‘From Death’s Gray Lands’

James LaFond's impressions of Dying Embers, Chapter 8 of Robert E. Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 141-147 of the Del Rey edition

A thematic illustration of a dragon crushing and harrying common men sets the mood for Howard’s tale of a populist king overthrown by manipulative forces.
“It is an ill thing to meet a man you thought dead in the woodland at dusk.”

So begins Conan’s audience with a loyal supporter, who informs him that his many premonitions [hinted at in the text and subtext] of mockery are true, that his efforts at ruling justly have been cast aside by masses of slave-minded folk who yearn for an oppressor and that those free-thinkers among the elite and lower orders are hopelessly hounded by informants.

The tale of the overthrow of a populist king [as unlikely a concept as it seems through our own clouded world view] by a police state with informers and spies everywhere struck this writer, laboring under a privatized censorship media hierarchy in the midst of a militarized police state of unparalleled efficiency, with a chill, as Howard’s view of kingship throughout the Kull, Mak Morn and Conan cycles is incisively populist, reflecting conditions of rule closer to the presidency of Andrew Jackson and now Donald Trump than in any historical monarchy which comes to mind.

Likewise, Howard’s depiction of the vast sweep of Western European history in the following statement reflects that he was well aware of the trials and travails of his plantation ancestors as well as the ongoing white slavery in the modern Middle East, which was a well-worn trope in his lifetime:

“…white men sell white men and white women, as it was in the feudal days.”

It is no surprise that Howard knew that chattel slavery was rampant in Feudal Christendom. The revisionist history which has ill-informed our fool nation since 1945 had not yet taken hold of the infantile American mind.

Finally, Conan is informed that his staunchest supported, a young countess Albiona, was to have her head cleaved off that very night, and well, he’s Conan, so some civilized dogs were going to have to die:

“I’d be a dog to leave Albiona to die because of her loyalty to me. I may be a king without a kingdom, but I’m not a man without honor.”

Diction of Note:
Avaunt, adv. Hence; away.
n.  A boast; a vaunt.
To advance.

(c) 2020 James LaFond

‘No Where On the Waking Earth’

The Rending of the Veil: Chapter 7 of Robert E. Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon
Reading from pages 131-140 of the DelRey edition

The illustration of the scowling Conan sweating on a bench, holding a bucket-sized drinking mug and giving a surly ear to the wiry and tall wise woman hunched on her stool with her great wolf yawning behind at her side, forms a stark picture of many an Aryan hero depicted throughout epic poetry, from Enkidu to Odysseus. 

The Rending of the Veil reveals Howard’s conception of folk magic as very similar to that of J. R. R. Tolkien, with a practitioner of dark sorcery using ravens to track the fugitive Conan and a homegrown, rustic witch employing a great wolf and a mighty eagle to foil the dark occult powers of civilization as Conan seeks the succor of the wild lands.

Keeping in mind that this tale predates The Lord of the Rings and that it was published in England, one wonders if Tolkien was inspired by it. However, the connection seems to have been deeper, that Howard utilized some of the same root folk sources as understood in more ancient form [possibly from primary sources] by Tolkien.

This scene also seems to have been the inspiration of the witch scene in the movie Conan the Barbarian, in which the powerful female reads Conan’s fate cryptically. The battle scene in which Conan takes on four witch burners is very well done, with the witch’s rescue preceded by a note on the barbarian’s resolve in the face of steep odds and couched in terms of Conan’s Western agency, that: “…he was no son of the Orient to yield passively to what seemed inevitable.”

When Conan realizes that he is in his own kingdom and that one of his subjects is being set upon, his lion-like belligerence returns, with him truculently accepting the witch as a soothsayer. Zeleta, like many of Howard’s female characters, expresses a keen understanding of human nature, which includes her positive measure of the masculine:

“…the people of your capital have forfeited the freedom you won for them by sweat and blood; they have sold themselves to the salvers and the butchers. They have shown that they do not trust their destiny.”

She compliments him on his stubbornness, usually the point at which a male protagonist is invalidated in most western forms of literature. Howard works his understanding of the European mass’s slavish and self-negating social gravity through the wise woman, hinting to the reader that Western Civilization is nothing without the individual hero and that the true Western king is a father to his people, more than a brother to the nobility.

Howard’s depiction of malevolent forces separated from the waking world by a veil conforms to much of modern paranormal theory as does Gianni’s thematic closing illustration, in which Conan fences in his mind against a skeletal sword lich holding a shield with a dragon emblazoned upon it.

Diction of Note

Swale: a low lying, marshy area

(c) 2020 James LaFond

‘Purple Gods of Morn’

James LaFond's Impressions of Earth-Born by Robert E. Howard, reading from pages 82-83 of A Word from the Outer Dark

Earth-Born is a Protean poem consisting of seven verses of four lines each. The spirit is very animistic and would be well understood by a shaman of some remote tribe. The spirit of Earth-Born reminds this reader of the song of Apollo’s sisters, sisters of the sun who condense into the amber weeping from lonely trees, but with an upbeat, masculine tone, that strikes a note of desire to venture across the world. This reader’s best measure of the inspiration was that the author used the East Texas landscape and the animistic bent of its displaced inhabitants to refashion an old Gaelic verse.

Verse four is quoted below:

And up along the mountain,
And down along the lea,
I heard my brothers singing,
The river and the tree.

Earth-Born reads like the reflections of the first man, if he were not born in a garden, and begins to feel, by the seventh verse, like the rhyme of a race. Despite the idyllic tones, the thinker is not reclining in hard-earned or well-deserved bliss but is rather accepting that he has been born into a turbulent world which he is fated to experience more intimately than any muse of Antiquity would expect of her consort.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

The Pale Usher by James LaFond

Impressions of Moby Dick: Herman Melville and Modern Man?s Transcendental Journey

In The Pale Usher, the author, masculinity historian James LaFond, examines the text and subtext of the 25-chapter overture to Moby Dick as an allegory of Civilized Man’s awakening to his socially submerged self—a primal quest within the domesticated human in search of his authentic self. In this work, the author goes on to examine the works of such authors as Robinson Jeffers, J. R. R. Tolkien, Clark Ashton Smith, Thomas Ligotti, Dan Simmons, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce, Phillip K. Dick, Carl Jung, Robert Bloch and H.P. Lovecraft.

Available in paperback or Kindle edition.

A Well of Heroes: Two

Literary Impressions of the Prose and Verse of Robert E. Howard

Fantasy and Horror writer, James LaFond reviews the subtext and heroic themes of Robert E. Howard’s works of pulp fiction and tribal myth, including extensive discussions of the hero in myth, history and literature.

Available in paperback.

A Well of Heroes: One by James LaFond

Literary Impressions of the Prose and Verse of Robert E. Howard

A Well of Heroes is an attempt to review every story, poem and fiction fragment written by Robert E. Howard, according to the mythic themes that the world’s most enduring pulp author seemed to tap into with uncanny depth and precision. Each volume will feature an in-depth examination of the subtext of one of Howard’s major works. Volume One is a broad survey of Howard’s work, which delineates the mythic themes he used so well and features his only interplanetary story, the novel Almuric, unpublished in his lifetime, reviled by mainstream critics and regarded as a taboo work by some Howard fans. Featuring reviews with Danica Lorincz and by Mescaline Franklin.

Available in paperback and Kindle edition.

Dark Art of an Aryan Mystic: The Racially Charged Fiction of Robert E. Howard by James LaFond

Robert E. Howard, Literary Mirror 

The writer of today faces the same prejudices as the writer of Howard’s day, with mainstream readers recoiling from any depiction of a nonwhite or female villain, just as reactionary whites and masculinity advocates cannot abide the depiction of a diverse racial cast or of striving female characters. For the reader interested in realism in fiction, or in the question of the monolithic political correctness currently smothering any attempts at realism in fiction, whether in print or on film, Dark Art of an Aryan Mystic will illuminate the white, black and red corners of our collective imagination with that most hated and rejected shade of illumination, the gray of truth, which is sought by few and accepted by none.

This book is out of print, but you may be able to find a used copy on Amazon.

Saving the World Sucks by James LaFond

"Saving the World Sucks" is a no-words-barred look at our changing literary landscape from the perspective of a practitioner of the art of speculative fiction. LaFond excavates the politically correct, trope-laden, and clichéd graveyards of science-fiction, fantasy and horror, with a defiant eye on what emerging authors of this and previous eras have and can do to set themselves apart from the vapidly palling literary pack.

"Saving the World Sucks" is available in paperback at Amazon.