Naked except for a loincloth, breechcloth or a rag, is one of Howard’s most revealing character metaphors. It is not applied to all of his heroes—not even half—but is the trademark of his most famous creation, Conan. Although Howard is thought of as a writer who created fantasy worlds, he is more accurately a creator of characters, with his various worlds merely the lurid flames, shadows and backdrops that illuminate their adventures. The loincloth metaphor is not only applied to heroes, but often to their unnamed foes. The Picts, who make their appearance in Conan, Cormac Mac Art and Bran Mak Morn tales are often depicted thus dressed. What the loincloth symbolizes is a man stripped of artifice and extraneous material—but not to the point of humiliation or embarrassment. For instance, recently, during the Charlotte, NC Purge a man was recently stripped of his pants rather than stomped. Amongst the military and also among primitive savages, the ritual unclothing of an enemy is an act of identity-killing and social nullification. Howard’s mostly naked heroes are immune to this, are already outcast, are stripped to their elemental state as pure direct actionists. The nearly naked hero is a demanding start for a writer, as he must immediately engage in definitive action, developing the hero feat first.

In rewriting the untold Conan tale, The Black Stranger, into Swords of the Red Brotherhood, Robert E. Howard failed to make a sale but succeeded in two very important aspects of storytelling:

The character conceived to turn this fantasy tale into a pirate yarn with supernatural overtones, was one of his best creations. By taking the Conan character and fitting him in the 1600s, Howard arrived—by trimming a fantasy character based on real ethnic characters in such a fashion as to fit a specific historical setting—at a masculine ideal, with Black Vulmea all the more savage than his fantastical basis for the real hatreds he held.

Perhaps because the Conan tale had been based on actual high adventures, involving the likes of Francis Drake, who looms as a Dark Shadow in the Solomon Kane saga, the premise for this tale—namely that one shipwrecked or marooned seamen traversed a savage continent, living with the natives as one of them in route, only to emerge on another ocean coast to plunge back into maritime skullduggery—fit hand to glove into historic 1600s North America.

On a lesser note, trying to explain away the magic of The Black Stranger in mundane terms in the historic pirate version did make this a somewhat lesser tale. Nevertheless, Swords of the Red Brotherhood is a fine adventure tale, and unless the reader acquires Howard’s entire works, it is unlikely to be read. Below, are brief quotes on each chapter of this rollicking adventure.

The Painted Men, Chapter 1

“He was naked except for a rag twisted about his loins, and his limbs were criss-crossed with scratches from briars and caked with dried mud. A brown-crusted bandage was knotted about his thickly muscled left arm. Under a matted, black mane, his face was drawn and gaunt, and his eyes burned like the eyes of a wounded animal. He limped slightly as he picked his way along the dim path that crossed the open space.”

Vulmea is immediately depicted as more savage than the primitive hostiles who hunt him like hungry wolves.

Men from the Sea, Chapter 2

“And on the beach, not many miles from the cavern where the silent figures sat, other, denser shadows were gathering over the tangled lives of men…. Francoise d’Chastillon idly stirred a sea-shell with a daintily slippered toe…”

“…To the east, loomed a great mountain range that shut off the coast from the continent that lay behind it. Francoise feared that mountain-flanked forest, and her fear was shared by every one [1] in the tiny settlement. Death lurked in those whispering depths, death swift and terrible, death slow and hideous, hidden, painted, tireless.”

The fear of forested mountains is the primal fear of the Anglo-American subconscious, according to H.P. Lovecraft, the very basis for much American horror, as the earliest white Americans immigrated from garden, pasture, moor, village and city, the forest only occupying a mythic pagan past in the early Anglo-Saxon consciousness,

The Coming of the Black Man, Chapter 3

“Did you ever hear of Giovanni da Verrazano?”

“The Italian who sailed as a privateer for France and captured the caravel loaded with Montezuma’s treasures which Cortez was sending to Spain?”

“Aye. That was in 1523. The Spaniards claimed to have hanged him in 1527, but they lied. That was the year he sailed over the horizon and vanished from the knowledge of men. But it was not from the Spaniards that he fled.”

Da Varrazano was the first European to chart Cape Fear and New York Harbor, a little known explorer of the mercenary Italian type common to the age ushered in by Columbus, and an excellent choice as the plot seed to this tale.

A Black Drum Droning, Chapter 4

“Clearly, the story of the mysterious black man had driven Henri mad and it was to escape this man that he meant to abandon the settlement and flee with Villiers. That much was obvious. Equally obvious was the fact that he was ready to sacrifice her for that opportunity to escape. In the blackness which surrounded her, she saw no glint of light. The serving men were dull or callous brutes, their women stupid and apathetic. They would neither dare nor care to help her. She was utterly helpless.”

A Man from the Wilderness, Chapter 5

“On the broad stair above the hall, Francoise and Tina crouched, ignored by the men below. Henri, Gallot, Villiers and Harston sat about the broad table. Except for them the hall was empty.”

“This is like the problem of the sheep, the wolf, and the cabbage,” laughed Vulmea. “How to get them across the river without their devouring each other!”

Howard’s genius in this tale, much underappreciated—indeed entirely missed—by critics of his Conan stories, is the use of hyper aware and necessarily vulnerable viewpoint characters, typified by the mixture of dignity and innocence represented by Francoise and Tina.

The Plunder of the Dead, Chapter 6

“The Frenchman missed a tremendous swipe with his headsman’s sword as the Irishman ducked, and the great blade banged against the stone wall, scattering blue sparks. The next instant his skull-faced head rolled on the cavern floor under the bite of Vulmea’s cutlass.”

In many aspects [of size, intellect and character] Vulmea reflects the historic pirate Black Beard, who was felled in his final battle by just such a character as this headsman, a large man with an oversized sword. This reader wonders if part of Vulmea’s intensity was Howard wondering “what if Black Beard had survived.” The larger point of this chapter is that, when the savage races come calling, whitemen must stand together, which was a common theme of Euro-American thought, up to and including the rescue of Europeans and Americans from the Congo, by the French Foreign Legion, circa 1970.

Men of the Woods, Chapter 7

“Night had fallen, but torches streamed across the strand [2], casting the mad scene into lurid revealment. Naked man in paint swarmed the beach; like waves they came against the palisade, bared teeth and blazing eyes gleaming in the glare of the torches thrust over the wall.”

This final battle represents the very stuff that the Arуan identity of Howards time was built upon [based largely on disastrous colonial battles as far flung as Polynesia, South Africa, North Africa, Afghanistan and The Little Big Horn in Montana. The idea of a small band of white men fighting grimly to the death against massed swarms of dark enemies did not have to result in victory or rescue to be glorious, and was just as much a facet of American as British myth, with J.R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, largely built upon this dynamic sense of racial contention.

1. In the early 20th Century and before, many words that we take for granted as compound words, were still two separate words joined by the writer in thought, this will be apparent in reading Moby Dick by Melville.

2. A beach, with a shipwrecked sailor being “stranded upon the sand of the strand”