one of his best stories by his fans. It tells of an attack by Howard’s favorite historical peoples, the Picts, against the encroaching colonization of the Aquilonians on the Picts’ deeply forested land between the Thunder River to the East, and the Black River to the west in his fictional Hyborian world setting. It is well-known that Robert E. Howard used historical events, people, places, and the stories of people he knew to help inspire his writing, giving his stories a grounding in realism that stories just made up from whole cloth may sometimes lack. In “Beyond the Black River”, Howard used his knowledge of Texas’s history and people, as well as his family’s history, to make the story as realistic as possible in a fantasy setting. Continue reading →