A year ago, having mined epic poetry for facts for two decades in my study of ancient combat, I looked upon the fragments of collected poetry by Robert E. Howard and found myself wanting. I had read thousands of history books, religious texts, epics and memoirs—even 2,000 year old homosexual love letters—and had managed to sort this vast mindfill into a theory of the combat arts. I seem somehow to have tapped into it effectively for fiction. But with no background writing poetry and no formal education I found myself looking at a poem and writing that I was not qualified to address the contents.

This admission galled the ego of the writer and I have since been active rereading the epic poems as well as other works of prose that seem to be rooted in the haunting wheelhouse of the imagination that Howard obviously shared with Poe—who I fortunately have in his entirety. As I write from the crudely annotated volumes of Howard's that I deface with pen along the groping way, I also seek help in audio form. The lectures of Jonathan Bowden have been helpful. Being able to listen to a lecture through my typewriter gives me an advantage that Howard might have found useful.

Below is a video link to a series of YouTube posts by a bright young fellow who seems to have paid attention to more than Miss Murphy's posterior in language arts class. It's kind of late to try and put a wrinkle in this bruised fruit between my ears, but Marc is one of my teachers.

"A voice that is not purposefully changed," is a comment by Wolfe, concerning character authenticity, that is consistently expressed in Howard's stories. I like using Wolfe as a mirror for Howard, because his characters are often far different from the heroic Howard protagonist but often traverse a darkly shadowed world as little understood by the hero as

civilization is by the interloping barbarian kings Kull and Conan and by the man out of time, Esau Cairn who is ill-equipped to comprehend it.

Part 3 and 4 will be of most interest to Howard readers, particularly the description of character types and death of the author in post modern thought discussed in 3.