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The Best of Robert E. Howard Grim Lands

Robert E Howard

(Many errors sorry I have not the original. web. Ed. )

Foreword

The first time we saw the layouts and illustrations for The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, we couldn't believe our eyes. Here was an illustrated book of a variety that no one had tried to produce in decades. It was magnificent. In fact, it was difficult to imagine such a book actually being published in a world that didn't take the time for such things any longer.

Little did we realize that ten years later, that book would have become the first volume in an ongoing illustrated library collecting the works of Robert E. Howard, and that we would find ourselves illustrating the seventh and eighth volumes in that series.

And what a treat it's been.

Every paragraph of Howard's vivid prose has something that fires the artistic imagination. Pirates and knights. Cowboys and barbarians. Warrior women and monsters. Is there an artist alive who can resist such things?

The stories of Robert E.

Howard challenge your inner kid--illustrator and reader alike--to come out and play, and stay out past dinner time.

Enjoy.

Jim & Ruth Keegan Studio City, California July 2007

Introduction

The'sall to adventure--signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight.

--Joseph Campbell

No writer has ever answered the call to adventure with greater alacrity than Robert E. Howard, and few have proven superior to him in issuing that call to readers. For all that his stories appeared in the pages of pulp magazines during the era between the World Wars, they are always fresh, always modern,--lways ready,--as David Weber observes,--o teach another generation of writers how to tell the high, old tales of doom and glory,--because they spring from that eternal well of hero tales from which the most enduring writers have drawn. His is the art of the bard, the skald, the cyfarwydd, the seanchai, the griot, the hakawaty, the biwa hoshi. Howard, in fact, may be said to have a direct connection to the oral tradition, as he is well attested to have talked his stories out, sometimes at the top of his voice, while he was writing, and to have been a spellbinding oral yarnspinner among his friends. The tales in this book, and in its companion volume, could well have been told around a fire, the audience listening raptly to the teller, surrounded, just outside the circle of light, by Mystery, and Adventure.

The telling of stories is as old as mankind, and many theorists believe that stories do much more than simply entertain us (though of course there-- nothing wrong with that). They help us find a way to make sense of the world and our lives, to give a narrative structure of meaning to what might otherwise seem a chaotic jumble of events. (In a startlingly postmodernist metanarrative within his loosely autobiographical novel, Post Oaks & Sand Roughs, written in 1928, Howard critiqued the very book he, and through him his fictional self, was in the act of writing: but was too vague, too disconnected, too full of unexplained and trivial incidents--too much like life in a word. --Story helps us connect and explain the incidents of life, helps us understand who we are and where we are and how we are to behave in the world and our society.