Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures

Historical fiction has been a part of our literary heritage for almost as long as we have possessed the written word, since some forgotten scribe in the court of Rameses XI put pen to papyrus to create the “Report of Wenamon.” Over the centuries it became the province of skalds and poets; bards and playwrights plundered whole archives to find fodder for the ages, while historians and antiquarians used fictionalized history as a means of understanding long-vanished civilizations. Today, while its form and function as a genre has changed, the appeal of historical fiction remains undiminished. It is the literature of spectacle and pageantry; at its simplest it is pure entertainment wrapped in a veneer of respectability often denied to its close cousin, fantasy. In the hands of a master, however, historical fiction does more than entertain … it puts a distinctly human face on our collective past.

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) was such a master. Though his professional career spanned but a little more than a decade, he wrote, by conservative estimate, some three million words of poetry and prose, much of it having an historical slant. Indeed, a love of times past ran deep in Howard’s veins; a survey of his correspondence reveals that virtually every letter between 1923 and 1936 makes some mention of his interest in things historical – from the Celtic migrations to the lives of local gunfighters. With this in mind, it’s relatively easy to make the case that even Howard’s non-historical writings, his tales of Conan of Cimmeria or Kull of Atlantis, are at heart historical fiction. Who can read Black Colossus, for instance, and not see the shadow of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the plight of the tiny city-state of Khoraja? Does not the blood-feud in Red Nails echo the equally bloody Lincoln County War? Such parallels abound in Howard’s fiction – some tenuous, others flare-bright and obvious.

The stories collected in this volume, however, are solidly historical. They owe their genesis to Howard’s literary patron and Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, who solicited the young Texan in the summer of 1930 to contribute to his newest pulp magazine, Oriental Stories: “I especially want historical tales,” Wright’s letter stated, “tales of the Crusades, of Genghis Khan, of Tamerlane, and the wars between Islam and Hindooism.” This was a welcome opportunity for Howard, and he seems to have wasted little time in acting upon it.

“There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction,” he commented in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft. And indeed, Howard’s zest, his passion, is evident in every detail and turn of phrase. These stories rank among REH’s finest – lean and descriptive, with headlong plots and a rogues’ gallery of characters who embody the kind of grim fatalism that has become a hallmark of his work. They span the breadth of the Middle Ages – from war-torn eleventh-century Ireland (Spears of Clontarf) to sixteenth-century Ottoman Crimea (The Road of the Eagles) – and they explore a similar theme, what Howard called his “continual search for newer barbarians, from age to age.” The violent clash of civilizations and its tragic consequences fascinated Howard, as did the stoic heroism that arises in the face of inescapable doom. These themes crop up often in REH’s oeuvre, in the travels of Solomon Kane, in the knife’s-edge maneuverings of Francis Xavier Gordon, and in the determined resistance of Bran Mak Morn. But here, in his stories of Outremer and the Old Orient, Howard most eloquently questions the dominance of barbarism over civilization – a question he would ultimately answer in 1934, in the final paragraph of one of his most celebrated tales, Beyond the Black River:

Barbarism is the natural state of mankind … civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph. Though passionate about his material and confident in his ability to spin a yarn, Howard nonetheless felt that the writing of historicals exposed one of his great faults to the world: “My knowledge of the Orient is extremely sketchy, and I have to draw on my imagination to supply missing links which I can’t learn in the scanty references at my command.” And though he seems to have considered the introduction of imagination into historical fiction to be a weakness, it is that selfsame imagination that gives these stories such a dramatic flair. Howard’s prose has the power to bring history to life – grim and vicious life, but life all the same; he had a poet’s eye for evoking sensations that surely must have existed, even if no mention is made of them in the historical narrative – from the color of the night sky over a sacked and burning citadel to the taste of blood and gunpowder to the bitter stink of death that hangs in the morning air. When woven into the skein of history, these dollops of imagination elevate the rote recitation of dates and deeds into a potent form of art.

Howard bolstered his imagination by reading, widely and voraciously – no mean feat in Depression-era rural Texas. In his ongoing correspondence with fellow Weird Tales author H. P. Lovecraft, Howard lamented the dearth of culture in West Texas, stating that “… it is almost impossible to obtain books on obscure and esoteric subjects anywhere in the state.” Despite the difficulties, Howard amassed a vast store of historical knowledge, both for the American Southwest and for lands far-flung. He counted Sir Walter Scott among his favorite authors, along with Talbot Mundy, Stanley Lane-Poole, and the much-esteemed Harold Lamb. And from every one, both fiction and nonfiction, he took away something with which to inform his own work.

Absent first-hand experiences garnered through travel, or the where-withal to perform one’s own research in situ, cannibalizing and absorbing the works of others is a time-honored tradition among writers. Every book, story, and article one reads has the potential to supply a phrase or fact, a description or a bit of color. Of course, we should not confuse this with plagiarism; a good author – and Howard was one of the best – takes only inspiration, recasting the actual words to suit his own voice, his own style. Gates of Empire, included in this volume, boasts a perfect example of this tradition.

The scene is thus: in twelfth-century Cairo, emissaries of the Crusader King Amalric of Jerusalem, accompanied by that Falstaffian rogue, Giles Hobson – perhaps the most unique protagonist Howard ever created – have been granted an audience with the reclusive Fatimid Caliph of Egypt. Their escort is the wily vizier, Shawar …

At the gates of the Great East Palace the ambassadors gave up their swords, and followed the vizier through dim tapestry-hung corridors and gold arched doors where tongueless Sudanese stood like images of black silence, sword in hand. They crossed an open court bordered by fretted arcades supported by marble columns; their ironclad feet rang on mosaic paving. Fountains jetted their silver sheen into the air, peacocks spread their iridescent plumage, parrots fluttered on golden threads. In broad halls jewels glittered for eyes of birds wrought of silver or gold. So they came at last to the vast audience room, with its ceiling of carved ebony and ivory. Courtiers in silks and jewels knelt facing a broad curtain heavy with gold and sewn with pearls that gleamed against its satin darkness like stars in a midnight sky. While The Arabian Nights could easily have inspired Howard’s sumptuous vision in the above passage, it is in fact rigorously historical – the details recorded at Amalric’s behest by his friend and confessor, Archbishop Guillaume de Tyr, in his Latin history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Historia Rerum in Partibus Transmarinis Gestarum (A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea). The Historia was rare in the 1930s – a modern English translation did not come out until 1943 – and only slightly less rare today. So where did Howard encounter it? In answer, we need only turn to the works of two of REH’s favorite writers: Harold Lamb and Stanley Lane-Poole. Both men read Latin and traveled to the lands they wrote about. Lamb, an American adventure writer, split his time between fiction and non-fiction; Lane-Poole, a British archaeologist and Orientalist, wrote non-fiction histories with a storyteller’s eye. Both men wrote extensively on the Crusades. In their books, Howard no doubt found limitless inspiration.

Weigh the passage from Gates of Empire against this, Lamb’s version of the Caliph’s opulent palace, from The Crusades: the Flame of Islam:

The Fatimid kalif lived in guarded seclusion. Sudani swordsmen filled the corridors of the Great Palace, and paced the mosaic floors of the antechambers, by the marble fountains where peacocks strutted and parrots screamed. The audience hall glistened like a gigantic treasure vault with its ceiling of carved wood inlaid with gold, and its inanimate birds fashioned of silver and enamel feathers and ruby eyes. But the kalif was hidden from the eyes of the curious by a double curtain of gilt leather. Now, place both against an excerpt from Stanley Lane-Poole’s Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which incorporates both the colorful description of the palace and the mission of the ambassadors – much of it in the words of Guillaume de Tyr, himself:

The introduction of Christian ambassadors to the sacred presence, where few even of the most exalted Moslems were admitted, was unprecedented; but Amalric was in a position to dictate his own terms. Permission was granted, and Hugh of Cæsarea with Geoffrey Fulcher the Templar were selected for the unique embassy. The vezir himself conducted them with every detail of oriental ceremony and display to the Great Palace of the Fatimids. They were led by mysterious corridors and through guarded doors, where stalwart Sudanis saluted with naked swords. They reached a spacious court, open to the sky, and surrounded by arcades resting on marble pillars; the panelled ceilings were carved and inlaid in gold and colours; the pavement was rich mosaic. The unaccustomed eyes of the rude knights opened wide with wonder at the taste and refinement that met them at every step;– here they saw marble fountains, birds of many notes and wondrous plumage, strangers to the western world; there, in a further hall, more exquisite even than the first, “a variety of animals such as the ingenious hand of the painter might depict, or the license of the poet invent, or the mind of the sleeper conjure up in the visions of the night,– such, indeed, as the regions of the East and the South bring forth, but the West sees never, and scarcely hears of.” At last, after many turns and windings, they reached the throne room, where the multitude of the pages and their sumptuous dress proclaimed the splendour of their lord. Thrice did the vezir, ungirding his sword, prostrate himself to the ground, as though in humble supplication to his god; then, with a sudden rapid sweep, the heavy curtains broidered with gold and pearls were drawn aside, and on a golden throne, robed in more than regal state, the Caliph sat revealed. Upon comparison, it is easy to see what elements of each Howard drew on when writing Gates of Empire, pairing the imagery of Lane-Poole (and Guillaume de Tyr) with the brevity of Lamb and giving the whole a stamp of ownership that forever marks it as the work of Robert E. Howard. And for the record, the excerpt from Gates of Empire is the most dynamic of the three. It illustrates not only Howard’s instinctive ability to strike a proper balance between color and movement, but his mastery of the subject matter as well.

While I’ve singled out Gates of Empire for mention, as it is my own personal favorite, the same argument for its historicity can easily apply to the other tales in this collection. Despite what Howard may have believed about his lack of education or poor grasp of Oriental history, the fact remains that he was as meticulous and exacting as a trained historian when it came to winnowing details from his source material – and as flexible as only a master of the writing craft can be about fudging those selfsame details if, in the end, it made for a better story.

“I try to write as true to the actual facts as possible, at least, I try to commit as few errors as possible,” he commented to H. P. Lovecraft, in a letter from September or October, 1933. “I like to have my background and setting as accurate and realistic as I can, with my limited knowledge; if I twist facts too much, alter dates as some writers do, or present a character out of keeping with my impressions of the time and place, I lose my sense of reality, and my characters cease to be living and vital things; and my stories center entirely on my conceptions of my characters. Once I lose the ‘feel’ of my characters, and I might as well tear up what I have written.”

Unfortunately, only seven of the stories collected herein saw print in Howard’s lifetime; the rest he no doubt submitted to Farnsworth Wright, but the ravages of the Depression – the tightened belts and failing markets – meant any tale Wright passed on had little chance for life thereafter. Howard consigned the unsold stories to his trunk and moved on. By 1933, Oriental Stories (which by then had been saddled with a ridiculous new name, Magic Carpet Magazine) was on its deathbed. It would cease publication in January of 1934.

With the demise of his primary historical market, the question becomes, then, why didn’t Howard submit his tales to the premier historical pulp of the day, Adventure? It was in the pages of Adventure that a young Robert E. Howard first encountered the works of Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy; on at least two occasions, in February and July of 1924, Howard submitted lists of research questions to the magazine’s Ask Adventure column. But from 1921 onward, his every attempt to break in as a writer met with rejection – sometimes silent, but often with the added encouragement of the editor wanting to see more of his work (for most writers, the latter kind of rejection is golden … it tells us we’re not far from the mark and should persevere just a little longer).

Despite coming close on several occasions, Howard seemingly preferred not to send his later work to Adventure, even when encouraged to do so by writers he admired. He commented to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith, in a letter dated May of 1932: “Kirk Mashburn, a damned good writer, wrote and told me I should have sold it [Sowers of the Thunder] to Adventure – of which he says he hasn’t missed a copy since he found one in a deserted stretch of Florida Everglades many years ago. But if I’d sent it to Adventure, they’d have returned it unread, same as usual.”

Thus, with Oriental Stories a dead market – and Adventure an unreachable one – Howard moved on to greener fields. In 1932, even as he was crafting his tales of the Old Orient, Howard had a notion to turn his love for “the roaring, brawling, drunken, bawdy chaos of the Middle Ages” into a new cycle of stories. They would be historical, after a fashion, easier to research by borrowing from every corner of the past while maintaining the conceit of being about a time before recorded history, a “forgotten Hyborian age.” And the hero of these tales would be a wild barbarian not unlike Cormac FitzGeoffrey or Turlough Dubh O’Brien or even Baibars himself – a Cimmerian called Conan …

An interesting postscript to this epoch of Howard’s life occurred in May of 1936, a month before his untimely death. In a letter, again to H. P. Lovecraft, he sums up the years between 1930 and 1933 with his usual self-deprecation: “Attempts to make a living by writing historical fiction proved a flop.”

Perhaps Robert E. Howard did not make a living from historical fiction, but he made something better: a legacy … one as enduring and colorful as the myths and tales of his beloved Middle Ages.

Scott Oden October 2009