Click to Subscribe
Domesticated Man’s Collective Soul
Ancestral Fantasy & Cultural Spirit: Notes on Various Peoples of the Hyborian Age & The Hyborian Age by Robert E. Howard
© 2016 James LaFond
MAY/25/16
Previously titled The Hero’s Stage in a Drugged Age, with revisions.
2003, the Coming of Conan The Cimmerian, DelRay, Miscellanea, pages 375-398
These two undated manuscripts provide the aspiring writer of adventure fiction of any genre with tips from a master of the craft. Howard’s Conan character was a shallowly sketched yet passionate hero; a speeding carriage of fury that carried the reader along through the depths of human subterfuge and primal terror like a bloody-handed tour guide of some insane world, a world whose very evils so mirrored Howard’s own, and now ours as well, for he wrote on the human condition through a prism of dark adventure.
Howard approaches his Notes on Various Peoples of the Hyboria Age from a eugenics perspective, in keeping with the ethical bent of his age, which was one of racial supremacy. We are taught that notions of racial supremacy are entirely white and European in origin. But, as illuminated by Lothrop Stoddard, Howard's non-fiction contemporary on issues of racial identity, every race of man has identified strongly with its ancestors, up until our current age of cultural dissipation, in which one world corporate concerns frown upon humanity identifying with anything non-material and inward looking.
Just as Howard's races of formally dominant, decadent ancients committed slow suicide as they were separated from their ancestral heritage by the ages, Howard's and Conan's [racial-spiritual] descendants, now separated from their ancestral heritage by the Media and the State, commit mass suicide according to the most passive means. Just as the last members of Howard's dissipated races lay beneath the dreaming lotus flowers breathing in their oblivious poison, the descendants of another race-based empire now dissolve into drug-induced oblivion.
We are the dying races of Xuthal and Xapur, the feral remnants of the Atlanteans, the figurines arrayed about the Well of the Black Ones...
Young men of European descent, Robert E. Howard was your prophet—so awake from your enchanted slumber, for the waving blossoms before your heavy lids belong to a malevolent weed with its ages old roots sunken into Hell, which drinks from the tepid pool that is Domesticated Man’s collective soul.
On a literary note these old manuscripts are primarily a guide to race relations for Howard's fantasy world. This was largely responsible for the ‘real feel’ of Howard’s admittedly superficial construct. Alone among modern American heroes Conan [Howard’s other creations have failed to grab the general public.] is a racist. I find this so refreshing in light of the decades of recent sci-fi vintage where the dynamic heroes all tend to have an almost godlike lack of prejudice, or espouse some intellectual ethos of the likes that are generally beyond a genuine man of action.
In The Hyborian Age the main item of interest is the italicized preface in which Howard states that this is no ‘attempt to advance any theory in opposition to accepted history.’ Remember that Howard wrote at a time when dozens of theologians, cult leaders, mystics, and just plain kooks were essentially writing science-fiction [much of it referencing the Atlantis fad] and trying to pass it off as either science or religion, or both.
Howard intentionally and simplistically goes on to do an overlay of known history and adjusts geography to correspond to the continental shelf. This is convenient for him as a writer and keeps the reader in familiar cultural territory, with all of his fantasy races being ancestral to the Eurasian/African distributions known from the historical record. George R.R. Martin essentially did the same thing with A Song of Fire and Ice, with similar good results, as it is easier for readers to follow, there being no extreme alternative reality like that found in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This approach is not that different in spirit from Tolkien’s folklore-based Middle Earth construct, but has the appeal of a lack of cultural minutia to bog down the non-geek reader.
Howard burns his introductory paragraph most instructively on why one must have a fictional construct in which to place one’s character, primarily to provide a consistent set of parameters for the writer to abide by.
If you are building a fictional world—even if just a fictional corporate structure in which your military contractor protagonist exists in a ‘current’ earth—than reading Howard’s notes is a good first step.
Black Phillip
blog
‘Mad Blind Hands’
eBook
thriving in bad places
eBook
all-power-fighting
eBook
advent america
eBook
uncle satan
eBook
masculine axis
eBook
the first boxers
eBook
broken dance
eBook
dark, distant futures
eBook
hate
eBook
the year the world took the z-pill
eBook
night city
eBook
on combat
eBook
logic of force
eBook
on the overton railroad
eBook
sons of aryas
eBook
time & cosmos
eBook
z-pill forever
eBook
logic of steel
eBook
sorcerer!
eBook
wife—
eBook
america the brutal
eBook
barbarism versus civilization
eBook
winter of a fighting life
eBook
cracker-boy
eBook
honor among men
eBook
book of nightmares
eBook
under the god of things
eBook
by the wine dark sea
eBook
the sunset saga complete
eBook
menthol rampage
eBook
the greatest lie ever sold
eBook
let the world fend for itself
eBook
fiction anthology one
eBook
beasts of aryas
eBook
the fighting edge
eBook
fanatic
eBook
the lesser angels of our nature
eBook
son of a lesser god
eBook
the combat space
eBook
within leviathan’s craw
eBook
song of the secret gardener
eBook
songs of aryas
eBook
your trojan whorse
eBook
blue eyed daughter of zeus
eBook
the greatest boxer
eBook
fate
eBook
when you're food
eBook
triumph
eBook
predation
eBook
ranger?
eBook
solo boxing
eBook
the gods of boxing
eBook
into leviathan’s maw
eBook
taboo you
eBook
orphan nation
  Add a new comment below:
Name
Email
Message