Robert Ervin Howard (1906–1936)—what more is there to say about a legendary man, such as he, about whom everything worth the telling has already been told? Howard’s writings have been talked about up and down and this way and that for a very long time, which is considerable given how terribly short the man’s life really was—this sordid world lost him too soon. Books, comics, movies—you name it; much has already been created that is based on or related to Howard’s life story or his works, and still people want more. Mr. Howard wrote and had published a great deal. If you are reading this, most likely are you already aware of some other, superior source or material that would bestow knowledge deepest and insight richer regarding Mr. Howard’s life and stories. Even in these vulgar days of modern society do we feel the emptiness left by the departing of our dear Robert E. Howard, and such a sorrow rises, like a flood, for are many today aware of what it is like to feel the weight of a certain loss, to feel the passing of a legend, and that loss multiplies as many still mourn the passing of the manga master Kentaro Miura (1966–2021); this singular gulf of grief I speak of is that which shall grow with each and every expiration of a rare artist or storyteller whose matchless works and ideas lift, or had lifted, the human race toward exaltation. There is a certain kind of sorrow sensed when there is a loss of a creator who once made irreplaceable creations so cherished and surpassing that the living lament, not only for the passing of the artist and their talents, but for the death of an irrecoverable beauty and a hope now lost. I am reminded of how the Romanticists might have felt when they had first learned of the death of Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770). I am not writing this to reopen old wounds or keep wide the festering apertures of new anguish. I simply would like to honor Robert E. Howard and quickly discuss how one of his stories appears to evoke all the elements of a quintessential Robert E. Howard tale.

In my mind, Mr. Howard’s stories carry with them a taste of both the Gothic and the Decadent movement; it is rather an unorthodox approach towards Decadence, verily noted, but there it is nonetheless, and that taste, that kind of mood, can be found in many of his writings. Understanding this dark mood will help Howard fans translate and relish his stories in a far more potent manner. His stories apparently reject the decadent and come equipped with a fury and action-oriented energy that keeps it in line with Sword and sorcery, but his works hold up certain questions and concerns that the Decadent movement has, and his stories show shades of the weird and the Dark Romantic too.

Without much further ado, as regards to this article, I shall summarize my ideas, and I shall share some statements or ideas from others, in the matter of Robert E. Howard’s “Spear and Fang”!

“Spear and Fang” (Weird Tales, July 1925) was Robert E. Howard’s premiere as an author. He was only nineteen when it appeared in Weird Tales. The story is set in a prehistoric world and doesn’t feature the usual sword-swinging barbarians he was later famous for. Despite this, it is still a Howard story and daring-do will happen. (Thomas “Spear and Fang: A Prehistoric Premiere.”)

“Spear and Fang” offers glimpses to a stranger, bestial transformation of elements associated with the Decadent movement, hybrid elements attached to a romanticized spirit of barbarism and a dark gaze upon living beings, weak civilizations, and doomed conquests: these elements, these glimpses, are used in a way representative of Howard’s style, and I believe that reading this story offers a good idea of what a Robert E. Howard story is essentially. To me, these glimpses are of that which labor together to really make up a Howard work; that which is a “Howard” is a story that does not necessarily have to have sword-fighting, gun-fighting, or boxers. The Decadent element in Howard’s stories is usually one that aims to show the corruption of the debauched through an attitude drenched in a kind of fury and a kind of horror. In his stories, things seek power and dominance, but nothing remains pure, and much falls into decay; to win is to fight another day or see oneself fall; small, selfish victories can be attained, even vengeance, but only after one risks everything and battles, with only the hardest of strength, forces of corruption.

Howard’s work has always had a taste for the Decadent, showing how individuals, cults, groups, peoples, societies, and civilizations can become degraded, spoilt, evil, corrupt, and weakened by things like customs, laws, conquest, wealth, and time; it is almost as if living beings and their social structures cannot help but become decadent, become vulgar, once they have tasted victory, power, riches, or all three at once, in a Howard tale. In his works, there is often a balance of action-oriented barbarism beside descriptions of the profane and the decadent. To read a Howard is to be immersed in both paradigms interchangeably. I do not mean to say that “Spear and Fang” is in the genre of the Decadent, what I am saying is that an element of the Decadent has been used. Decadence, to me, can also entail showing ideas, characters, or spaces in a work that bring up a sense of dissatisfaction with decadent society, dissatisfaction even with current real-world trends or civility. “The Gothic horror of the Decadence is the horror of dissolution, of the nation, of society and, ultimately, as we move into the Modernist world, of the human subject itself” (Punter and Byron 43). And, as mayhap be suggested by Stephen Romer, writings of the Decadent can be created with an intimation of an awareness of how what they evoke—including one, or several, of their characters—could be unwell, tired, or corrupted (Romer, Introduction). Being Decadent does not have to mean that the work cannot be critical of the debauchery it depicts. Looking at it like this, it is my view that Howard’s writings often give life to debauched characters or places, and can it not be said that such items add to its very fabric, to the enquiring, and towards the philosophy of his stories with regard to a certain pondering and relishing of different attitudes and ideas asking us to examine what is civilization or strength?

Decadent writers used elaborate, stylized language to discuss taboo and often unsavory topics, such as death, depression, and deviant sexualities. (Foster)

Could we then surmise, from “Spear and Fang,” that Howard is taking us into the hands of savagery, primitiveness, and carnage, and that these matters are combined into a sort of experience that civilized societies might try to censor or eschew?

In a Howard story, readers may hope to find characters or ideas that touch upon or evoke examples of Decadence, hedonism, and sadism; especially with the passing of time, living beings become, or always were since birth, debauched or perverse, for one reason or another. “Spear and Fang” touches upon this very idea, as usual for a Howard story. Howard’s stories do not exactly glamorize the decadent, but a kind of power and life is given to it; the consequence of this being that it cannot be ignored.

Numerous Gothic fictions of the Decadence (q.v.) consequently focus on monstrous metamorphic bodies, on what Hurley identifies as the ‘abhuman’, bodies that have ‘lost their claim to a discrete and integral identity, a fully human existence’ (2002: 190). (Punter and Byron 23)

In light of this, can we not say that the sadistic creature of “Spear and Fang” is not also a kind of Gothic-Decadent feature?

As for the hues of the Gothic and Dark Romanticism in “Spear and Fang,” they are dim yet are felt. I see shades of the Gothic and Dark Romanticism through the “monsters” of this story:—

From that above passage, I felt a sense of the past returning to haunt and torment; this is the kind of literary space by which the Gothic meets the Weird. As can later in the story be learned, the “gur-na” and the “Neandertaler” kind never left and have caused trouble yet again. In addition, these monsters are also linked to elements of Weird Fiction. From the text quoted above earlier, the story shows how the stuff of monster legends has been clarified and given explanation through a very odd and subverting, though material, menace; we are shown the idea of a possible other reality in which misconceptions and ignorance have taken the reality of these “Neandertaler” creatures and turned them into silly myths and the trappings of fairy-tale superstitions, but the actuality has been made to be much darker, and much more obscure, for there is no “goblin,” only “gur-na.” I can’t help but feel as if we are meant to ponder on the implications and hypothetical consequences of there ever being such a thing, the former existence of monstrous beasts, creatures almost anthropoid yet unlike animals we are accustomed to—a type of pondering that is a very “weird” fiction sort of mental process. Truths of the hidden past arise unburied to destroy the illusions of the present. This kind of theme is something that is very well a part of the Weird tradition, where readers are confronted by a legend only to later learn that the legend has a very real yet awful explanation that is not as what it had at first appeared.

While reading “Spear and Fang,” I was struck by another undoubtedly “weird fiction” concept of the unknowable and the unfathomable hiding within the story: the murky layers and unknown origins of human existence that have not yet been understood:—

As for Dark Romanticism, it is illuminated upon through a sort of Byronic character—“Ka-nanu”—in the story. As well, Dark Romanticism comes alive another time, though very briefly, with a certain gloomy attitude hinted at:

From the above passage, we as readers are meant to feel this Romantic sense of an emotion of smoldering, primitive rumination laced with a sense of fear and revenge. Such powerful emotions really do appear to come to life.

“Spear and Fang” is a great example of Robert E. Howard’s love of primitivism and barbarism for his writings. With this story, we are given a simple piece showing primitive beings battling and struggling to dominate or survive. Even the story title is simplistic and barbaric, evoking the outmoded and the uncivilized; it lets us imagine organic or natural weapons made of wood, stone, and bone that connect us to a primeval world without sophisticated technological tools. The spear, symbolically even, is just advanced yet still brutal and simplistic enough to belong in a world of savagery and primitiveness. Armaments of Romanticism are typically those which deny the industrial and hark back to the more ancient of days. As we read and enter into all this imagery, we must understand the magnificence and the power of our ancient ancestors and the fierce world they lived in so long ago, ancestors who were much more like animals, more like beasts, more like the natural world, one with the natural world.

I cannot help but feel that we are meant to enjoy the savagery as if we were spectators in a decadent colosseum. “Spear and Fang” makes me think of the Decadent work “Perseus and Andromeda or The Happiest of the Three” (1887) by Jules Laforgue (1860–1887)—both stories show combat between a “hero” and a “monster,” both tales offer violence and bloody images, and both works deal with a kind of romance or romantic rivalry amongst characters.

If we reevaluate the Decadent movement and see one of its forms as being a style, or genre, through which writers or artists bring up the subject of anathemata and vice; a style through which creators convey the monstrous, the abnormal, the sadistic, and the self-indulgent, and a style of barbarism, subversion, and symbols, we can come to understand how Howard might have been using these elements all throughout many of his other stories too. I also find it interesting that the artist character, and main protagonist, of the story is seen painting with ocher, which can be understood to be a type of yellow sometimes mixed with brown or red or both. The color yellow can be seen by some as a color that connects symbolically to the decadent movement (St. Clair). All this to me is interesting because this color is a lot like the story: yellow, mixed with brown and red; the Decadent element being mixed with other elements, mixed with earthy styles of adventure, barbarism, bloodshed, fantasy, and horror.

Can we not then see the entire story of “Spear and Fang” as a fighting tale heavy with action but with bite marks of weird and Decadence? The story goes against “normal” attitudes of primitivism and modern society; it gives us barbarism, blood, and combat; it brings to mind a pondering on taboos and primitive societies, bringing up a questioning and reexamining of the savagery and primitivism of our own modern laws and manners. I cannot help but to reflect on and wonder, and to assume we all are meant to wonder, about these things: was the character “A-aea” truly being selfish, truly going against decency? Was she truly going against customs when she spied on the artist? Does this not remind us of voyeurism and some kind of secret longing, a secret desire? Does she go against propriety when she spies on him? What about when she listens to a conversation between men?

And what of the three characters that fight over possession of the female A-aea? Only one of them can be considered a hero; one is a monster; and the other is a Byronic rival. The romance of the ending of this story is marked by an attitude, or gaze, of carnal conquest, as if we are witnessing the attaining of a prize.

Readers might be left to wonder where the true decadence lives: is our modern world truly more decadent than the primeval one? Is the barbarian more noble than the king? Then, what of monsters and humans? Things are getting flipped around, and that kind of subversion certainly feels decadent.

While I would never wholly say that “Spear and Fang” is Weird, Gothic, Decadent, or even a part of Dark Romanticism, I could easily say that this story has pieces and themes from, and of, all these modes; in addition, these elements have been woven together throughout the story into a specific fashion—a Gothic-Decadent fashion—that is truly emblematic of a moodier component of Robert E. Howard’s writing style as I have known it. So, while at first it may not look like it, “Spear and Fang” is alive with an ultimate Howard spirit, and it has the potential to offer some of that Gothic-Decadent substance which has helped in part to make many of Howard’s writings so enjoyable and appealing.  

“Spear and Fang” is a great action-adventure story to read during this time of the year—as spring burns into summer and the weather gets hotter, when brutal nature roars with heat and anger! It is a tale that honestly should not be overlooked by fans of Robert E. Howard, because it has so much of that which, in my opinion, makes a Howard story special. In fact, I would say that “Spear and Fang” shows a different kind of Gothic-Decadence, which Howard used even in some of his other writings. This story has many of the things I look for and enjoy in a Howard piece. Reading this story helps one appreciate and recognize this shadowy mood in Howard’s other, more renowned works.

Thank you for reading.

Be strong.

If you’ve liked what you’ve read here, check out some of Matthew Pungitore’s writings at his BookBaby author-page.

Matthew Pungitore graduated with a Bachelor of Science in English from Fitchburg State University. He volunteers with the Hingham Historical Society. The town of Hingham, Massachusetts is where he was brought up, and he has lived there for many years. Matthew is the author of The Report of Mr. Charles Aalmers and other stories, Fiendilkfjeld Castle, and Midnight's Eternal Prisoner: Waiting For The Summer.

Contact him at: matthewpungitore_writer@outlook.com 

WORKS CITED

Foster, Niki. "What Was the Decadent Movement in Literature? (with Pictures)." InfoBloom. Last Modified: 13 Feb. 2021. Web. Accessed: 26 May 2021.

Howard, Robert E. "Spear and Fang." Prehistoric Adventures. DMR Books, 2021. Kindle ed.

Punter, David and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Blackwell Publishing. 2004. Print.

Romer, Stephen. “Introduction.” Introduction. French Decadent Tales. Translations by Stephen Romer. Oxford University Press. 2013. Kindle ed.

St. Clair, Kassia. "The Secret Literary History of Some of Your Favorite Colors." Literary Hub. 27 Oct. 2017. Web. Accessed 27 May 2021.

Thomas, G. W. “Spear and Fang: A Prehistoric Premiere.” Dark Worlds Quarterly, 3 Feb. 2020. Accessed 24 May 2021.