Click to Subscribe
'To Whip a Woman!'
An Untitled Incomplete Fragment by Robert E. Howard
© 2017 James LaFond
OCT/12/17
Reading from pages 255-57 of Kull: Exile of Atlantis
This brief and truncated first scene of a story features Am-ra, the barbarian prototype which would become Kull and later Conan. The telling is a little clunky for Howard and was certainly an early work. There is more communication directly between the narrator and the reader, more typical of Burroughs than of Howard's prime work.
The Am-ra character would go on to lead in the superb story, Gods of the North, which would be rewritten twice, lastly as the Conan story The Frost Giant's Daughter. An impatience with the teasing of female kind, which shows itself firstly in this Am-ra story and then becomes the focus of the awesome Gods of the North, featuring as it does the protagonist's furious attempt to rape a goddess, gleams through from the author's young mind, eventually enshrined as a story of man against god.
Three times, Am-ra faults himself for whipping the woman, justifying it as the punishment of a child according to his tribe's custom. The girl, Ah-lala, who he calls "Zukor Na" or "little wildcat" uses most of the notes on the emotional scale to get her way and avoid the whipping and he finally relents, relived that he didn't beat the girl and angry for not being able to fathom this vexing creature, who has followed him on a masculine quest.
In Ah-lala one sees the prototypical willful woman of Howard's later fiction, in her adolescence, still trying to decide what kind of woman she must be to engage the world as something more than a child. Am-ra is likewise a character seeking himself, as if Howard's exploration of character development were being played out in the minds of these early budding protagonists. Howard's contrasts of feminine and masculine extremes is fully developed from the start, perhaps the most consistent aspect of his characterization of fictional beings over his career. For Howard, men and women diverged more extremely in type, physiology and psychology than for most writers of his time and all writers of our age.
The one experimental aspect of his fiction which he thankfully discards in his development as an author was the practice—common in his time and done to the extreme by Tolkien [who was at least linguistically qualified to do so]—was the development of a primitive language for the setting, an unnecessary conventions which he unburdens himself of early in his career.
Writing Unchained
Prolific Writing by Design
'As of Ghostly Piping'
book reviews
Ethnosuicide or Renaissance?
eBook
dark, distant futures
eBook
within leviathan’s craw
eBook
on the overton railroad
eBook
winter of a fighting life
eBook
logic of steel
eBook
night city
eBook
son of a lesser god
eBook
by the wine dark sea
eBook
logic of force
eBook
thriving in bad places
eBook
predation
eBook
uncle satan
eBook
the combat space
eBook
blue eyed daughter of zeus
eBook
menthol rampage
eBook
time & cosmos
eBook
when you're food
eBook
the greatest boxer
eBook
the fighting edge
eBook
beasts of aryas
eBook
book of nightmares
eBook
your trojan whorse
eBook
taboo you
eBook
the year the world took the z-pill
eBook
masculine axis
eBook
triumph
eBook
cracker-boy
eBook
solo boxing
eBook
sorcerer!
eBook
on combat
eBook
barbarism versus civilization
eBook
sons of aryas
eBook
advent america
eBook
under the god of things
eBook
the first boxers
eBook
orphan nation
eBook
z-pill forever
eBook
ranger?
eBook
honor among men
eBook
america the brutal
eBook
broken dance
eBook
the lesser angels of our nature
eBook
the sunset saga complete
eBook
the gods of boxing
eBook
hate
eBook
song of the secret gardener
eBook
songs of aryas
eBook
fiction anthology one
eBook
into leviathan’s maw
eBook
wife—
eBook
fate
eBook
fanatic
eBook
all-power-fighting
eBook
let the world fend for itself
eBook
the greatest lie ever sold
  Add a new comment below:
Name
Email
Message