Time was an inexorable poison, blighting everything with decadence. But always in his pasts, civilisation was waiting to weaken and corrupt. The histories he created were shaped by these principles, their nations forged by men of valour and integrity. He saw the past as an idealised place, one which left room for the virtues he prized – strength, decency, individualism, and justice. Many of the broad elements of these histories are the same or close, but the details clash, and the nearer the stories are to the present, the less they diverge from historical fact.Īn alternate, deep past of this sort is known as a Romantic History, and it’s a term that perfectly encapsulates Howard’s viewpoint. They provided a sense of realism and immediacy to his fiction, and gave his heroes vibrant, self-consistent territories in which to have their adventures.Īlthough each series was rigorous in its internal accuracy, the different heroes did not inhabit exactly the same versions of reality. These detailed timelines were designed to provide him with a palette of exotic locations, historic events, and social structures to draw from. He drew heavily on real myth and legend for these lost ages however, populating the world with states and regions carefully named to suggest aspects of reality. Rather than trample all over the real past, he set his series in meticulous histories of his own devising. But this meant that he had very little time to research the details of any given story. In his short time, Howard turned out an incredible amount of work. The only way to survive was to be prolific. Life as a writer for the pulps came with certain strictures, however. His own Celtic heritage intrigued him, and in his stories he turned time and again to the north and west of the British Isles for inspiration. Howard loved history, and he was particularly fascinated by its broad brush-strokes – the spread of peoples, the rise and fall of civilisations, the epic conflicts that marked epochs. “Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of…” The Phoenix on the Sword, Robert E.
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