BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER

Robert E. Howard’s short stories “Red Nails” and “Beyond the Black River” make an interesting pair of narratives that support the same thesis statement. "Red Nails" is Robert E. Howard's story about how civilization often eats itself, cautioning its readers against closing themselves and their society off from the natural world as the people of a lost city literally cut themselves off from all of nature. Their doors are perpetually locked, the sky is blocked by glass that warps sunlight, and even plants are grown away from soil. 

If “Red Nails” is anti-civilization, "Beyond the Black River" is the other half of the equation: the proponent for barbarism. I like how Frank Coffman phrases it in his essay Barbarism Ascendant: "Barbarism [is] the natural human condition, with the many historical cycles of great civilizations and any attempts to establish a lasting order in the face of chaos always and ultimately futile." This is the story in which Howard not only makes his case for eschewing societal comforts, but inviting his reader to marvel at the power of nature. "Beyond the Black River" is an excellent Conan story. In fact, it's one of the best ever. It's thematically rich, very interesting, and a total blast to read.

Serialized in Weird Tales from May to June in 1935, this is one of the later publications, with only four more to be published before Howard's suicide.

"Black River" is one of the Conan stories that gives you ample hints as to where it sits in the chronology. As I noted in my post about "The Devil in Iron," Conan gives a whole speech about what he's done in his life, placing this one later on. 

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"​I've seen all the great cities of the Hyborians, the Shemites, the Stygians, and the Hyrkanians. I've roamed in the unknown countries south of the black kingdoms of Kush, and east of the Sea of Vilayet. I've been a mercenary captain, a corsair, a kozak, a penniless vagabond, a general—hell, I've been everything except a king of a civilized country, and I may be that, before I die."

Conan is about to become king of a "civilized" country very soon. "Beyond the Black River" is his first step in Aquilonia toward that eventual kingship. Like usual, Conan will gain people's trust and admiration quickly, and he starts very simply as a scout for the kingdom.

According to "A Probable Outline of Conan's Career," Conan is likely in his late 30s, about 39 years old. 

"Conan as a scout in Conajohara, fighting against the Pictish wizard, Zogar Sag. This is very shortly before he seized the throne; he may be 39."

While we're in a part of the Hyborian world we've never been to before, the area is very finely drawn by Howard in his descriptions. We're on the western reaches of the Kingdom of Aquilonia, which is colonizing to the west. The fertile land of the Bossonian Marches lays nearby. Two rivers mark the western border of the country of which Conan will soon become king: the Thunder River and the Black River, the latter is the one further into the wilderness. 

The Aquilonians have pushed out far, perhaps too far, colonizing what has been Pitcish territory up to this point. They've built a fort named Tuscalan as the farthest outpost of the "civilized" world into the wilderness.

Conan is working as a sellsword scout for the militias at Fort Tuscalan, protecting not only the men of the fort, but also the nearby town of Velitirum and the entire western border of Aquilonia, by extension. He meets young Balthus, who is definitely one of the most interesting companions of Conan's so far, who unfortunately doesn't make it out of the story (why do the best companions always stick around for only one story? I'm looking at you, Belit, Valeria, and Balthus!)

Conan fights ruthlessly against the Picts, who are portrayed as backwards, savage, cultish, animal-like, and completely bloodthirsty. Conan has a ticking clock on his quest this time- in fact, it's one of the strongest setups in any Conan story so far- the evil sorcerer Zogar Sag had been captured by the Aquilonians, but recently escaped and is picking off prominent members of the settlers as revenge. If he beheads five Aquilonians, terrible things will happen, meaning Conan has to act quickly. 

The fort allows Conan to lead a detachment of 12 men to attack the Pict village of Gwawela while they still have time. What results is a constant thrill ride of stealth missions, heart-pounding chase scenes, fierce battles against prehistoric beasts, and a magical showdown at the end. It's an old saying that to write a good adventure story, your hero should lose every battle but win the war, and that's almost exactly what happens to Conan in this story (though Conan does, yeah, lose the war, technically). Through setback after setback, he perseveres, losing most of the people he meets along the way, but ultimately surviving.

Every now and then, we see Robert E. Howard push at the boundaries of pulp fiction. "The God in the Bowl" was a mystery story. "A Witch Shall Be Born" implements elements of epistolary writing into it. "The Tower of the Elephant" plays with science fiction. "Beyond the Black River" is another peculiar Conan story. It seems to be an experimentation on two fronts for its author.

​One, it is almost entirely devoid of women characters. It's true that many Conan stories feature exactly one (1) woman character, so dropping that count to zero might not seem like much.

​But Conan stories had on-and-off become dependent on having a sexy, young woman who's completely smitten with Conan rounding out the cast. It seems like the more desperate Howard was to sell a story to the editors at Weird Tales, the more likely he was to write one of those ladies into his plot. While it appears that he was generally negative about this and felt that adventure story readers were too reliant on sex, which I wrote about extensively in my "Red Nails" post, he played the game frequently. Howard confirmed that this lack of a female companion was intentional when he wrote in a letter to his friend:

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"​My latest sales have been a 23,000 word Oriental adventure yarn to Top- Notch, and a two-part Conan serial to Weird Tales; no sex in the latter. I wanted to see if I could write an interesting Conan yarn without sex interest."

And two, the far more interesting part of the experiment, is that "Beyond the Black River" is a western. It may take place about 12,000 years ago on another continent, but it's absolutely a western in the same way that Firefly and Star Wars are westerns. Howard thought so too:

"My latest sales to Weird Tales have been a two-part Conan serial: 'Beyond the Black River' — a frontier story... In the Conan story I’ve attempted a new style and setting entirely—abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, etc., and thrown my story against a back-ground of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen."

Howard's world in this story is actually reminiscent of something much older than westerns. The fact that the west is "normal" and the east is exotic reminds me of maps going as far back as the 13th century (I loved studying these in my Old English class back in undergrad). In the Psalter map, the farther one gets from England, the more horrid and fantastic the world is, ranging from Christ on one end of the map to horrifying monster creatures called blemmyae on the far sides. Howard takes this a step further by making "the west" in his world so far removed from the exotic that it ceases to be even a fantasy world. It instead becomes the much more recent, much more mundane (but I mean that as a "normal" way, not in a bad way) American frontier that he himself called home.

​The sides of the battles in "Beyond the Black River" are drawn along the lines of the traditional western myth, long established in American literature. Daniel Weiss explains in his essay "Robert E. Howard's Barbarian and the Western:"

Howard’s life in Texas was shaped by Texan history, while at the same time, he fantasized about distant lands. But his interest in western history — its influence on the American imagination — was never far from his mind.

Conan and the Aquilonians are the pilgrims, the settlers, the white frontiersmen. The Picts are the Native Americans, standing in the way of "taming" the west. He even goes as far as to drape his Pictish shaman Zogar Sag in feathers.

I think these tropes will be instantly recognizable to any American reader (They definitely hit close to home for me, since I grew up across the highway from Bent's Old Fort in southeast Colorado, an old west trading post), and while they are incredibly problematic, it is very interesting to see how Howard uses them to inform a sword-and-sorcery story. Some of these tropes just sort of sit in the story and he doesn't do much with them, while other parts are almost transformed by moving the western from the American frontier to the Hyborian Age.

The trope that is the most troubling is also the one that Howard does the least with in the narrative. The Picts, Howard's analogue for Native American cultures, fit perfectly into the racist stereotype employed by most films in the high western genre and a lot of frontier fiction. He chooses to give them widely-known plains Indian characteristics rather than many of the markers that other pseudo-historical accounts have given Picts, like blue tattoo-like skin markings, as John Bullard notes over at Adventures Fantastic. They're bloodthirsty semi-humans as far as the story is concerned, with no culture of their own save for their pagan rituals that inevitably revolve around sacrifices. I mean, holy fuck Howard, you named one of your bodies of water Scalp Creek in this thing. Subtlety was never his strong suit.

The thing that is interesting about Native American tropes in this story, though, is that Conan also fits into one. In many tales, Conan is depicted as the "noble savage:" simple, but also glorious in the way he goes about life. Howard even decides to draw further connections between the Picts and the Cimmerians by pointing out that disparate Cimmerian clans were united at the siege of Venarium to become victorious over Aquilonia when Conan was just 15, exactly as the Picts are doing now. It turns the story into a two-pronged use of stereotypes, as the villains are one and the hero is another form of anti-indigenous racism.

I find it hard to call it anything other than racism, because when a white, blue-eyed character like Conan is living the simple life, it is upheld as an example of peak existence, while any character naturally darker-skinned than Conan is to be pitied at best, or to be eliminated at worst. When Conan fights against his land being colonized, it ignites the righteous rage of a proud people. When the Picts do it, the innocent settlers of Aquilonia need to be protected at all costs. The head of Balthus at the end of the story is worth the heads of ten Picts, according to Conan himself.

Strangely enough, Howard writes early in the story, "The Picts were a white race, though swarthy, but the border men never spoke of them as such." I find it strange that this line exists in the story when it's clear that whiteness is the reason why Conan sides with the Aquilonians rather than with fellow "barbarians," the Picts. Additionally, the next Howard-penned story chronologically, "The Black Stranger" / "The Treasure of Tranicos" clearly deems the Picts not white, saying, "​The Cimmerian knew he was the only white man ever to cross the wilderness that lay between that river and the coast." 

Conan even verbally draws a line between "white men" and "Picts" when choosing not to abandon some of his acquaintances in "The Treasure of Tranicos:"

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"'But I'm not going to do that!' Conan roared. 'Not because I have any love for you dogs, but because a white man doesn't leave white men, even his enemies, to be butchered by Picts.'"

If we put aside the detestable action of siding with someone solely because you see them as your own race, the Picts are apparently white, but not white white and they’re nonwhite enough to be othered by most of the white characters. In a way, Howard is agreeing with the progressive idea that race is a social construct. Paradoxically, Howard is expressing viciously racist views while also predicting antiracist concepts from decades on.

​But "Beyond the Black River" is far from just regressive western tropes, though. Whether Howard intended all of the political messaging in this story or if it showed up by accident isn't super important, but I am reminded of playwrights like Sophocles and Shakespeare writing politically-coded stories that help the blow land softer because they set them in earlier, mythical times. Goddamn, did I really just compare a pulp story to Sophocles and Shakespeare? Give me a second to make my point.

Conan, frequently as the mouthpiece for Howard's politics, makes some interesting statements in this story. In the first chapter, Conan makes almost a socialist and anti-colonialist argument.

"​Some day they'll try to sweep the settlers out of Conajohara. And they may succeed—probably will succeed. This colonization business is mad, anyway. There's plenty of good land east of the Bossonian marches. If the Aquilonians would cut up some of the big estates of their barons, and plant wheat where now only deer are hunted, they wouldn't have to cross the border and take the land of the Picts away from them."

Surprising. That's a pretty good case for the redistribution of wealth and for them to end colonization. If the oligarchy would avoid opulent overconsumption, there would be less case for the poor people of Aquilonia to have to strike out into dangerous conditions to just scrape by with subsistence farming. And Conan is acknowledging that the land they're on belongs to the Picts: colonization is not the filling in of a blank space, but the replacement of one population with another. Conan says, "Free Palestine." 

As REH was a lifelong Texan, it's interesting to see that he might have held some sympathies for the tribes displaced by Texas settlers, or at least may have felt bitter about the burdens that he saw country people carrying during the Depression.

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What is for sure is that "Beyond the Black River" makes it clear that Howard believes society softens and weakens a person and that it's nature that gives a person the physical prowess that Conan possesses. Describing Conan from Balthus's perspective, he says:

"​Evidently Conan had spent much time among civilized men, though that contact had obviously not softened him, nor weakened any of his primitive instincts. Balthus' apprehension turned to admiration as he marked the easy catlike stride, the effortless silence with which the Cimmerian moved along the trail. The oiled links of his armor did not clink, and Balthus knew Conan could glide through the deepest thicket or most tangled copse as noiselessly as any naked Pict that ever lived."

I noted briefly in my "Red Nails" writing that barbarism for Howard is a kind of simplicity. I like how Daniel Weiss says it:

...an uncluttered intellect, unsullied with the political cravings, irrational desires, or other distractions a civilized man suffers.

Conan remains untainted by the weakness of society and retains the strength given to him by his barbarism. For Howard, there is even a mystical quality to holding onto that simplicity of barbarian life. It gives a person a natural, animal-like power that apparently has threads to the very dawn of man in his philosophy.

"​The barbarian's eyes were smoldering with fires that never lit the eyes of men bred to the ideas of civilization. In that instant he was all wild, and had forgotten the man at his side. In his burning gaze Balthus glimpsed and vaguely recognized pristine images and half-embodied memories, shadows from Life's dawn, forgotten and repudiated by sophisticated races—ancient, primeval fantasms unnamed and nameless."

This is also mirrored in the fact that Zogar Sag summons forth only incredibly ancient beasts from the forest. In the logic of a Conan the Barbarian story, older is better, stronger. Then, only through even somehow more ancient knowledge, is Conan able to fend off the beasts, using the sigil of Jhebbal Sag. It has been long forgotten with the exception of the memories of a few, and its age is its power.​

​I'm very easily reminded of the concept of the sublime (not the terrible band) that was inspiring to Romantic-era British writers like Percy and Mary Shelley. Jesus Christ, I've compared Howard to both Shakespeare and Mary Shelley in the same blog post, so I think I need to ease up on the coffee.

The sublime is the awesome (as in awe-inspiring power of capital-G God and capital-N Nature rather than, like, something that's totally tubular, dude) feeling within ourselves that we experience looking at an enormous mountain range, or a raging sea, for example. We could so easily be crushed like an ant beneath the boot of Nature. There's a fear there, but also an appreciation of a type of beauty. Conan's strength, for Howard, is clearly something to be revered, awed at, and strived toward.

We get some of Howard's best-ever lines describing the sublime qualities of the forested frontier, reminding us that nature is an unconquered thing of its own:

"The shadows were thickening. A darkening blue mist blurred the outlines of the foliage. The forest deepened in the twilight, became a blue haunt of mystery sheltering unguessed things."

Like Conan's barbarism lending him strength, Howard speaks highly of the unnamed settler characters in the narrative, imbuing them with a quiet strength that leaves the unshaken even when they're threatened. This even extends, surprisingly, to his female characters on the frontier.

"They stared at him seriously, making no outcry. The woman took the horse's halter and set out up the road. She still gripped her ax and Balthus knew that if cornered she would fight with the desperate courage of a she-panther."

"But the old woman, a stern old veteran of the frontier, quieted them harshly; she helped Balthus get out the two horses that were stabled in a pen behind the cabin and put the children on them. Balthus urged that she herself mount with them, but she shook her head and made one of the younger women ride.

'She's with child,' grunted the old woman. 'I can walk—and fight, too, if it comes to that.'"

These characters are pretty unique in the Hyborian canon. Not only is one of them old, as opposed to the young, sexy ladies hanging off of Conan's arm, but they're unflappable and ready to defend themselves- with lethal force if they must. 

Not all of this is detective work on my part, though. Howard finishes the story by just coming out and saying his thesis plainly.

"The forester stared at him, comparing him with the men about them, the men who had died along the lost river, comparing him with those other wild men over that river. Conan did not seem aware of his gaze.

'Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,' the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. 'Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.'"

So barbarism is more natural than civilization and will always win when the two are pitted against one another.

I'm inclined to think that this unnamed forester is Howard himself, inserting a stand-in into the story. The forester stares at Conan and speaks to him, with Conan seemingly unaware of either, the same way Howard follows Conan's adventures on the page. He compares the Cimmerian with the other frontiersmen around, as Howard has often compared Conan to the men in the taverns of Zamora and the palaces of Shem and the tents of Turan. Knowing Howard's penchant for considering Conan stories to be remembrances that have sprung up from the past, it just seems like an incredibly Howardian thing to have this line spoken by Conan's chronicler himself. 

"Beyond the Black River" is perhaps Howard's magnum opus on Conan. I wouldn't say it's quite as purely entertaining as "The Tower of the Elephant" or "Black Colossus," but it is far more worth discussing. It's Howard's thesis on plain living, the power of nature, and the American frontier myth. It's weird western with actual philosophical things to say. It's absolutely Howard raising a twenty-five cent pulp publication into the realm of literature. 

"Moon of Blood" is up next!

★★★★★

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