‘A Tocsin of Alarm’

James LaFond's Impressions of Conan Loses His Axe by Robert E. Howard

Reading from Beyond the Black River, pages 45-53 of The Conquering Sword of Conan by Del Rey, 2005

Beyond the Black River has often been cited, by myself and others, as a “leather-stocking tale” as a Conan story, indicating the cycle of Natty Bumpo or Hawkeye stories about the fictional white Indian’s adventures in the time of the French and Indian wars in New England and New York. However, Howard’s history was clearly vested in his reading of his own family history, which, in the U.S. occurred mostly in the trans-Appalachian forests of the Tennessee, Cumberland and Mississippi watersheds. I have written, I think convincingly, that the campaigns of Nathan Bedford Forrest in this region, which involved some of Howard’s blood relatives, inspired his heroic vision most memorably imbedded in the Conan character.

With this in mind, one should consider the geography of Beyond the Black River in Howard’s Hyborean World, which was not a forest banking up into a mountain fastness like New York and New England, but a transalpine forest, between hill county beyond and spanning rivers, including the Black River, and there was a Black River across which Forrest campaigned in western Tennessee. In the unsold sequel to Beyond the Black River, The Black Stranger, which was rewritten as a Black Vulmea pirate yarn, the geography is also one of forests sweeping down from foothills to a great body of water, the Pacific, set in north or central California. In both the early modern and prehistoric fantasy version, the river riven forest is bordered on the west by an impassible body of water from where enemies attack, making it keenly congruent with the Mississippi from a Confederate perspective.

Finally, the use of Conan as a guerilla fighter by his commander mirrors the use of Forrest by his commanders and also the pleas of frontier women from Conan to save their husbands from the enemy [a white race prone to committing atrocities] is perfectly in line with Forrest's career in combating Yankee atrocities, often at the behest of nagging women. Also, the use of the Bowie knife, being a common occurrence in the forested American southwest is mirrored by the common armament of Howard’s frontiersmen being the short sword.

For an idea of Howard’s narrative texture, some quotes from the first chapter, in which Conan is introduced through the eyes of a novice frontiersmen, are cited below, as well as the very North American frontier feel. The speaker is Conan:

“Tiberius gave one scream, then his throat was torn open and he was selling his otter skins in hell…

“We’ll carry the body into the fort. It isn’t more than three miles. I never liked the fat bastard, but we can’t have Pictish devils making so cursed free with white men’s heads.”

Many of Howard's works can be read online at Gutenberg Australia.

Audiobooks:

(c) 2019 James LaFond