Kothar!

 

By Dwalka! This was a fortune to make a man mad.

Gardner Fox is far and away my favorite pastiche author. I love his Kothar and Kyrik books as just plain fun, straight up S&S entertainment, and his two volume Llarn series (Warrior of Llarn, Thief of Llarn) are wonderful examples of sword-and-planet. He won't make you forget Robert E. Howard, but Fox delivers fun, semi tongue-in-cheek adventure.

At right is the complete Kothar series. Below is a period advertisement from Kothar and the Wizard Slayer. It's so cool I think I'll take up smoking.

Smoke up Johnny.

A review of Tolkien (2019)

I’m currently on a J.R.R. Tolkien kick, having finished both a re-read of The Lord of the Rings and a re-read of Humphrey Carpenter’s outstanding biography. Last night I watched for the first time Tolkien (2019), which I have both managed to (until now) avoid out of some combination of forgetfulness and anticipated dread of ill-treatment of its subject. I’m pleased to say that I found it a good film, not great, but worth the watch.

Tolkien focuses on Tolkien’s early life from roughly age 10, circa 1902, ending with him writing the iconic first line of The Hobbit, in the early 1930s. We get a heavy emphasis on his romance with Edith Bratt, his friendship with the T.C.B.S., four passionate boys who shared a common love of heroic literature, his love of languages, and his experiences with love and war that inspired his great story of the war of the ring and its underlying mythology.

Overall I enjoyed the film, and was moved by a few scenes. It took several dramatic liberties, compressing and magnifying various events to help propel along the sometimes quite ordinary course of about 25 years of his life. Other events I believe were wholly created—sneaking into the storage room of a sold-out concert hall to listen to a performance of the Richard Wagner opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen” with Edith, for example. Normally I would not complain about it, except that Tolkien was not particularly influenced by Wagner’s opera, despite the shared conceit of a ring of power, and a casual viewer of the film might leave thinking that Wagner’s Ring Cycle was the chief influence on The Lord of the Rings (it was not). Tolkien did romantically reunite with Bratt after the latter had gotten engaged to another man, and encouraged her to break off the relationship. But it did not happen in the seconds before Tolkien dramatically boarded a transport ship to France, as was portrayed in Tolkien. But I accept these changes in the spirit of needing to create a dramatic film, which is very different from biography or history.

Tolkien was also surprisingly low on the “cringe” factor. There were no made-up dramatic charges into German machine gun fire, embarrassing sex scenes, or manufactured maudlin T.C.B.S. speeches; rather the genuine friendship and spirit of the four boys was well-portrayed, as was Tolkien’s view of Edith as something akin to an elven princess (for better and for worse, as she often felt alienated by his split personality around her). Tolkien’s life had a great many tragedies and triumphs that required no exaggeration, and the film presented some of these faithfully. I particularly liked that it preserved the 1916 letter from G.B. Smith to Tolkien, in which the former foresaw his own end in the fields of France and implored his old schoolmate to continue the great work the T.C.B.S. had vowed to create:

My God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.

It is heartbreaking to think what came next: T.C.B.S member Rob Gilson died in one of the many suicidal advances across the mud-choked Somme battlefield, straight into German machine-gun fire; Smith suffered shrapnel wounds from an exploding artillery shell and later died of gangrene infection. That left only Wiseman and Tolkien to carry on the T.C.B.S.' promised great work. Tolkien developed trench fever and had to be evacuated back to England, which in all likelihood saved his life. He and Wiseman held up their end of the bargain: Wiseman would go on to become a school headmaster, while Tolkien of course would go on to become an Oxford professor and write the greatest fantasy the world has ever known.

The best account of this period of Tolkien’s life remains John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War, which after Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth is one of the best pieces of Tolkien scholarship I have read. But you could do worse on a Saturday night than a viewing of Tolkien.

Happy 115th, REH

On the occasion of what would have been the 115th birthday of Robert E. Howard (had he had the blood of Numenor in his veins, and had not tragically ended his own life at age 30), I thought I would share my favorite presentation of some of his classic Conan stories.

I do regret obtaining these second-hand, as they are shorn of the full-sized pullout Ken Kelly posters that once graced their interior. But they are well-worth obtaining and reading for the great Karl Edward Wagner introductions.

Many enjoy the Tor Conan pastiches (I have mixed feelings about them myself), and if so you may not agree with KEW, who wrote this in the preface to The Hour of the Dragon:

I have written Howard pastiches myself, so I can speak both as a reader and author: Every author leaves his personal mark on whatever he writes; the only man who could write a Robert E. Howard story was Robert E. Howard. Read Howard pastiches as you will--but don't let anyone kid you that you're reading Robert E. Howard. It is far more than a matter of initiating adjective usage or analyzing comma-splices. It is a matter of spirit.

No other author I've read, pastiche or otherwise, could tap into the same heroic spirit of the late, great REH. I'll be drinking a high ABV craft beer or three tonight, to his shade.

Berkley Medallions, in your face.

The Great Debate: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard

My latest post for Goodman Games/Tales from the Magician's Skull is up. Check it out here.

My greatest challenge with this post was to try to summarize a 900-page correspondence in 1,000 words. This essay only scratches the surface of the amazing exchange of letters between Lovecraft and Howard from 1930-36, published in the highly recommended A Means to Freedom. Make no mistake, it was a great debate in which Howard formulated and formalized the underlying themes that give his stories much of their power and resonance. Howard rejected fascism and criticized political and industrial "progress" both home and abroad. Today it still remains to be seen whether barbarism will ultimately triumph over civilization.

On a lighter note, kudos to Goodman Games for the wonderful graphic displays they post with these articles. I'm digging the headshots of these two men overlaid on the handwritten letter and dip pen. Fancy.

Swords Against Darkness: Heyday of sword-and-sorcery

.My favorite cover goes to vol 4, I'm digging the mounted barbarian and skulls. On the back is a wicked wyrm.

 

Today's entry is the Andrew Offutt-edited Swords Against Darkness, a series of five anthologies published between 1977-79. This was still the heyday of sword-and-sorcery, as the subgenre was attracting names like Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Charles De Lint, and Orson Scott Card, the latter fresh off a John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer. All were published in the pages of Swords Against Darkness, along with many other fine authors. These were all new stories Offutt bought for the anthologies (and/or finished, in the case of the Robert E. Howard story "Nekht Semerkhet,") attesting to the health of sword-and-sorcery during this time period.

A lot of variety, much darkness and horror, and some fun introductions penned by Offutt. Five excellent volumes and I wish there were more.

Tolkien the barbarian

I recently finished a re-read of The Lord of the Rings, which inspired me to revisit Humphrey Carpenter's authorized biography of JRRT. I'm still in the early/pre-Oxford period of Tolkien's life, covering his days at King Edward's School in Birmingham, and encountered this particular scene:

There was a custom at King Edward's of holding a debate entirely in Latin, but that was almost too easy for Tolkien, and in one debate when taking the role of Greek Ambassador to the Senate he spoke entirely in Greek. On another occasion he astonished his schoolfellows when, in the character of a barbarian envoy, he broke into fluent Gothic; and on a third occasion he spoke in Anglo-Saxon.

It makes one wonder again whether Tolkien did in fact enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan. I like to think he would have, and did.

Flashing Swords: More from the S&S collection

Hardcovers, paperbacks, but a complete collection. Still not sure why Gary Viskupic drew a 
horned-helmeted warrior springing from the head of an otherwise pleasant, oblivious young lass
(Flashing Swords #4).

The five-volume Lin Carter-edited Flashing Swords series (1973-81) is my next selection for gratuitous display. Gotta go with the cover of #1 for best art, but Frazetta's second piece in the series for Flashing Swords #2, featuring iconic warrior, wizard, and angry Ent, draws a close second.

I'd like to also call out the dedications: Carter dedicates the first volume to Robert E. Howard, "without whom we would all probably be writing nothing but science fiction stories," vol. 2 to Henry Kuttner, "one of the best Swordsmen and Sorcerers of 'em all," vol. 3 to Clifford Ball, "one of the first writers of Sword & Sorcery, now, sadly, forgotten and, even more sadly, uncollected," and vol. 4 to Norvell Page, "our late colleague, the chronicler of the saga of Hurricane John." Oddly, vol. 5 does not have a dedication, at least in the Nelson Doubleday Book Club Edition that I own.