Every fantasy role-playing adventure, many sword & sorcery tales, any number of heroic fantasy comics, all seem to begin in a tavern in an inn. It is one of the traditional tropes of heroic fantasy, right? I have to wonder where this traditional starting point originated. Did Robert E. Howard begin it, as with so many of S&S’s standard ideas? Did he steal it from Lord Dunsany? Or is it all Tolkien’s fault? That is my quest, which I humbly embark upon, having just left the inn of The Prancing Pony….
ROBERT E. HOWARD AND WEIRD TALES
My stratagem is simple: find the first examples and blame them. I scour the pulp tales of Robert E. Howard and find his first s&s character, King Kull too stately to hang out in taverns. Bran Mak Morn is too busy brooding about the Romans. Solomon Kane, that Puritan of England, a God-fearing man does show up in the Cleft Skull Tavern in “Rattle of Bones”(Weird Tales, June 1929) but is Kane really Sword & Sorcery? So then it must be Conan the Cimmerian…
