Reading from Marchers of Valhalla, Berkley, NY, 1978, pages 172-86

First published in 1966 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

The story begins with the youthful protagonist listening to his grandfather “thumping wearily” on his guitar:

“ ‘Twas in the merry month of May,

When all sweet buds were swellin’,

Sweet-William on his death-bed lay

For the love of Barbara Allen.”

The young man is soon challenged about his heritage by the old man and told he cannot know of the past he never lived, and is then regaled with the story of the death of his grandfather’s brother, who was slain just as he spoke to his brother on the battlefield, mistaking his brother for their grandfather just before being struck dead. The brothers fought under the command of Nathan Bedford Forest, who holds center stage for a while, and perhaps is related to some of the very Forest-like protagonists Howard seemed to craft in his hero cycles: Kull, Conan, Gordon, impetuous alpha males who roared from horseback as they led men in battle.

Not lost on Howard, surely, was the fact that while conducting the screening of the Confederate retreat after the battle of Shiloh, Nathan Bedford Forrest once charged a Union Regiment by himself—not realizing his men had stayed behind out of fear for the poor odds—crashed into the lines while being shot and dragged a Union soldier up onto his horse and used him as a human shield while retreating.

With this in mind, consider the common “compliment” that modern horror and fantasy writers pay Howard, that his characters are “larger than life.” Of course, if life consists of shopping and restaurant-going. For a man who had possibly known men who knew Forest, a character like Conan is not larger than life, but true to the masculine apex. But to a late 20th century science-fiction writer any hero more robust than the local strip-mall karate instructor [essentially a day care provider] is simply unimaginable and must therefore be “larger than life.”

The young man in the story is soon haunted by waking dreams in which he recalls his pioneer ancestors in vivid detail and is driven to go visit the old dying woman who had been the lover of his slain great uncle, for, as Howard writes, these visions provided, “…a tie to the past, a link between today and the dim yesterdays.”

“But the conviction was growing that I had experienced all this before; it was like living an episode forewarned in a dream…I knew at last my true cosmic identity, and the reason for those dreams of wooded mountains and gurgling rivers…”

Howard challenges the reader with the possibility that the very lands of our ancestors yet haunt our beings.

“They sent to the east, they sent to the west,

To the place where she was dwellin’,

Sweet William’s sick, and he sends for you,

For the love of Barbara Allen.”

The story ends on a searing, sentimental note, unusual in Howard’s work.