The old blaze came back in his eyes, and this time she did not resist as he caught her fiercely in his arms.
--t-- a long way to the coast,--she said presently, withdrawing her lips from his.
--hat matter?--he laughed.--here-- nothing we can't conquer. We--l have our feet on a ship-- deck before the Stygians open their ports for the trading season. And then we--l show the world what plundering means!--
Cimmeria
Written in Mission, Texas, February, 1932; suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredericksburg seen in a mist of winter rain.
--Robert E. Howard
I remember
The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;
The grey clouds--leaden everlasting arch;
The dusky streams that flowed without a sound,
And the lone winds that whispered down the passes.
Vista on vista marching, hills on hills,
Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,
Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up
A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye
Saw but the endless vista--hill on hill,
Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.
It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold
All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,
With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,
And the dark woodlands brooding over all,
Not even lightened by the rare dim sun
Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.
It was so long ago and far away
I have forgot the very name men called me.
The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,
And hunts and wars are shadows. I recall
Only the stillness of that sombre land;
The clouds that piled forever on the hills,
The dimness of the everlasting woods.
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.
Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills,
To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun,
How many deaths shall serve to break at last
This heritage which wraps me in the grey
Apparel of ghosts? I search my heart and find
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.
Appendices
BARBARIAN AT THE PANTHEON-GATES
by Steven Tompkins
In [Frederick Jackson] Turner-- intellectual scenario, the frontier was visualized as a terrain on which two kingdoms of force,--avagery and civilization,--stood toe to toe contending for supremacy. As long as neither held dominance there was danger, but there was also boundless freedom. Into this landscape came the archetypal American, an American who was free in a way that no American has been free since. Free to choose patterns of conduct from an infinity of choices, free to move easily back and forth across the line which separated savagery and civilization, free to take the best from the wilderness and the best that civilization had to offer, free to create his self from the materials of a totally unrestricted environment.
--Tom Pilkington, State of Mind: Texas Literature and Culture
That knocking you hear, polite but persistent, is the people who assembled Volumes I and II of The Best of Robert E. Howard, addressing themselves to the front door of the American literary pantheon. Let-- be upfront while we--e out front: not only do we put Howard's finest work on a pedestal, we--e even gone so far as to pick out a place of honor for that pedestal within the pantheon't marmoreal recesses. These books are designed to be more than just a Petition for Admittance; our aim has been a show of force, an effort to rout derisive interdiction with a decisive intervention in a debate that-- been too non-evidentiary for too long.
In a sense that debate has been underway since at least the fall of 1934, while Howard was still writing--let-- join a conversation already in progress back then between two cousins, both small-town schoolteachers in West Texas, as they discuss a writer dismissed by one as small-time. Enid Gwathmey refuses to accept--he pulp and confession magazines as legitimate starting places for writers. Good stories had stood the test of time. Examples of good writing were put into literature books.--That-- all Novalyne Price, to whose invaluable 1986 memoir One Who Walked Alone we owe the recap of this cousinly disagreement, needs in order to pounce:
--ou read Edgar Allan Poe, don't you? I heard you talking about him to your class the other day.-- She looked at me as if I had the measles.--oe is a good writer,--she said.--was pointing out what a wonderful choice of words he had; I was trying to get my students to enjoy using words carefully to improve their writing.----ob has a wonderful choice of words, too,--I insisted,--nd as far as the content of his stories and of Poe--, they write the same kind of nightmarish stuff. The main difference is that Poe-- works are in the literature books and Bob-- aren't--et. Someday, some English teacher will be telling kids to try and write like Bob.----will have to see that to believe it,--Enid said.--will certainly have to see that to believe it.--
The Best of Robert E. Howard would enable Enid to see and believe, but handing the two volumes to her would require some time travel. More encouragingly, the readers of today and tomorrow now have the opportunity to verify the'sonderful choice of words--defended by Novalyne Price for themselves in the preceding pages. Those words do indeed deserve to be--n the literature books,--and are closer to getting there thanks to Del Rey's Library of Robert E. Howard. And while only a few English teachers are telling their pupils to--ry and write like Bob--as of yet, he is beginning to be thesis-fodder or a dissertation-magnet, a trend that the overdue-but-impending arrival of his Collected Letters and Complete Poems can only galvanize.
Novalyne-- attribution of--he same kind of nightmarish stuff--to both Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Ervin Howard is a reminder that the Texan is already a redoubtable presence in one pantheon. We can't be certain that she took her cue from her sometime boyfriend in measuring him against Poe, but we do know that years before Howard met her, in a December 1928 letter he alluded with a sort of self-deprecating bravado to--he school to which Poe contributed and I at present honor with my presence--literarily speaking--I mean the school of fantasy and horror writing.--That he was at the top of his class within that school has been confirmed by generations of fans and a generous entry in the 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy, in which John Clute deems him--f central interest in the field of fantasy--and attributes his--uge appeal to later readers--to--onsiderable invention'tand--he feel of the wind of Story.-- Heroic/epic fantasy authors and historical novelists specializing in the edged-weapon clashes of ancient or medieval warfare are often quick to tip their plumed, crested, or horned helmets to Howard. As David Weber recognized in an introduction to a 1995 collection of the Bran Mak Morn stories,--ran and Cormac and Kull are always ready to teach yet another generation of writers how to tell the high, old tales of doom and glory.-- Howard was more than just a fantasist, although there is no--ust--about his achievements in the genre. While it would be silly to label him, or anyone, an American Tolkien, it is not at all silly to alter a few pronouns in one of leading Tolkienist Verlyn Flieger-- observations about the Englishman in order to render her insight applicable to both men:--y looking backward [their] fantasy reflected the present, the temporal dislocation of [their] escape mirrored the psychological disjunction and displacement of [their century].--Flieger goes on to emphasize that--he very act of escape acknowledges that which it flees, and nostalgia, like modernism, must have a ground from which to turn away.--In Howard's case that ground was American, and therefore controlled by a dominant down-to-earth outlook given to shooting down flights of fancy; the national lore of settlers and strivers usually chased anything more outrageous and fact-flouting out of town.