Hyboria - More of the same?

[mmadsen]

Are we, in the end, all just apes playing dress-up? Are we not men? We are DEVO!

Rock on!

This is eerie. I almost posted the exact same response to the exact same excerpt.

Anyway, kenjib, I loved your entire post. And in a fantasy setting, I can certainly see cultural decline reified as physical "devolution".

 

[Desdichado]

This is eerie. I almost posted the exact same response to the exact same excerpt.

But did you have this ==>

|33+ custom smily to go along with that? Huh? Did ya?

 

[Arnwyn]

Khitai is not China, it's ruined temples in verdant jungles where brass cymbals clash and yellow-robed monks chime out the endless hours. Aquilonia is a thousand plate-armoured knights crossing Thunder River to do battle with the painted Pictish host. Zamora is sleepy, lotus-drugged towers of spider-haunted mystery, and so on.

Now that is what will get people interested in Hyboria.

 

[mmadsen]

Howard's world is not a place, it's a mood. Khitai is not China, it's ruined temples in verdant jungles where brass cymbals clash and yellow-robed monks chime out the endless hours. Aquilonia is a thousand plate-armoured knights crossing Thunder River to do battle with the painted Pictish host. Zamora is sleepy, lotus-drugged towers of spider-haunted mystery, and so on.

S'mon, you too deserve a hearty "rock on!" -- with |33+ custom smily

 

[Andrew D. Gable]

the prevailing belief of the time that the historical Cimmerians were somehow Celtic in nature (they're actually unknown, but widely assumed to be "Scythian" or Iranian in nature.)

I was always under the impression that REH based this bit on the fact that the old Celtic name for Wales was Cymru.

 

[S'mon]

Neotony...

If you ignore the normative/teleological implication of devolve/evolve I don't see the problem - you can get "man-apes" from "men" by switching off the neotony, then get "men" from "man-apes" again by switching it back on. The degree of neotony appears to be the result of selective adaptation just like any other evolutionary change. Chimps and gorillas have changed more from our common ancestor than we have, so in a sense they're "more evolved". Since the non-neotonous form is the older one though I can see a reversion to such being called "devolving" in casual parlance.

I agree that I'm sure REH thought in teleological "Ascent of Man" terms, just as most people with a fuzzy belief in evolution still seem to do today (even sf writers!), and he probably put white Americans at the top of the tree. In fact if one were using "most neotonous" for "most evolved", Mongoloid/Chinese races would be at the top, with whites somewhere in the middle.

 

[S'mon]

Even if this theory about the origin of chimps pans out and garners any more support, it's nothing like men turning back into man-apes, and then back to men again. That'd actually be the exact opposite of neotony, which isn't any type of documented process at all.

That's incorrect - neotony is certainly reversible as a species evolves; as I understand it the infantilisation process can be reversed, halted, restarted et al. Hence chimps being less neotonised than homo sapiens sapiens.

 

[Snoweel]

What a rebel! What an iconoclast!

What will he say or do next?

So I don't like the Beatles.

Does that somehow limit your enjoyment of them?

Get over it...

I was always under the impression that REH based this bit on the fact that the old Celtic name for Wales was Cymru.

And here I was thinking that the 'CYMRU' I'd seen on countless rugby jerseys stood for Catholic Young Men's Rugby Union. My boss is Welsh and his wife used to teach the Welsh language back in Cardiff. I'll have to ask him/her/them about it...

Useless Trivia: While Welsh (Celtic language) and Swedish (Germanic language) are largely unrelated, they share a nearly identical term for 'window' (fönster in Swedish).

 

[S'mon]

Oh, thanks to everyone who commented kindly on my attempt to evoke the Hyborean 'mood'.

 

[Desdichado]

That's incorrect - neotony is certainly reversible as a species evolves; as I understand it the infantilisation process can be reversed, halted, restarted et al. Hence chimps being less neotonised than homo sapiens sapiens.

Quite possible, although what I was getting at is that you don't "devolve" into what you were millions of years ago and then "re-evolve" back into what you were. Evolution, no matter exactly what model of it you subscribe to, doesn't work that way.

By the way, S'mon, have you checked out my dinosaur thread in the OT forum? It'd be nice to have someone who knows evolution comment...