“There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction,” he commented in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft. And indeed, Howard’s zest, his passion, is evident in every detail and turn of phrase. These stories rank among REH’s finest – lean and descriptive, with headlong plots and a rogues’ gallery of characters who embody the kind of grim fatalism that has become a hallmark of his work. They span the breadth of the Middle Ages – from war-torn eleventh-century Ireland (Spears of Clontarf) to sixteenth-century Ottoman Crimea (The Road of the Eagles) – and they explore a similar theme, what Howard called his “continual search for newer barbarians, from age to age.” The violent clash of civilizations and its tragic consequences fascinated Howard, as did the stoic heroism that arises in the face of inescapable doom. These themes crop up often in REH’s oeuvre, in the travels of Solomon Kane, in the knife’s-edge maneuverings of Francis Xavier Gordon, and in the determined resistance of Bran Mak Morn. But here, in his stories of Outremer and the Old Orient, Howard most eloquently questions the dominance of barbarism over civilization – a question he would ultimately answer in 1934, in the final paragraph of one of his most celebrated tales, Beyond the Black River:

Barbarism is the natural state of mankind … civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph. Though passionate about his material and confident in his ability to spin a yarn, Howard nonetheless felt that the writing of historicals exposed one of his great faults to the world: “My knowledge of the Orient is extremely sketchy, and I have to draw on my imagination to supply missing links which I can’t learn in the scanty references at my command.” And though he seems to have considered the introduction of imagination into historical fiction to be a weakness, it is that selfsame imagination that gives these stories such a dramatic flair.