Robert E. Howard to Harold Preece, c. Oct 1930
Well, Harold, how did you like my story, The Voice of El-Lil, in the new Oriental Stories? I'm very pleased with the magazine myself. But listen—if you've read the story, you probably noticed a sentence which referred to non-Aryan peoples in Connaught AND Galway. That's the printer's mistake, not mine; I wrote "Connaught and Galloway," meaning, of course, the province of Scotland. I don't know why it was changed.
I find tales of the East extremely fascinating, and am beginning to believe that the old, old theory of Turkish-Gaelic affinity is well bourne out. The races have so much in common cruelty, treachery, loyalty, fatalism, spend-thriftness, beserk fighting rage, a love of music and poetry.
I lately sold a tale to Oriental Stories in which I created the most somber character I have yet attempted. The story is called Hawks of Outremer, and I got $120 for it. The character is Cormac FitzGeoffrey: "Clean shaven and the various scars that showed on his dark, grim face lent his already formidable features a truly sinister aspect. His low, broad forehead was topped by black, square cut hair that contrasted strongly with his cold blue eyes. Son of a woman of the O'Briens and a renegade Norman night, Geoffry the Bastard, in whose veins, it is said, coursed the blood of William the Conqueror, Cormac had seldom known an hour's peace or ease in all his thirty years of violent life. Hated by the Irish and despised by the Normans he payed back contempt and ill treatment with savage hate and ruthless vengeance."
One of the main things I like about Farnsworth Wright's magazines is you don't have to make your heros such utter saints. I took Cormac FitzGeoffrey into the East on a Crusade to escape his enemies and am considering writing a series of tales about him.
The tang of fall is in the air and the whisper of autumn in the skies. Summer is waning into the yellow leaves of all the yesterdays, and the heart of me is thin and old. The sky is deep and blue and mysterious with the changing of the seasons, and strange thoughts stir deep in me, but age forever steals on me in the autumn of the year, and though I am young, my soul is old and wavering like a thread-bare garment outworn.
All that is deep and gloomy and Norse in me rises in my blood. I would go east into the sunshine and the nodding palm trees, but I bide and the dream of the twilight of the gods is on me, and the dreams of cold and misty lands and the ancient pessimism of the Vikings.
It seems to me, especially in the autumn, that that one vagrant Danish strain that is mine, predominates above all my Celtic blood. It is in the autumn that the wanderlust grips me, and my sleeping dreams are not of the lazy palm fringed lagoons, the desert caravans, the loud bazaars and the tropic jungles to which my waking thoughts turn, but of cold blue seas beneath a clear and frosty sky, of clean sandy fens stretching from the cold foam to blue mountains, of boats racing through the flying spray, and fishers' nets, shining like silver on the shore.
I never saw such things; yet they gleam plainly in my dreams. I see them with the eyes of old Samuel Walser, who knew them and loved them in his youth, aye, and with the eyes of a thousand generations of blue-eyed, red-haired fishermen and sailors and Vikings behind him, who were his ancestors, and who were no less ancestors of mine.
Ah, well, I will not weary you with my vagaries.
Bob