Lovecraftian Elements in Sword & Sorcery

The Lovecraftian elements in Sword & Sorcery often make it or break it for me. I love that blend of energy that H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard shared. When a warrior faces the sheer terror of the Lovecraftian universe, and wins or loses, we get a kind of frisson that dusty old antiquarians just can’t provide.

What we are talking about here is Cosmic Horror. In a Lovecraft story, the sheer scope of the evil against humanity is mind-blowing. Quite literally. As HPL says: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far…” That quiet gentleman in a New England town crosses this line when he discovers certain books his strange old uncle left him. You know he is either going to end up in a tomb lunching with ghouls or having a fish-fry in Innsmouth.

Along comes Robert E. Howard and his swaggering alpha males. What happens when a Conan or a Kull crosses that line? Action. But dark action filled with hero-level conflict between that dark magic and a man who knows how to fight. Howard wasn’t interested in writing about fragile old scholars. His protagonists are fighters, whether in the ring or on the battlefield. These guys aren’t going to end up in Arkham asylum (and I don’t mean the Batman one.)

I wrote a piece called “The Sword of Cthuhu” for Sword & Mythos (2014), a book dedicated to this idea. I said:

The Howardian tale deviates from the traditional Lovecraftian story, outside of the window-dressing of time period, in one important way. HPL worked in a form based on the ghost story, in which his hapless hero eventually perceived the staggering vastness of cosmic horror. The point is often that we are small, unimportant specks in a terrifying universe. Howard’s fantasy does not embrace this philosophy entirely.

So let’s look at a few examples, by old REH. My personal favorites are not Conan stories. “The Shadow Kingdom” (Weird Tales, August 1929) is a Kull tale. The new king is shown how fragile his reign is by Brule the Spear-Slayer, who reveals to him the treachery going on behind his throne:

“Much–and yet, little. Valusia is so old–”

“Aye,” Brule’s eyes lighted strangely, “we are but barbarians–infants compared to the Seven Empires. Not even they themselves know how old they are. Neither the memory of man nor the annals of the historians reach back far enough to tell us when the first men came up from the sea and built cities on the shore. But Kull, men were not always ruled by men!”

Brule shows Kull how to weed out the serpents by using an ancient phrase:

“Through the dim corridors of memory those words lurk; though you never heard them in this life, yet in the bygone ages they were so terribly impressed upon the soul mind that never dies, that they will always strike dim chords in your memory, though you be reincarnated for a million years to come. For that phrase has come secretly down the grim and bloody eons, since when, uncounted centuries ago, those words were watchwords for the race of men who battled with the grisly beings of the Elder Universe. For none but a real man of men may speak them, whose jaws and mouth are shaped different from any other creature. Their meaning has been forgotten but not the words themselves.”

Here Howard has reversed Lovecraft’s Mythosian speech, a word spoken by creatures not men. “Cthulhu” or “Kutulu”is the best approximation we can make with our simple tongues. (I pronounce it Cath-oo-loo.) Howard flips this, giving Kull a way to find his enemies. They come for him in one of the greatest battle scenes in all Sword & Sorcery. What a great way to start off a sub-genre!

“Worms of the Earth” (Weird Tales, November 1932) is a Bran Mak Morn story. Bran’s hatred of the invading Romans has grown so strong he is willing to seek revenge from the dark ones that came before men. He seeks out a witch who can tell him how one approaches the Worms of the Earth. Then borrowing some mojo from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1896), Bran sneaks into their tunnels and steals their greatest treasure, The Black Stone. The worms will now kill the Roman general, but Bran never quite feels the deal worth it. In the end, he feels more commonality with his victim than with his inhuman killers.

“Go back to Hell and take your idol with you!” he yelled, brandishing his clenched fists to the skies, as the thick shadows receded, flowing back and away from him like the foul waters of some black flood. “Your ancestors were men, though strange and monstrous – but gods, ye have become in ghastly fact what my people called ye in scorn! Worms of the earth, back into your holes and burrows! Ye foul the air and leave on the clean earth the slime of the serpents ye have become! Gonar was right – there are shapes too foul to use even against Rome!”

Perhaps my very favorite is “The Valley of the Worm” (Weird Tales, February 1934), a James Allison reincarnation tale. (I especially love Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, Gil Kane and Ernie Chan’s adaptation in Supernatural Thrillers #3, April 1973, perhaps the single greatest comic story from the Bronze Age.) In this story, Niord and his  people migrate into a land inhabited by the early Picts (a future Bran Mak Morn’s people). There a great terror exists, a gigantic worm creature and its arcane handler. To defeat them, Niord captures and kills a giant snake named Satha, and takes its venom. Armed with poisoned arrows, Niord makes the ultimate sacrifice for his kin.

As in twilight shadow I saw the ruined temple, cyclopean walls staggering up from masses of decaying masonry and fallen blocks of stone. About six hundred yards in front of it a great column reared up in an open glade, eighty or ninety feet in height. It was so worn and pitted by weather and time that any child of my tribe could have climbed it, and I marked it and changed my plan.

I came to the ruins and saw huge crumbling walls upholding a domed roof from which many stones had fallen, so that it seemed like the lichen-grown ribs of some mythical monster’s skeleton arching above me. Titanic columns flanked the open doorway through which ten elephants could have stalked abreast. Once there might have been inscriptions and hieroglyphics on the pillars and walls, but they were long worn away. Around the great room, on the inner side, ran columns in better state of preservation. On each of these columns was a flat pedestal, and some dim instinctive memory vaguely resurrected a shadowy scene wherein black drums roared madly, and on these pedestals monstrous beings squatted loathsomely in inexplicable rituals rooted in the black dawn of the universe.

Can you get anymore Lovecraftian than that? Of course you can. The weird little piper is shaggy and odd but the worm:

Out of the temple the monstrous dweller in the darkness had come, and I, who had expected a horror yet cast in some terrestrial mold, looked on the spawn of nightmare. From what subterranean hell it crawled in the long ago I know not, nor what black age it represented. But it was not a beast, as humanity knows beasts. I call it a worm for lack of a better term. There is no earthly language which has a name for it. I can only say that it looked somewhat more like a worm than it did an octopus, a serpent or a dinosaur.

It was white and pulpy, and drew its quaking bulk along the ground, worm fashion. But it had wide flat tentacles, and fleshy feelers, and other adjuncts the use of which I am unable to explain. And it had a long proboscis which it curled and uncurled like an elephant’s trunk. Its forty eyes, set in a horrific circle, were composed of thousands of facets of as many scintillant colors which changed and altered in never-ending transmutation. But through all interplay of hue and glint, they retained their evil intelligence–intelligence there was behind those flickering facets, not human nor yet bestial, but a night-born demoniac intelligence such as men in dreams vaguely sense throbbing titanically in the black gulfs outside our material universe. In size the monster was mountainous; its bulk would have dwarfed a mastodon. 

Now you may disagree with my picks for Lovecraftian elements in Sword &Sorcery but the editors of The Best of Robert E. Howard (2007) did not. All three stories listed here are in the first of two volumes.

Conclusion

Recently I wrote about a Conan story for Jason M. Waltz’s Hither Came Conan (2023) for Rogue Blades Entertainment, a great book for the Howard fan. My selection, for each author chose a story they loved best, was “Queen of the Black Coast” (Weird Tales, May 1934). No spoiler here when I say I focused on the Lovecraftian elements. I think it is the best Conan tale for that (though the squidgy Thog the Slitherering Shadow comes a close second!) Again our hero faces off against an ancient terror that still lives despite the millennia that have gone by. Not in its original form but in a dark, mutated shape. The Winged Ape is a great elder opponent.

“Queen of the Black Coast” is a wonderful example of how an action story can still carry much of the Gothic gloominess we expect in a weird tale. (How else did he sell them to Farnsworth Wright?) Howard was the master at this, of course. In just over 11,000 words he introduces Conan to Belit and her pirates and takes them into the creepy jungle to face off against the Winged One.

…Black men came up the river in long boats with skulls grinning on the prows, or stole stooping through the trees, spear in hand. They
fled screaming through the dark from red eyes and slavering fangs. Howls of dying men shook the shadows; stealthy feet padded through the gloom, vampire eyes blazed redly. There were grisly feasts beneath the moon, across whose red disk a bat-like shadow incessantly swept…

Belit dies and saves Conan in the finale (no, it wasn’t Valeria, film-fans!) It is one of the rare times Howard ever suggested a life beyond death. His vision was not the hopeful Catholic ideals of Tolkien. (The true difference between these two titans of heroic fantasy.) Conan worships Crom, a hands-off kind of god who sits in a mound, brooding. Howard and his many swordsmen and women stare into the Lovecraftian darkness, and smile. “Bring it!”