Robert E. Howard

So I've actually gone back to reading a bit more of Heroes in the Wind.

That is a Robert E. Howard collection.

I've talked trash, as Americans say, about Howard before.

So I'm starting to appreciate what people might see in him and I'm enjoying some of it a bit more.

End of Celia and the Ghost.

The Fearsome Touch of Death by Robert E. Howard.

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This recording is by Cliff Stone of Sydney, Australia, September 2023.

The Fearsome Touch of Death by Robert E. Howard.

As long as midnight cloaks the earth with shadows grim and stark, God save us from the Judas kiss of a dead man in the dark.

Recording by Thomas Rose.

The Hyborian Age by Robert E. Howard.

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The origins of other races of the modern world may be similarly traced.

In almost every case, older far than they realize, their history stretches back into the mists of the forgotten Hyborian Age.

End of The Hyborian Age by Robert E. Howard.

The Invader by Alfred Coppel.

I think here, what we're seeing is that when we're talking about the rock middle and we're talking about that, you know, the, the destruction of that, that small fortress of.

of livable area inside of this cosmos of vast destructive forces, we fall or are, are led into thinking that, okay, so, um, just as Robert E Howard has Conan talking about civilization as being an anomaly that's going to be washed away by barbarism that, you know, basically it's saying this, this small livable world that you have, that was formed by these fast destructive cosmic powers is just a moment in time and it'll soon be gone washed away by those same powers and then what's happening here is saying oh hey look that livable world emerges again that is now part of the pattern that yes you're going to have periodic destruction but it it's almost like you have a permanent standing wave of the creation of this this livable space destruction of the livable space and then a re creation again, a reemergence of it.

So that now this, um, this, this thing that was created willfully intentionally by the gods is now part of the eternal pattern now must re.

Yeah.

So she waited six years.

His plan all along was to publish only 500 to 600 copies, and that was the case for subsequent books of poetry by Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard.

He

was also trying to sell the book at a price that would not turn away buyers.

Now, by far the most famous Cimmerian for modern listeners is Conan the Barbarian.

And Robert E. Howard, writing in the 1920s and 30s, was fascinated by real ancient cultures, even though the understanding of them available to him was limited by modern standards.

However, the Cimmerians of Conan are really something much more like highly romanticized Celts with a strangely Indo-European migration origin.

If you really want to find the best analog to the historical Cimmerians in Howard's mythos, you would look to the Hyrcanians, the classic steppe peoples, who Howard imagines actually mixed with his fictional Cimmerians to birth the Scythians.