The power of dream to bridge the gulfs between the living and the dead and to bring crucial information to the slumbering hero, is a theme utilized in Howard's prose and verse so often one wonders if he was a believer in the possibility.
Sir Richard Grenville was the right hand of Sir Walter Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, who planted a military mission on Roanoke a year before the doomed Roanoke Colony. He was made to sit out the fight with the Spanish armada, as his success and bold daring against the Spanish had earned him the jealousy of men like Drake who resented his patron’s status as the Queen’s favorite.
Sir Richard, as a hard-fighting man discarded by posterity, seemed to have earned a place in Howard’s heart. Grenville had a record of disputes with murderous and immoral men like Lane, architect of the first Native American genocide by Englishmen.
This reader has the sense that Sir Richard Grenville, who died heroically, under questionable circumstances, at sea, was the inspiration for the Solomon Kane Character who his ghost comes to in the African night in this poem.
I find this audio reading to be very appealing.
For more information on this remarkable adventurer try this link:
