D&D General Reassesing Robert E Howards influence on D&D +

[Bedrockgames]

Absolutely. You can really see how many of Conan's stories influenced early D&D dungeon-crawling. And REH really knew how to create a setpiece location.

It is highly portable. I was inspired to do this in one of my campaigns after reading the Devil in Iron (pretty sure it was the Devil in Iron, it has been a while). But often with his stories it is a description or an idea that just leads to adventure concepts. I find you can read the same story 8 times and come away with 8 completely different adventure concepts. Not sure why Howard in particular is inspiring to me in this way (I think his use of language has a big role in it).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not all that interested in parsing degrees of virulence,

Well, I kind of do. I think social/cultural context matters in assessing how people do things, so...

(And to make it clear, yes, there are people who are better than their cultural matrix, and they should be celebrated. But expecting it is, I think perhaps consigning most of the past to the discard heap which I'm not entirely willing to do. This does not say other people, especially those who's gender or ethnicity is actually in the spatter zone should feel the same.)

and don't have particular thoughts on how one would "rank" Call of Cthulhu vis-a-vis Vale of Lost Women; or how one would rank that stories presentation of a "vaguely nautical" person against the jailor in The Scarlet Citadel.

I think the essay Southern Discomfort is fairly well known: it can be found here; as a caution, it contains quotes of REH using virulently racist language. In Googling it up I also found this blog: https://www.jasonsanford.com/jason/2010/09/20/robert-howard-racist I'm not in a position to express an independent view of the factual claims made, about REH and his time and place. I agree with some but not all of both pieces, about how we might and should go about engaging with REH's work.

I don't know if I've read this particular material in the past, but, honestly, I've certainly gone around it with various people in the past and found the arguments compelling that REH was not a standout for his time, and I don't really have enough dedication to him to find it worth doing again.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I definitely have no interest in another Lovecraft-HOward Racism discussion (I feel like all those points have been addressed in multiple threads and there isn't much value in getting into them again. One thing I will say as the question of how exceptional either of them were for their time and place has been raised: This stuff was written at the height of Eugenics and racialist science, as the Nazi's were rising in Germany, when segregation and Jim Crow Laws were in full swing in the US, the KKK was reaching heights of popularity, and lynchings were very common. Racism was very widespread, even in the North East and New England (where it often focused more on the kinds of things you see in Lovecraft). I think it is an abuse of history when we try to paint either of them as particularly exceptional in order to make a point about the value of their work

To make it clear, I'm actually far fonder of Lovecraft's work than Howard, but I think when you dig into things, he's still significantly more problematic (though with some evidence he might have slightly started to turn it around near the end of his life).

 

[Bedrockgames]

To make it clear, I'm actually far fonder of Lovecraft's work than Howard, but I think when you dig into things, he's still significantly more problematic (though with some evidence he might have slightly started to turn it around near the end of his life).

I agree he is more problematic than Howard (and again I don't really want to get into the Lovecraft discussion again). My point was just in terms of the times, that kind of thinking was pretty widespread (and racism in the north tended to be more like Lovecraft's). But your point in the other post, obviously there are people who were lived in the same time and were more enlightened.

 

[Yora]

I think the essay Southern Discomfort is fairly well known: it can be found here;

That page is very rambling with quotes that consists only of single sentences and given no context, and often no clear indication what the author wants to show with them. Some of the quotes seem to not even be by Howard himself but are completely unrelated, with no clear indication of that being the case.

Robert Howard used a vocabulary that now "is not the preferred nomenclature", to quote John Goodman. Yes, that's clear. I don't think anyone ever doubted that.
But I really don't think that kind of writing provides any insights into the man's thinking.

 

[Vikingkingq]

As someone who likes Lovecraft and Howard, I don't have a problem acknowledging that these two dudes were pretty weirdly racist even for their time. Lovecraft's issues are better known, but Howard's beliefs are quite distinctive in their own way.

While we can certainly detect a strong influence of Madison Grant's eugenic theories of prehistory and the fin-de-siècle Yellow Peril anxieties about the seemingly effeminizing influence of modern industrial civilization in Howard's writings, REH combines these tendencies with something of Ibn Khaldun's theories about historical cycles of conquest and decline due to the tension between nomadic purity and urban decadence, which is a bit unusual for a West Texan of the 1930s.

What I find fascinatingly contradictory about his beliefs is that despite the fact that Howard makes the superiority of the barbarian absolutely central to his writings, he also shares a strong belief in the inferiority of nonwhite people especially manifested through an idiosyncratic obsession with devolution. Over and over again in his writings, there is this idea that evolution can go backwards and transform humans back into apes or ape-hybrids. So Ibn Khaldun's cycles of civilization become cycles of biology, so that when human civilizations fall to the barbarian, they inevitably regress into an animal state of nature until the pendulum eventually swings back in the other direction.

While Lovecraft's obsessions with human-fish hybrids were a more unidirectional allegory for interracial relationships and didn't have Howard's admiration for the barbarian and the natural world, I think we can see something of why they vibed together in that.

 

[Kurotowa]

While Lovecraft's obsessions with human-fish hybrids were a more unidirectional allegory for interracial relationships and didn't have Howard's admiration for the barbarian and the natural world, I think we can see something of why they vibed together in that.

They were both drawing on the zeitgeist of the time, where civilization is a thin veneer that's easily torn away, leaving man stripped down to his barest essentials. It's just that Lovecraft viewed that raw state as fearful quivering in the face of a grand cosmos that cares naught for you, and REH viewed the raw state as savage barbarian vitality that bites at the throat of their enemies. Lovecraft despaired that all things fall to ruin and the works of men would be supplanted and forgotten in time, and REH imagined an eternal cycle of civilizations rising and falling as the pendulum swung between simple barbarian savagery and the decadent indulgences of high culture.

History is more narrative tale than bare facts, as people try to impose meaning on the past and find justification for their choices in the present. In the 1930's they were living in the shadow of the first World War and the epidemic of the Spanish Flu. Scientific innovation and the industrial revolution was changing the face of society at a blinding pace. Evolution was being taught in schools and the old sureties of belief were shaken. It's no wonder their world felt fragile and as if it often teetered on a razor's edge over collapse.

 

[Bedrockgames]

As someone who likes Lovecraft and Howard, I don't have a problem acknowledging that these two dudes were pretty weirdly racist even for their time. Lovecraft's issues are better known,

Again though America was a very racist place at that time. And this this is at the peak of Eugenics and scientific racism which led to forcible sterilization programs. It is also a period when the 1924 immigration act was passed which is a complex topic but one aspect of it was to limit the number of immigrants from southern european and eastern European countries while increasing the number of people from western and northern European countries (its passage reflected a lot of the pre-occupations someone like Lovecraft had). While I am happy to defend Howard and Lovecraft's work and encourage people read literature outside their cultural comfort zone (even if that means encountering things we find objectionable). And I think it is important not to overstate or eggagerate their views. I think it is not wise to minimize what was going on in the US at that time in the places they lived, either to defend their work or to attack it. This was not a good period in terms of how Americans saw race and dealt with racial issues. And it wasn't just people walking around with ideas we'd be put off by. It was people putting into practice racist policies. And the other things I mentioned in my previous post (the extremely violent forms of racism that proliferated during Jim Crow). You can't talk about a period that lead to the Holocaust in Europe and resulted in things like Lynchings in the US, and say writers who invoked ugly language about race were somehow not in line with that time's thinking

 

[MGibster]

And the other things I mentioned in my previous post (the extremely violent forms of racism that proliferated during Jim Crow). You can't talk about a period that lead to the Holocaust in Europe and resulted in things like Lynchings in the US, and say writers who invoked ugly language about race were somehow not in line with that time's thinking

I've made similar arguments in regards to the idea that Lovecraft was somehow racist even by the standards of his day. If you look at the classifieds from the Arkansas Democrat (newspaper) in 1932 you will find jobs for washerwomen and domestic servants specifically for Negro/Colored women. If you look in the city directory, you'll find a little (C) next to the name of some people to indicate they are Colored. Lovecraft was raised in and wrote during an era where whites could lynch African Americans with impunity. To say that Lovecraft was racist even by the standards of his own time is to say you don't understand just how deeply racist mainstream Americans were at the time. This isn't to say there weren't people who opposed this kind of racism, but you don't lynch on average one person a week without the tacit approval or indifference of the majority.

 

[pemerton]

Robert Howard used a vocabulary that now "is not the preferred nomenclature", to quote John Goodman. Yes, that's clear. I don't think anyone ever doubted that.
But I really don't think that kind of writing provides any insights into the man's thinking.

Re-read The Scarlet Citadel, Queen of the Black Coast, and/or Vale of Lost Women.

I'm not talking about "vocabulary".