The Dragon Sickness

(Warning; contains spoilers for David Drake's "The Barrow Troll")

Wealth hoarding. Obsessively clutching your treasure until it consumes you. This base and all-too human instinct manifests in our stories and myths as The Dragon Sickness.

The dragon is a creature out of myth, but also a symbol out of the theories of Carl Jung. A monster lording over its wealth, but also a beast lurking inside of you. Your ego, preventing you from self-actualizing, becoming your highest version of yourself, dragging you down into selfishness.

The dragon sickness finds expression in the Old English epic poem Beowulf, a common ancestor of both high fantasy and sword-and-sorcery. We can see its influence on works as diverse as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and David Drake’s “The Barrow Troll.”

And we can see how the lesson of the myth diverges in these two stories, offering two very different ends.

Bilbo acquires and then gives away (most) of his wealth. He returns to Bag End with money, but is very generous with his treasure.

The “barrow troll” of Drake’s story hoards it, guards it jealously, and murders anyone who would take it.  When Ulf kills the troll and takes possession of its golden horde, he becomes the monster.

“Gold,” he murmured. Then, “Gold!” There must—the others—in God’s name, there are five more and perhaps all of them—”

“Gold,” Ulf grated terribly.

Johann ran to the nearest chest and opened it one-handed. The lid sagged wetly, but frequent use had kept it from swelling tight to the side panels. “Look at this crucifix!” the priest marvelled. “And the torque, it must weigh pounds. And Lord in heaven, this—”

“Gold,” the berserker repeated.

***

What should we make of wealth? Is it a metric for success or a sign of corruption? An earned possession of the rich that trickles down to the less fortunate? A sin to possess in quantity?

Wealth is not an inherent evil, it’s all about our relationship to it. Expending effort to achieve wealth is admirable … but more admirable is generosity, post-wealth. If you use it to help enrich others you can become a hero. If you set your north star solely by the size of your bottom line or your bank account you become a troll.

“It’s a Wonderful Life” contrasts George Bailey and Old Man Potter. Who had the greater moral clarity and lived a more wonderful life? The crabby old man who lived a luxuriant life of hoarding while keeping others poor, or the family man who lived modestly and sacrificed to give families in his community a fair mortgage and a reasonable start in life? 

Who received wealth in the end, in the most unexpected of eucatastrophes? 

Making the right choice isn’t easy. Wealth is seductive, the dragon, a fierce enemy. The Master of Laketown succumbs to the dragon sickness. The dwarves in Moria delve too greedily and too deep, arousing the balrog, a physical manifestation of greed. Thorin succumbs to it with the Arkenstone, and ultimately recognizes his error on his deathbed.

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world,” Thorin says to Bilbo. 

The dragon sickness can be overcome with compassion, generosity, a moral compass that places people above possessions. Bilbo and Bard are the guideposts. 

“The Barrow Troll” is the warning.

"Into the Fire," Dokken

I've heard it referred to alternatively as hair metal, glam metal, sometimes by the less charitable, butt rock. Whatever. 

I've come to love it. 

It really all started with Quiet Riot's Metal Health, which made history by becoming the first metal album to reach no. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart. Then you had Pyromania and Shout at the Devil and it was on. Dudes with big hair and tight pants playing heavy but radio friendly-ish heavy metal, dominating the air waves circa 1983-91.

Dokken is one of the best examples of this sort of thing. Their first album, 1983's Breaking the Chains, was considered a commercial flop, and they needed a big sophomore effort. They got it with Tooth and Nail, released in September 1984. It had several strong tracks, "Alone Again" probably the most popular and recognizable, but I like this one best.

God I love these ridiculous videos... zero subtlety, near zero artistry, zero fucks given.

I've come to love George Lynch. He's an incredibly talented guitarist who writes killer licks and makes this band what it is. Guitar-forward, great hooks, great for blasting as you drive down the seaside in a convertible Iroc-Z or Camaro Z28.

You might be seeing a bit more of this type of music on Metal Fridays through September, for reasons that will soon become clear.

Gazing into The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune

Can sword-and-sorcery be quiet, thoughtful … philosophical?

Not typically … but Robert E. Howard was anything but typical.

If you want to know why Howard lasts while so many of his barbaric descendants have not, gaze into "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune."

But not too closely. You might not be able to rip your gaze away.

***

“Mirrors” starts with an epigraph by Edgar Allan Poe, placing the reader into the proper headspace for the story to come. Poe wrote stories of psychological disorientation and spirals into madness.

The stuff of “Mirrors.” 

Not much actually happens plot-wise. Kull is king but unsatisfied with reality, weary of life, and unable to hear the sea-songs of Atlantis of his youth. It has the same melancholy, disenchanted feel of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key” (Feb. 1929 Weird Tales), even though Howard wrote the story considerably earlier and that could not have been an influence. Must have been something in the inter-war air.

A slave girl with an ulterior motive recommends Kull seek out Tuzun Thune, a wizard who holds the secrets of life and death. And he does.

But this story isn’t about plot, or character. It’s theme, the exploration of life itself, and how strange and ephemeral this thing called “reality” is. When you get right down to it the relationship of reality and consciousness are incredibly complex, and uncertain, prone to dissolve if you look at them too closely. 

Is there reality if no one is there to observe it? Does the observer therefore create reality? And if so, can we create and inhabit worlds of our own making, every bit as “real” as this one?

Howard frames this strangeness through Thune and his probing questions. When Kull asks the wizard if he can create wonders, Thune replies, Is it not a wonder that flesh obeys the thoughts of our mind? That we can talk with the dead by talking with another person—who are already dead because they were born?

Skeptical of slippery sophistry, Kull nevertheless accepts Thune’s offer to gaze into his mirrors. And there finds the origins of man, a “dream of the gods,” and learns the truth of mankind’s ephemeral existence, that all our glories will fade like smoke on a summer sea.

Kull is soon lost in a hall of mirrors that seem real but may be a metaphor for his own tortured and bewildered metaphysical thinking.

Is his world real, or the world inside the mirror real? 

Does it matter, if reality is only in our heads, the product of our highly individual consciousness? Is life merely a dream?

The line between fantasy and reality blurs as Kull himself begins to fade; he threatens to vanish entirely into the world in the mirror until his Pict friend, Brule the Spear-Slayer, kills Tuzun Thune and shatters the glass. 

But this is no heroic finish. Unease remains. Kull is left to ponder, was it Thune’s witchery changing him to mist, or had he stumbled on to a secret? Maybe there are worlds beyond worlds, ones we can access.

Conan would famously reject such mirrors and place his gaze firmly upon this world. He scorns such bottomless and possibly destructive philosophizing (“Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me."). Perhaps both he and Howard came to discover that the only truth we can ever truly know is our own. 

Though even Conan’s words can be interpreted with ambiguity; after all he never admits he knows the truth, only that he will let others brood upon its nature, and that the illusion is real, to him.

A few additional notes

“The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” originally appeared in the September 1929 Weird Tales and has been reprinted and adapted widely since. In print, too numerous to mention, but some notables include Skull-Face and Others (Arkham House, 1946), The Coming of Conan (Gnome Press, 1953), and King Kull (Lancer, 1967).

***

The story was adapted for Savage Sword of Conan #34 (Oct. 1978), with script by Roy Thomas and art by Mike Ploog. I have this. It’s pretty cool even though two of the pages are transposed. The images from this essay are taken from that.

***

The heavy metal band Arkham Witch covered the tale in a song of the same name.

***

It contains one of my favorite Howard passages, a prose-poetry which made Howard so special. 

“There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester's bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky, and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh.”

This passage was heavily adapted for the screenplay of Conan the Barbarian (1982) and voiced by Max Von Sydow.

***

Is Kull a proto-Conan? You can make the case for yes and no.

Yes: Conan was borne out of a rewritten Kull story and so contains his literal DNA. Both are powerful, massive, untamed, fierce fighters, barbarian outsiders sitting uncomfortably on the thrones of civilized kingdoms.

No: Howard was in a different place in his life when he wrote these stories, and the characters are therefore different. Kull has his own distinct characteristics: Brooding, reflective, relatively chaste, philosophical, prone to dreaming. In his essay “Atlantean Genesis” included in Kull: Exile of Atlantis (Del Rey, 2006), editor Patrice Louinet shares some passages from letters to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith at the time of the writing of “Mirrors,” and they are rife with the same sort of philosophical/psychological inquiry.

***

Can a story about the nature of reality be categorized as sword-and-sorcery? I don’t want S&S minus the Clark Ashton Smithian-weird strain. And it’s got a warrior and a wizard in it. 

So I say, yes.

The Myth of Progress

I am a big fan of modern medicine. I like my car, I need electricity, I even (mostly) enjoy the internet. I could do without my television … but watching a good movie (on the DVD player) makes the glass teat worth owning.

I mourn the fields and sighing pines that are now condos, and the state of my attention before the omnipresent pocket screen. I miss the world pre-9/11, life in the middle before extreme political division. I miss local bookstores and reading culture, when everyone seemed to be holding a mass-market paperback.

I am not a purveyor of nostalgia, though nostalgia is genuine human emotion and has evolved with us for a reason. I do realize that we’ve come a long way baby, and even the decades of my youth—the 70s and 80s—had pockets of shittiness we’re better off without.

But I’m also not a blinkered techno-utopian. 

I miss Google search before it became “enshittified” and definitely life before generative AI. Slop and outsourced thinking is a problem; not having a reliable way to know if something is true is worse.

Progress is just change, and change is sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Great things are gained with breakthroughs, something is inevitably lost along the way. There is no unseen digital hand, no Prometheus of circuitry and silicon, steering us ever forward to “better.” This belief is a myth.

The myth of progress does not only apply to technology. It applies to social progress, and the progress of a life.

As we grow older we gain wealth, wisdom, strength, autonomy, influence.

We lose innocence, wonder, malleability, potential. And if I’m getting dark, we lose everything at the end. Maybe we progress to some paradise of the afterlife, but there is no assurance there.

Unfortunately there is no magical formula for getting this balance right.

What can we do?

Slow the fuck down. Encourage and celebrate measured, incremental progress. Be thoughtful, as humans can be, and strive to make more of these changes the positive sort.

Be kinder, stop killing each other for a few minutes.

Celebrate our past, preserve and honor what is great about it.

Understand the tradeoffs that inevitably come with technology and efficiency and the sprawl of development.

Talk like adults about all this, rather than behave like children striving to win a game that never was one to begin with.

I realize I sound a bit like an old man shouting at clouds, without hope. 

But I am hopeful we can figure this out, and discover the peace that comes with balance.

...

Or at least bring back Pizza Hut of the 1980s.

Missives from Highland Lake

I'm up at the family cottage on Highland Lake this week, enjoying some sorely needed PTO.

I did get out an issue of Arcane Arts, which you can read here. And remember to click "subscribe."

I also got in some quality time with my friend Tom Barber, who left me a mighty gift: 10 classic paperbacks, most published by Zebra in the 1970s, all with his cover art.

In return I gave Tom a ride on the pontoon boat on a beautiful, 10/10 afternoon.

100 Metal Fridays + In My Darkest Hour

My 100th Metal Friday post!

A few observations.

Most featured band: Judas Priest (14 appearances). 

Others with multiple appearances: Iron Maiden (12), Black Sabbath (9), Bruce Dickinson (5), Manowar (5), Manilla Road (4), Blind Guardian (4), Queensryche (4), Metallica (3), Def Leppard (3), Rob Halford (2), Anthrax (2), Slayer (2), Sepultura (2), Eternal Champion (2), Ace Frehley (2), Thin Lizzy (2), Ronnie James Dio (2).

This gives you a pretty good indicator of my metal(ish) tastes. Note that there is a separate “heavy metal” category on the blog for general metal posts that fall on non-Fridays. So what you see above is not all-inclusive or all-indicative of my interests.

Metal Friday typically steers away from bands that are hard rock/borderline metal (AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, etc.) with some exceptions. Or when Gordon Lightfoot died or I felt like talking about 80s KISS.

Not every Metal Friday is a song; sometimes I covered the metal news of the day, concert reviews, etc. With that in mind, here is your Metal Friday 100 post setlist; pretty good listening here IMO.

How has Megadeth not made a Metal Friday? Let’s fix that now with what is probably their best song.

1. Valkyries, Blind Guardian

2. Light Comes Out of Black, Rob Halford

3. Jerusalem, Bruce Dickinson

4. Falling off the Edge of the World, Black Sabbath

5. NM156, Queensryche

6. Hail and Kill, Manowar

7. Welcome Home (Sanitarium), Metallica

8. Beyond the Realms of Death, Judas Priest

9. Raining Blood, Slayer

10. Left Hand Black, Danzig

11. The Evil That Men Do, Iron Maiden

12. The Clairvoyant, Iron Maiden

13. Night Winds, Parasite

14. Queen of the Black Coast, Manilla Road

15. Man of Sorrows, Bruce Dickinson

16. Satsuma covers Ratt's "Lay it Down" and Judas Priest's "Hellion/Electric Eye"

17. Take Hold of the Flame, Live in Tokyo 1984, Queensryche

18. Armageddon Clan, Battle Beast

19. The Hunt, Sepultura

20. Darkest Hour, Iron Maiden

21. Heart of a Lion, Judas Priest

22. Sing a Last Song of Valdese, Eternal Champion

23. Between the Hammer and the Anvil, Judas Priest

24. I, Black Sabbath (with incredible Conan imagery)

25. Judas Priest! … and Gordon Lightfoot?

26. British Steel on the docket tomorrow night

27. Defending 80s KISS (A Million to One)

28. Orgasmatron, Motorhead

29. Nativity in Black (Black Sabbath tribute album)

30. Master of the Wind, Manowar

31. Wild Child, WASP

32. Master of Puppets, Metallica

33. Necropolis, Manilla Road

34. The Crue, Poison, Def Leppard, Joan Jett

35. Emerald, Thin Lizzy

36. Ace Frehley lead guitar! (Fractured Mirror)

37. Blood Tears, Blind Guardian

38. Rockin’ Again, Saxon

39. Headless Cross, Black Sabbath

40. A very metal week: Judas Priest/Queensryche, Iron Maiden (Halls of Valhalla)

41. The Clansman, Iron Maiden

42. Sea of Red, Judas Priest

43. Thunder Road, Judas Priest

44. Flaming Metal Systems, Manilla Road

45. Theater of Salvation, Edguy

46. Bible Black, Black Sabbath

47. Top 5 Manowar Songs

48. Show Don’t Tell, Rush

49. Kill Devil Hill, Bruce Dickinson

50. Let it Go, Def Leppard

51. Beginning of the End, Meliah Rage

52. Stranger in a Strange Land, Iron Maiden

53. En Force, Queensryche

54. Caught in the Middle, Ronnie James Dio

55. Traitor’s Gate, Judas Priest

56. RIP to Canada’s finest singer-songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot

57. Edge of Thorns, Savatage

58. If Heaven is Hell, Tokyo Blade

59. Curse My Name, Blind Guardian

60. As Heavy as I’ll go (Sepultura, Slayer)

61. Worms of the Earth, Eternal Champion

62. Force of a Storm, Sumerlands

63. Orion, Metallica

64. The Battle of Evermore and the timeless nature of fantasy

65. Resurrection, Rob Halford

66. Start the Fire, Metal Church

67. Season of the Witch, Grave Digger

68. Where Eagles Dare, Iron Maiden (for Nicko)

69. Cold Sweat, Thin Lizzy

70. Sign of the Southern Cross, Black Sabbath

71. The Rage, Judas Priest

72. Cauldron Born, Born of the Cauldron

73. Sixteenth Century Greensleeves, Rainbow (RIP Ronnie James Dio)

74. Gods of War, Def Leppard

75. Powerslave, Iron Maiden

76. War Pigs, Judas Priest

77. Goodbye to Romance: Reflections on Black Sabbath, Back to the Beginning, and the end of the road

78. Mystification, Manilla Road

79. Hell on Earth, Iron Maiden

80. Bruce Dickinson at the House of Blues, Boston MA Sept. 11, 2025

81. Atom and Evil, Black Sabbath

82. Strange Ways, Ace Frehley

83. Of Blind Guardian and the Quest for Tanelorn

84. The Sentinel, Judas Priest

85. Stonehenge, Spinal Tap

86. Computer God, Black Sabbath

87. Judas Be My Guide, Iron Maiden

88. Desert Plains, Judas Priest

89. Heavy metal, sword-and-sorcery, the Outsider ... and Iron Maiden's “Drifter”

90. Among the Living, Anthrax

91. Revelations, Judas Priest

92. The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, Arkham Witch

93. Mountains, Manowar. RIP Ross the Boss

94. Defender, Manowar

95. Darkside of Aquarius, Bruce Dickinson

96. Don’t Break My Heart Again, Whitesnake

97. The Thin Line Between Love and Hate, Iron Maiden

98. Shake Me, Cinderella

99. Medusa, Anthrax

100. In My Darkest Hour, Megadeth

A History of Heavy Metal (Arcane Arts excerpt)

Unfortunate cover blurb.

(Note: The following is the lead item in this week's Arcane Arts. I also cover REH, Jane Yolen, 70s horror, and Mike Grell's Warlord. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox)

Metal is vast. Metal is diverse. Metal is sprawling. The number of subgenres is staggering … more than 70, are you kidding? And to be honest, a little stupid. Drone metal. Funeral doom. Djent metal. Some of the finer points make sword-and-sorcery vs. heroic fantasy look like high school debate club.

And so I don’t think it’s possible to write an absolutely definitive history of heavy metal.  And even if you could, who would be interested in such a thing? If you like doom are you likely also a fan of funk metal or Christian metal? 

This past weekend I finished reading an attempt at a comprehensive history, Andrew O’Neill’s A History of Heavy Metal. I’d describe it as breezy, entertaining, fairly well written. But also, quite biased and therefore incomplete. An ostensible history shouldn’t ignore bands that the author does not like. O’Neill hates glam metal, so we get 10 pages of why it sucks … except for maybe Appetite For Destruction. He also has little use for Anthrax and Megadeth (Dave Mustaine’s nasally voice grates on him) so they’re largely ignored too, despite their considerable footprint. 

For what it’s worth I recommend A History of Heavy Metal as a breezy, sometimes entertaining read that filled in a few corners for me. Black and death metal, mainly, and a lot of bands I’ve never heard of.

What he wrote was fine… but it’s not what I want to read. Or write. I’d rather go deep than broad. Curated instead of encyclopedic.

This is a roundabout way of explaining how I ended up writing a heavy metal memoir. We have histories. We’ve got Sound of the Beast and Louder than Hell and O’Neill’s book. We have information: Videos, podcasts, even, a map. We’ve got a million stories of the bands and performers themselves. 

We don’t need another Flame and Crimson for heavy metal.

So, I wrote something quite different. A story from one fan’s perspective—my own. My life, with heavy metal as the backdrop.

My memoir will only focus on the handful of metal genres I like. But I’m not writing a history. So if you’re looking for a treatise on Unblack Metal (a real subgenre, by the way) you’ll need to look elsewhere.

But if you’re looking for one fan’s utterly unique story, maybe you’ll like this. August is getting closer.