Robert E. Howard
Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures
Robert E. Howard’s crowning glory in literature was Conan the Cimmerian. His epic tales written from a remote place in Texas were remarkable in character, landscape, and mood.
At the age of fourteen, I first came across his stories in paperback editions. At that time, as a young artist, I had been studying anatomy with regard to drawing the human figure. The exotic, mysterious, action-packed stories of the Conan saga were a perfect vehicle for inventive figure renditions and stagings.
At that time I could only dream about working on Howard’s stories. Now I have realized that dream, illustrating
I hope you enjoy Howard’s work as much as I enjoyed illustrating it.
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
The stories collected in this volume, however, are solidly historical. They owe their genesis to Howard’s literary patron and
“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 (
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
