"The kisses and love-cries of women fade and pall, but the sword sings a fresh song with each stroke."

     -Marchers of Valhalla, Asgrimm

"A man is no better and no worse than his feelings regarding the women of his blood, which is the true and only test of racial consciousness. A man will take to himself the stranger woman, and sit down at meat with the stranger man, and feel no twinges of race-consciousness. It is only when he sees the alien man in possession of, or intent upon, a woman of his blood, that he realizes the difference in race and strain."

     -Marchers of Valhalla, Hialmar

Throughout Howard's works his Arуan heroes cross racial boundaries, becoming blood-brothers with alien tribesmen, lovers of strange—even extra-human—women, some saving good black folk from their savage oppressors, others delving insanely deep into tribal hatreds and blood feuds with their racial cousins. But through all of their brutal adventures they do not let go of their identity, for just as there is no such creature as a superhero, erasing the trials of the true hero in effigy to appease the postmodern worm on his couch of sloth, there is no such thing as a human hero without racial identity, tribal loyalty, and most of all, men, heroes of rival ethnicities ready and willing to pour their wrath upon him.

Marchers of Valhalla and the other stories collected in that volume reveal the ideal of the hero and the nature of the waters tapped by the storyteller dipping into the heroic well of souls—it is blood, the ancestral link that binds and defines, that substance that is the subterranean river of heroes that is mankind's only hope when all of our petty artifice fails in the face of the bloodless, soulless, monstrous.