Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures Read Free

twist facts too much, alter dates as some writers do, or present a character out of keeping with my impressions of the time and place, I lose my sense of reality, and my characters cease to be living and vital things; and my stories center entirely on my conceptions of my characters. Once I lose the ‘feel’ of my characters, and I might as well tear up what I have written.”
    Unfortunately, only seven of the stories collected herein saw print in Howard’s lifetime; the rest he no doubt submitted to Farnsworth Wright, but the ravages of the Depression – the tightened belts and failing markets – meant any tale Wright passed on had little chance for life thereafter. Howard consigned the unsold stories to his trunk and moved on. By 1933, Oriental Stories (which by then had been saddled with a ridiculous new name, Magic Carpet Magazine ) was on its deathbed. It would cease publication in January of 1934.
    With the demise of his primary historical market, the question becomes, then, why didn’t Howard submit his tales to the premier historical pulp of the day, Adventure ? It was in the pages of Adventure that a young Robert E. Howard first encountered the works of Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy; on at least two occasions, in February and July of 1924, Howard submitted lists of research questions to the magazine’s Ask Adventure column. But from 1921 onward, his every attempt to break in as a writer met with rejection – sometimes silent, but often with the added encouragement of the editor wanting to see more of his work (for most writers, the latter kind of rejection is golden … it tells us we’re not far from the mark and should persevere just a little longer).
    Despite coming close on several occasions, Howard seemingly preferred not to send his later work to Adventure , even when encouraged to do so by writers he admired. He commented to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith, in a letter dated May of 1932: “Kirk Mashburn, a damned good writer, wrote and told me I should have sold it [ Sowers of the Thunder ] to Adventure – of which he says he hasn’t missed a copy since he found one in a deserted stretch of Florida Everglades many years ago. But if I’d sent it to Adventure , they’d have returned it unread, same as usual.”
    Thus, with Oriental Stories a dead market – and Adventure an unreachable one – Howard moved on to greener fields. In 1932, even as he was crafting his tales of the Old Orient, Howard had a notion to turn his love for “the roaring, brawling, drunken, bawdy chaos of the Middle Ages” into a new cycle of stories. They would be historical, after a fashion, easier to research by borrowing from every corner of the past while maintaining the conceit of being about a time before recorded history, a “forgotten Hyborian age.” And the hero of these tales would be a wild barbarian not unlike Cormac FitzGeoffrey or Turlough Dubh O’Brien or even Baibars himself – a Cimmerian called Conan …
    An interesting postscript to this epoch of Howard’s life occurred in May of 1936, a month before his untimely death. In a letter, again to H. P. Lovecraft, he sums up the years between 1930 and 1933 with his usual self-deprecation: “Attempts to make a living by writing historical fiction proved a flop.”
    Perhaps Robert E. Howard did not make a living from historical fiction, but he made something better: a legacy … one as enduring and colorful as the myths and tales of his beloved Middle Ages.
    Scott Oden
October 2009

Spears of Clontarf



I
T HE W ORD OF W AR

    “War is in the wind – the ravens are gathering.”
    Conn the thrall let fall a huge armload of logs before the cavernous fire-place and faced about to meet the gaze of his sombre master. Conn was tall and massively yet rangily built, with broad sloping shoulders, a mighty, hairy chest, and long heavily muscled arms. His features were in keeping with his bodily aspect – a strong stubborn jaw, low slanting forehead topped by a