Just when Robert
Howard developed his passion for boxing is not clear, but certainly
by the time he met Clyde Smith in Brownwood it was strong. He
boxed with his friends at any opportunity, and may have occasionally
assisted in promoting fights at local clubs in Cross Plains. While
working at the soda fountain at Robertson’s Drug Store,
he befriended an oil-field worker who introduced him to the amateur
fighters at the local ice house. He soon became a frequent participant
in these bouts. Between 1925 (at the latest) and 1928, Howard
put himself through a weight and strength program, and took on
really heroic proportions. He read avidly about prizefighters
and attended matches whenever and wherever he could. By early
1929 he had begun writing and submitting boxing stories, with
his first efforts mingling boxing with weird themes (presumably
a field in which he knew he could sell). With the first Steve
Costigan story, ‘The Pit of the Serpent,’ in the July
1929 Fight Stories, he had found a market that would prove as
steady for him as Weird Tales, at least until the Depression KO’d
Fight Stories and its companion magazine Action Stories in 1932.
During the same summer weekend in 1927 when he met Harold Preece
in Austin, Howard bought a copy of G. K. Chesterton’s The
Ballad of the White Horse. This epic poem brings together Celts,
Romanized Britons and Anglo-Saxons under King Alfred in a battle
that pitted Christians against the heathen Danish and Norse invaders
of the 9th Century. Howard enthused about the poem in letters
to Clyde Smith, sharing lengthy passages. It seemingly inspired
him to begin work on ‘The Ballad of King Geraint,’
in which various Celtic peoples of early Britain make a valiant
‘last stand’ against the invading Angles, Saxons and
Jutes. Chesterton’s concept of “telescoping history,”
that “it is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries
while preserving the sentiment,” must have appealed to Howard.
This is precisely what he did in many of his fantasy adventures,
particularly in the creation of Conan’s Hyborian Age, which
conflates vastly different historical eras and cultures: from
medieval Europe (Aquilonia and Poitain) to the American frontier
(the Pictish Wilderness and its borderlands), and from Cossacks
(the Kozaki) to Elizabethan pirates (the Free Brotherhood). This
historical melting pot allowed Howard to portray what he saw as
universal elements of human nature as well as giving him nearly
all of human history for a playground.
When Howard discovered that Harold Preece shared his enthusiasm
for matters Celtic, he entered into his ‘Celtic’ phase
with his customary brio. His letters to Preece and to Clyde Smith
from 1928 to 1930 are full of discussions of Irish history, legend
and poetry - he even taught himself a smattering of Irish Gaelic
and began exploring his genealogy in earnest. Irish and Celtic
themes came to dominate his poetry and by 1930 he was ready to
try out this new persona with fiction. In keeping with his tendency
to use old material as a springboard into new, he first introduced
an Irish character into a story featuring two earlier creations.
Cormac of Connacht is often overlooked as one of the ‘Kings
of the Night,’ as he is overshadowed in this tale by the
alliance between Bran Mak Morn and King Kull, but the story of
a battle against the encroaching Roman legions is told from the
Irish King Cormac’s point of view.