Formerly published as ‘Beyond the Dim Circle of Light,’ revised and expanded

In Beyond the Black River, Howard gives the reader Conan at his most brutally tribal. This story was very personal for Howard, who inserted himself and his dog into it as two doomed frontier fighters. This is the most obvious America colonial frontier story in the fantasy genre.

The Picts of Howard’s mythology are the bad guys in this story, the Hurons of Last of the Mohicans.

“Another instant and there would be a stranger in Hell,” spoke Conan after butchering a Pict about to ambush the viewpoint character, Balthus.

Ironically, Conan was among the horde of screaming savages that had wiped out an old border fort where Balthus’ uncle had long ago been stationed. He was therefore analogous to the Mohicans in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather Stocking Tales. Conan goes on at length as to how foolish Hyborean [read, European] colonization was, and that the white man had reached the geographical limits of his range through rash and greedy conquest that favored rich investors and not the common man, and could be expected to be pushed back from their frontiers.

Howard does an excellent job of evoking the lonely peril of life under the vast primeval forests that confronted his forefathers when they first came to the shores of North America. In Beyond the Black River the Conan character is obviously a white Indian [Cimmerian], battling another tribe of Indians [Picts] on behalf of the white man. Howard is at his best writing about shadowed and brooding forests, feuds, and the bitter passions of hard bitten men. Conan refers to his enemies as “dogs” and “devils” not very often calling them “Picts.”

“The Picts were a white race, though swarthy, but the border men never spoke of them as such.” This is telling and evokes the many white Indians who battled against civilized encroachment during the forest-shadowed stage of the American frontier. The importance of rivers as barriers and as canoe-ways in early America is not understood by the modern American. It is a pleasing element that Howard retains in this fantasy frontier story.

He would soon write The Black Stranger, in this same setting and fail to sell it, moving him to write the two Black Vulmea 17th century pirate yarns set in forested North America and Forested South America. H.P. Lovecraft, a correspondent of Howard, and regarded as the authoritative source for American horror bibliography, stated that the unique American sense of horror is directly linked to the primeval forests that settlers faced, settlers who had come from a thoroughly cultivated land dotted by the occasional isolated woods where lords hunted for sport. Although I suspect that Howard’s fascination with savage-inhabited forests came from his own pine woods heritage and the fact that his ancestors transited the forested Appalachians, I wonder if Lovecraft and Howard discussed this in their correspondence.

“A savage figure of suspicious menace,” is how Conan seems to his companion. After action, it is typically time for sardonic humor, as in the scene where Balthus and Conan find a murdered merchant, “The demon isn’t going to get Tiberias’ head if I can help it,” he growled, “We’ll carry the body back to the fort. It isn’t more than three miles. I never liked the fat bastard, but we can’t have Pictish devils making cursed free with white men’s heads…his throat was torn open and he was selling his otter skins in Hell.”

Mythically speaking, there are two main threads here:

The foundational thread is the European horror of forested fastnesses in the context of a candlelit world, a world of civilized encroachment into the wild as envisioned by Increase Mather and other Puritan Christians in terms of a candelabra, with each walled village taken by the savages marking an extinguishing of another of the civilized lights. Howard uses the image of savage religious rites held in the devil-haunted forests, just as Mather wrote of satanic "powwows" held by their Heathen enemies. This was not the beginning of a dark mythos, but the reintroduction of the Christian mind into the pagan setting represented by early forested Europe, before cultivation on the Mediterranean model. Howard’s ancestors had come to a new world much like the old pre-Christian one, the world of Grendel and his bestial mother.

Enter Conan, in the footsteps of Beowulf, the interloper hero who must seek the monstrous, as he is a monster himself. Throughout Conan is the consummate woodsman—though born in the mountains—a link to Howard’s fascination with Gaelic highlanders turned wandering rogues and frontiersmen. In the story Conan physically and tactically suggests Simon Kenton, psychologically evokes Lewis Wetzel, and in his gruff, gregarious spirit, brings to mind Simon Girty, the three most notorious men that lived and fought in the forested lands of America that inspired this fantasy tale set in an antediluvian age.

If you have not read a Howard story, but are a Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour reader, or a fan of western movies, start reading Howard with Beyond the Black River.

I prefer the final reading. The popularity of this story among Conan fans is demonstrated by the number of audio links below.