Valkyries dispatched to the battlefield to retrieve the souls of slain warriors, taking them to the great roaring hall of Valhalla, where bitter enemies by day drink and debauch by night.

Do we believe this actually happened? Valhalla is of course just a myth.

But, how to explain dying warriors on corpse-choked battlefields clutching notched swords to gasping chests, praying to Odin through blood-flecked lips to bear them to his golden hall? It was certainly tangible enough for these raiders from the likes of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and integral to how they lived their lives.

For them, Valhalla was real.

If not reliable conveyors of historical fact, myths reveal emotional truths, in their way as important as recorded history. There is far more to life than observable phenomena and cold materialism. The myths are what give life meaning, what motivate us to action, and thus have a reality of their own.

Robert E. Howard tapped into this vein of true myth deeply, striking a femoral artery with “Marchers of Valhalla.” Howard wrote “Marchers” sometime in 1933 but it did not see print in his lifetime, finally appearing in 1972 in Marchers of Valhalla (Donald M. Grant Publisher). There is something to this story that resonates with me, deeply. I have a love for The Northern Thing, perhaps because I am of that blood, with lineage tracing back to the likes of Ireland and Denmark. Or perhaps it’s because I just love Vikings. Regardless, I was quite pleased to see this fine story reprinted in Renegade Swords II, given new life again. It deserves to be read by a larger audience.

“Marchers of Valhalla” is one of Howard’s James Allison stories. In these tales a modern man recalls past eras of his life from which he has been reincarnated, over and over again. Howard borrowed this conceit from Jack London, who employed it in “The Jacket,” also published as “The Star Rover.” As “Marchers” opens Allison is living in early 1930s Texas, despondent over his prosaic, banal existence. He has no opportunity for adventure or heroism, as the frontier has been settled, the great wars fought. Moreover he has lost his leg to a riding accident, perhaps a metaphor for modern man’s impotence. Howard describes the low hills of the Texas landscape as “a dreary expanse… checkered with sterile fields where tenant farmers toil out their hideously barren lives in fruitless labor and bitter want.”

Howard felt all these same feelings, and just as deeply as Allison. He lamented that he did not live in an earlier, more heroic age. “Marchers” is the richer for it. In his fine essay “North by Southwest: Or, the Yellow Rose of Valhalla,” Steve Tompkins states, “It is next to impossible to write anything at all about Howard without quoting H.P. Lovecraft’s verdict on the stories: ‘The real secret is that he himself is in every one of them’.” Steve notes that Howard was “so deeply inside ‘Marchers of Valhalla’ that he hauled his own surroundings at their most subjectively bleak, his own isolation both temporal and spatial at its most intolerable, in after him.” All authors put a little of themselves into every story, but for Howard that was more true than most.

Allison is roused from his torpor by the appearance of a beautiful woman, incongruous in her speech and appearance. She refers to him as “Hialmar,” awakening in him powerful memories of when he and a thousand of his yellow haired Aesir of Nordheim, the Marchers of Valhalla, trekked from lands of ice and snow across thousands of leagues, conquering, exploring, and wandering, “driven only by our paranoidal drive to see beyond the horizon.” Allison remembers that he once lived a life worthy of his father, who was wounded in a charge up San Juan Hill, and his brothers, slain at Vimy Ridge and the Argonne forest, and others before them.

The age of heroes, denied to Allison by happenstance of birth, is part of his heritage too, though sundered by time and circumstance.

How were these ancient ages lost to us, and relegated to the pages of history and legendry? By another myth, the sinking of Atlantis. Allison is hit like a thunderclap when the woman poses him a curious question:

Prior to the great green wave was a time of great ages and kingdoms, the likes of the Hyborian Age and Numenor. Allison/Hialmar describes men of that age as possessing physical fortitude and power far beyond the capabilities of even the well-trained athletes of the present, “giants beyond the comprehension of moderns.” In “Marchers” even more so than his tales of Conan and Kull, Howard throws into stark relief the barbarism/civilization divide, imbuing the Aesir with a power almost mystical, again like something from the pages of a London novel. “Our might was more than physical; born of a wolfish race, the years of our wandering and fighting man and beast and the elements in all forms, had instilled in our souls the very spirit of the wild—the intangible power that quivers in the long howl of the grey wolf, that roars in the north wind.”

Though reduced from 1000 to 500 men from long years of fighting and trek, the Aesir assault the city of Khemu and lay waste to its numerically superior army, hewing the soft, civilized soldiers like ripe wheat. Unable to stand before the yellow-haired invaders, the rulers of Khemu throw open the gates, offering food and women and gold in exchange for leniency. Against the warnings of their leader Asgrimm, the Aesir accept, and walk into a trap: Poison in their wine-cups and daggers at their back await. But for now the people of Khemu bide their time. They need the Aesir to fend off a looming assault on the city, a fierce wave of invaders in black war-canoes decorated by skulls, led by a wild wanderer of the red-haired Vanir.

Inside Khemu Hialmar is love-struck by the golden-haired Aluna, handmaiden of the goddess Ishtar. It’s an awkward courtship, to say the least, with Hialmar fumbling in his advances: “Another woman I might have dragged to my tent by her long hair, but even without the priestly ban, there was something in my regard for Aluna that tied my hands from violence. I wooed her in the way we of the AEsir wooed our fierce lithe beauties—with boastings of prowess, and tales of rapine and slaughter.” This approach doesn’t go over so well. “My ferocious boastings frightened her; she did not understand,” Hialmar says.

Minor spoiler in that the relationship fails to culminate in love, and ends tragically. Hialmar later declares of the brief, halted relationship: “For the roots of love are set in hate and fury.” A curious phrase, and worth pondering. Perhaps this is some of Howard’s own awkwardness around and frustration with women manifesting itself in his fiction. We see some of the same boasting in his relationship with Novalyne Price Ellis, whom he met in the spring of 1933, around the same time as “Marchers.” The two experienced a tumultuous and ultimately failed relationship.

But, including this love interest allows Howard to again weave myth into the story. Through Aluna he encounters the goddess Ishtar, in the flesh. She is no cold, distant figure of legend but a sympathetic figure, immortal but suffering. Though a wife of Poseidon and daughter of a king of Lemuria, she is a captive of the wicked priests of Khemu, who have tortured her for her secrets.

When Allison awakes from his dream, again in 1930s Texas he discovers that the mysterious woman we see at the beginning of the story is indeed Ishtar, “the Eternal Woman, the root and the bud of Creation, the symbol of life everlasting.” In a stirring speech Howard connects her to various personages through the ages, drawing a dotted line from the impossibly distant past to the present: “She was Ishtar of the Assyrians, and Ashtoreth of the Phoenicians; she was Mylitta and Belit of the Babylonians, Derketo of the Philistines. Aye, and she was Isis of Egypt, and Astarte of Carthage; and she was Freya of the Saxons, and Aphrodite of the Grecians, and Venus of the Romans. The races call her by many names, and worship her in many ways, but she is one and the same, and the fires of her altars are not quenched.”

She is a myth, and a symbol, just as Hialmar is a symbol of an unquenchable heroic spirit in modern man.

It’s a wonderful bit of myth-making, as Howard skillfully connects the deep time of Atlantis and Lemuria, the Thurian Age, with Hialmar and the tail end of the Hyborian Age, to more recent history, and finally to the present of 1930s Texas. Allison learns that Khemu now lies beneath the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. He is sundered from his own heroic past—but not in an emotional sense, and in a rare ray of hope in this otherwise grim story, not forever:

You shall know them again, Ishtar promises Allison, “when, in a little while, you shall put off that misshapen mask of broken flesh and don new raiment, bright and gleaming as the armor of Hialmar!”

So many of us today are disaffected, men and women feeling displaced in time, dreaming of heroic ages. Great sword-and-sorcery can take us back by engaging in myth-making. In “Marchers of Valhalla” Howard connects us to the heroic myths, separated by eons of time and death but still alive in spirit, rekindled through his awe-inspiring prose.

We too see our fathers before us, back to the beginning. To the vanishing Texas frontier of the 20s and 30s, and deeper, to geologic eras of time, and great lost empires sinking under the waves. Even into the mind of Robert E. Howard himself.

Brian Murphy is the author of Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (Pulp Hero Press, 2020). Learn more about his life and work on his website, The Silver Key.