Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers by L. Sprague de Camp

Author:L. Sprague de Camp [DECAMP, L. SPRAGUE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography: Literary
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2015-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

The ancient Celts fascinated Howard. Where Lovecraft was an Anglophile, Howard was a Celtophile. Of largely Irish descent, Howard made an affectation of his Celticism, sometimes signing himself “Raibeard Eiarbhin hui Howard.” One St. Patrick’s Day, he appeared in a green bow tie two feet across. Howard was more objective toward the Celts than Lovecraft ever was towards the Anglo-Saxons. Nevertheless, Howard harbored, throughout his life, a burning interest in Celtic history, anthropology, and mythology.

This interest appears in Howard’s fantasies of Turlogh O’Brien, in his historical stories of Cormac Mac Art, and in other historical and contemporary tales with heroes of Irish names: Costigan, Dorgan, Kirowan, O’Donnell, and so on. He wrote fantasies and historical tales laid in the British Isles, of the struggle of Pict against Briton, of Briton against Roman, and of Irishman against Norseman. He read Donn Byrne’s Irish novels but resented Bryne’s making heroes of Ulstermen and Anglo-Normans. He studied the eccentric phonology and orthography of the Irish language. He took part in the arguments as to which of the two branches of the British Celts—the Goidels, Gaels, or Q-Celts and the Cymry, Britons, or P-Celts—reached the islands first.

Howard indignantly rejected Lovecraft’s assertion that Americans had a duty to defend the British Empire, on the ground that his own forebears had fled from Ireland to escape British oppression. While Lovecraft fulminated against Irishmen for agitating against their “lawful sovereign,” the king of England, Howard felt equally bitter about the sins of the English in Ireland ever since 1171, when the Irish chieftains submitted to Henry II.

Like Lovecraft, Howard was still under the spell of the Aryanist doctrine. This dogma identified the horse-taming Aryans, the original spreaders of the Indo-European languages, with the tall, blond, blue-eyed Nordic racial type—which seems unlikely in the light of present knowledge. Hence Howard wrote of the conquest, in Britain, of small, dark aborigines of Mediterranean type by “blond, blue-eyed giants”—the supposed Aryan Celts. According to present evidence, the conquering was probably the other way round. The Nordic aborigines were at least twice conquered by swarthy little Southerners, first by the prehistoric Beaker Folk from Spain and secondly by the Romans. Howard himself had black hair and blue eyes, a genetic combination that seems commoner in Ireland than elsewhere. Hence he was less englamorated by mere blondness than Lovecraft. Most of his heroes, in fact, are brunets.

For all his Irish sympathies, Howard was not altogether naïve about the Celts, writing of their fickleness, jealousy, and treachery. He blamed his Celtic blood for endowing him with a restless, unstable mind. In his black moods, he cursed the black Milesian blood, which filled him with nameless sorrows and instilled in him a blind, brooding rage at anything that crossed his path.

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