Here it is, Robert E. Howard’s birthday. The author who, more than any other, is the reason I am blogging today. I found his work very early in my life and it is his fiction that still speaks to me the most. Tonight I’m going to explore a topic that has received scant attention in Howard Studies: degrees of canonicity within the Howardian texts.

I suppose I should define what I mean by "canon" first. Here is the Merriam-Webster definition:

[Middle English, from Late Latin, from Latin, 'standard']

a: an authoritative list of books accepted as Holy Scripture

b: the authentic works of a writer

Here is one from the Victorian Era website:

Literary Canon: The most relevant definition of canon is “an authoritative list, as of the works of an author”. It is also described as “a basis for judgment; standard; criterion.”

Both sources--in basic agreement with many, many others--say essentially the same thing. What the author actually wrote is "canon". That is what counts. What others wrote later does not count. Don Herron* and Rusty Burke--on behalf of Robert E. Howard--both strove mightily for the better part of thirty years to hammer that core concept home and they should be honored for it.

With that initial battle won--i.e., REH versus the pasticheurs--we should also look at canonicity within the texts of Robert E. Howard. This is not a totally 'inside baseball' sort of issue. It has ramifications from a scholarly essay on REH to a (hypothetical) Turkish cinematic knockoff of an REH Conan yarn.

When it comes to the study of Robert E. Howard and the texts he left behind, any serious scholar soon runs into contradictions. What might be found in an earlier draft or a fragment might be at some variance with what was actually published. So, which version 'counts'? This is where the "basis for judgment; standard; criterion" comes into play.

I'll look at two examples below, both of which illustrate the problems facing an REH scholar--or an REH pasticheur. I hope to show that these questions affect both REH scholars and fans.

Let's examine the Kull-era fragment that I call "The Brule Fragment". This text describes Brule the Spear-Slayer and delves into an episode of his early life in the days before he was a Pictish envoy to the Valusian court. There is one part of the text of particular interest:

"But in one respect Brule differed from his tribesmen, for whereas their eyes were mostly hard scintillant brown or wicked black, his were a deep volcanic blue. Somewhere in his blood was a vagrant strain of Celt or of those scattered savages who lived in ice caves close to the Arctic Circle."

That was probably written around 1928-1929. Meanwhile, we have this line from "Men of the Shadows" from 1925:

“Why should we not hate?” his [Bran’s] dark eyes lit with a sudden fierce glitter.

Bran Mak Morn is responding to a Gothic legionary as to why the Picts hate all other races. Bran has "dark eyes".

Meanwhile, we have "Kings of the Night", which was written early in 1930. In it, Kull of Atlantis travels forward in time to 205 AD to aid Bran Mak Morn, the direct descendant of Brule. Early in that yarn, REH describes a scene wherein several Picts and an Irish Gael--Cormac na Connacht--are present at the sacrifice of a Roman prisoner:

The dagger flashed downward. A sharp cry broke in a gasp. The form on the rough altar twitched convulsively and lay still. The jagged flint edge sawed at the crimsoned breast, and thin bony fingers, ghastly dyed, tore out the still twitching heart. Under matted white brows, sharp eyes gleamed with a ferocious intensity. Besides the slayer, four men stood about the crude pile of stones that formed the altar of the God of Shadows. One was of medium height, lithely built, scantily clad, whose black hair was confined by a narrow iron band in the center of which gleamed a single red jewel. Of the others, two were dark like the first. But where he was lithe, they were stocky and misshapen, with knotted limbs, and tangled hair falling over sloping brows. His face denoted intelligence and implacable will; theirs merely a beast-like ferocity. The fourth man had little in common with the rest. Nearly a head taller, though his hair was black as theirs, his skin was comparatively light and he was grey-eyed. He eyed the proceedings with little favor.

Cormac the Gael, descendant of Cimmerians and Atlanteans, was "grey-eyed". None of the Picts—including Bran Mak Morn—were, according to Robert E. Howard.

Soon after, Gonar brings Kull--Brule's best friend--forward in time. The Atlantean had this to say:

Such was the man [Kull] who paused before the silent group. He seemed slightly puzzled, slightly amused. Recognition flickered in his eyes. He spoke in a strange archaic Pictish which Cormac scarcely understood. His voice was deep and resonant. “Ha, Brule, Gonar did not tell me I would dream of you!” For the first time in his life Cormac saw the Pictish king completely thrown off his balance. He gaped, speechless. The stranger continued: “And wearing the gem I gave you, in a circlet on your head! Last night you wore it in a ring on your finger.” “Last night?” gasped Bran. “Last night or a hundred thousand years ago—all one!” murmured Gonar in evident enjoyment of the situation. “I am not Brule,” said Bran. “Are you mad to thus speak of a man dead a hundred thousand years? He was first of my line.” The stranger laughed unexpectedly. “Well, now I know I am dreaming! This will be a tale to tell Brule when I waken on the morrow! That I went into the future and saw men claiming descent from the Spear-slayer who is, as yet, not even married. No, you are not Brule, I see now, though you have his eyes and his bearing. But he is taller and broader in the shoulders."

According to REH (and Kull), Bran had Brule's "eyes and his bearing". Where are Brule's blue eyes from the "Brule Fragment"? That fragment was never finished, let alone published. Howard saw fit to abrogate it. Never again would we read of a 'blue-eyed' Pict or Brule’s mixed ancestry.

Around the same time that Howard was writing "Kings of the Night", he was also typing out yarns of Cormac Mac Art--not the 'Cormac na Connacht' of "Kings of the Night" and "Worms of the Earth", by the way. The two share names and homelands, but their temporal settings are separated by at least two hundred and fifty years. That is the topic of another post.

Meanwhile, let's look at REH's classic essay, "The Hyborian Age". It went through several drafts and, as Howard stated, it was never intended to be published. Bob sent it to Don Wollheim after he (REH) was basically done writing Conan yarns as a favor to Wollheim's fledgling fanzine, The Phantagraph.

Here is what Robert E. Howard had to say about the fall of the Stygian Dominion--which extended into Koth--before the first onslaught of Hyborian barbarians:

The tale of the next thousand years is the tale of the rise of the Hyborians, whose warlike tribes dominate the western world. Rude kingdoms are taking shape. The tawny-haired invaders have encountered the Picts, driving them into the barren lands of the west. To the northwest, the descendants of the Atlanteans, climbing unaided from apedom into primitive savagery, have not yet met the conquerors. Far to the east the Lemurians are evolving a strange semi-civilization of their own. To the south the Hyborians have founded the kingdom of Koth, on the borders of those pastoral countries known as the Lands of Shem, and the savages of those lands, partly through contact with the Hyborians, partly through contact with the Stygians who have ravaged them for centuries, are emerging from barbarism. The blond savages of the far north have grown in power and numbers so that the northern Hyborian tribes move southward, driving their kindred clans before them. The ancient kingdom of Hyperborea is overthrown by one of these northern tribes, which, however, retains the old name. Southeast of Hyperborea a kingdom of the Zhemri has come into being, under the name of Zamora. To the southwest, a tribe of Picts have invaded the fertile valley of Zingg, conquered the agricultural people there, and settled among them. This mixed race was in turn conquered later by a roving tribe of Hybori, and from these mingled elements came the kingdom of Zingara.

Five hundred years later the kingdoms of the world are clearly defined. The kingdoms of the Hyborians—Aquilonia, Nemedia, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Koth, Ophir, Argos, Corinthia, and one known as the Border Kingdom—dominate the western world. Zamora lies to the east, and Zingara to the southwest of these kingdoms—peoples alike in darkness of complection and exotic habits, but otherwise unrelated. Far to the south sleeps Stygia, untouched by foreign invasion, but the peoples of Shem have exchanged the Stygian yoke for the less galling one of Koth. The dusky masters have been driven south of the great river Styx, Nilus, or Nile, which, flowing north from the shadowy hinterlands, turns almost at right angles and flows almost due west through the pastoral meadowlands of Shem, to empty into the great sea. North of Aquilonia, the westernmost Hyborian kingdom, are the Cimmerians, ferocious savages, untamed by the invaders, but advancing rapidly because of contact with them; they are the descendants of the Atlanteans, now progressing more steadily than their old enemies the Picts, who dwell in the wilderness west of Aquilonia.

Another five centuries and the Hybori peoples are the possessors of a civilization so virile that contact with it virtually snatched out of the wallow of savagery such tribes as it touched. (…) Toward the latter part of the period other Hyrkanian clans push westward, around the northern extremity of the inland sea, and clash with the eastern outposts of the Hyperboreans.

The timespan REH describes has always been interpreted as covering about fifteen hundred years before the time of Conan. Yet, in both "Black Colossus"--written very early during Howard's 'Conan period'--and in The Hour of the Dragon--written toward the end of that period--we see "three thousand years" stated as the date from which the Hyborians threw back Stygian rule and established the Styx as the northern boundary of Stygia for thousands of years thereafter.

From "Black Colossus":

In that ivory dome lay the bones of Thugra Khotan, the dark sorcerer who had reigned in Kuthchemes three thousand years ago, when the kingdoms of Stygia stretched far northward of the great river, over the meadows of Shem, and into the uplands. Then the great drift of the Hyborians swept southward from the cradle-land of their race near the northern pole. It was a titanic drift, extending over centuries and ages.

From The Hour of the Dragon, wherein the fate of Stygia is bound with that of Acheron:

"I fled an exile into dark Stygia [said Xaltotun]. Much I remember, but much I have forgotten. I have been in a far land, across misty voids and gulfs and unlit oceans. What is the year?” Orastes answered him. “It is the waning of the Year of the Lion, three thousand years after the fall of Acheron.”

The Stygians were an ancient race, a dark, inscrutable people, powerful and merciless. Long ago their rule had stretched far north of the Styx, beyond the meadowlands of Shem, and into the fertile uplands now inhabited by the peoples of Koth and Ophir and Argos. Their borders had marched with those of ancient Acheron. But Acheron had fallen, and the barbaric ancestors of the Hyborians had swept southward in wolfskins and horned helmets, driving the ancient rulers of the land before them.

Robert E. Howard makes it quite clear that the greater Stygian Dominion fell when Acheron did: three thousand years before Conan. It is impossible to square what is stated within "The Hyborian Age" with what is stated in those two Conan yarns. One is right and the other is wrong. One must give way to the other. How "The Hyborian Age"--as much as I love it--can be given precedence over two published Conan yarns is beyond my comprehension. Despite that, I have seen fanboy after fanboy try to assert the dominance of "The Hyborian Age" over those two tales again and again and again.

That is why we need a system of ascertaining the relative canonical 'weight' of each draft, synopsis and fragment.

The subject is complex and vast enough that I will end this post here. More needs to be said, but I would appreciate some feedback.

Feel free to chime in via the 'Comment' section below. Bring it on. I ain't scared.

*Don Herron shares a birthday with REH, by the way.