REH, looking much like many rural Irishmen of his era—or this one.

Saint Patrick’s Day was well over a week ago and the fifteenth anniversary of Steve Tompkins’ death is almost a week gone by. Being late to the party has rarely been an obstacle to me before, so why start now?

It was back in February of 2009 that Steve Tompkins invited me to become a blogger for Leo Grin's award-winning website, The Cimmerian. Leo was stepping back from blogging and the other TC bloggers had moved on. He gave Tompkins free rein to recruit a new cadre of bloggers. I was one of those tapped to join the shield-wall.

One requirement laid down by Mr. Grin was that every TC blogger should provide a blog entry every week on their assigned day. They could do two or more in a week, but the assigned day had to be covered or dire consequences would befall. One of my first posts happened to fall on March 18th.

My choice of topic seemed self-evident. The day after Saint Patrick's Day on a Howardian website? What better excuse to examine Robert E. Howard's views on the Irish and their national holiday did I need?

If Howard's collected letters hadn't recently been published by the REH Foundation, I might've been a wee bit intimidated. As it was, I'd read through them twice and taken notes. Enough and more than enough fodder for the bonfire.

The end result was "If nobody but a pure Celt wore the green...". You can read it in full here.

Fifteen years on, I stand by it. Robert E. Howard was undoubtedly a 'Hibernophile'--his love for the Gaels of Scotland was more muted than his affection for the Irish Gaels--from about 1928 to about 1934. In other words, his prime writing years at Weird Tales. During that period, he created Irish Gaelic heroes of weird fiction such as Stephen Costigan ("Skull-Face"), Conan the Reiver ("The People of the Dark"), Cormac na Connacht, Turlogh Dubh, Cormac Mac Art, John Kirowan (the Conrad and Kirowan yarns), Cormac Fitzgeoffrey...and Conan the Cimmerian.

Howard came by his love for the Irish honestly. His mother, Hester Ervin Howard, would affect an Irish brogue from time to time, during a period when being Irish was not cool. Her mother was--according to REH--just one generation removed from Munster.

Turlogh Dubh—’Black Turlogh’ in Irish Gaelic—tall, black-haired, blue-eyed. A pure-blooded descendant of the Hyborian Age Cimmerians.

Robert E. Howard identified with the Irish Gaels so strongly that he molded them into his own image. Review the physical characteristics of those Howardian Gaelic Irish heroes I listed above, All of them are tall--REH was statistically on the 'tall' side of the spectrum. All of them are black-haired. So was Howard. All are 'light-eyed'. Back in the day, this referred to those who had blue or grey eyes. REH had blue eyes. Most of them are 'swarthy' or 'bronzed'.* Robert once remarked in a letter that he was swarthy enough to have been mistaken for a Mexican.

So, to all those Secret Kings of Gamma World out there, your ideas--or your daddy's ideas or your grandad's ideas or Wikipedia's ideas--of what 'Gaelic Irish' looks like mean nothing when it comes to Howard and his universe. Within that universe, Gaels--and Cimmerians--look like Sean Connery, who was Scottish Gaelic on one side and Irish Gaelic on the other. As for 'my truth'...growing up in my hometown, we had an Irishman from Connacht who had been a boxer in his youth with an impressive record back in Ireland. He was six feet tall, on the swarthy side, with black hair and blue eyes. When I visited Ireland, I saw many more Irishmen who fit that general description.

I also stand by my observation that Howard's Irish heroes hardly ever had adventures in Ireland. As to what, exactly, to make of that, I still can't say. Obviously, there's a psychological element to it. As noted, REH seemed to feel comfortable enough setting stories in Great Britain. Fifteen years on, I still have nothing more than vague suppositions.

As far as I know, nobody before yours truly spotted the close correlation between what Bob said about the Gaels in a letter to Preece and what Conan said about the Cimmerians in the first draft of "The Phoenix on the Sword". The same goes for what Conan said about the Cimmerians and what G.K. Chesterton wrote regarding the 'Great Gaels of Ireland' in his "The Ballad of the White Horse", which epic poem we know REH read and admired highly.

I do wish I'd hyperlinked the "black Milesian blood" part of that one Howard quote. Bob is referring to his 'Black Irish' blood. 'Milesian' is basically a synonym for 'Gaelic'. The Milesians were the 'sons of Mil' who set out from Spain and conquered Ireland from the Tuatha de Danaan, becoming the Irish Gaels in the process. 'Black Irish' has been a thing long before the Spanish Armada and Elizabethan times. Despite Afrocentrist assertions, 'black' was applied as a nickname to numerous individuals and groups all over medieval Western Europe based purely on hair color. For instance, the Irish Gaels referred to the Danes as the 'dubh gall'--the black/dark foreigners--due to the higher prevalence of brunettes among them, as opposed to the 'finn gall', who were the more blondish Norse. That's all and that's it. The same sort of naming was done all over western Europe during the Middle Ages.