More difficult to unearth were the facts of his youth, before he became the famous reaver, bane of sorcerers, and Champion of Eirrin. The task of tracking down and assembling these accounts fell to my friend Geo. W. Proctor.

Like Howard who first discovered and began chronicling the Cormac cycle, Proctor is a Texan and a lover of high adventure, particularly heroic fantasy. His own tales of weapon-men and images are included in my anthologies of new heroic fantasy, Swords Against Darkness, and he is working on his own novels.

It was Geo. Proctor who tirelessly tracked down, along vermiculate paths leading into and through numerous sources, Macghnimhartha na Cormaic: The Youthful Deeds of Cormac. From a crumbling monastery near Cashel came the scraps of laboriously recopied-in Latin! -manuscript, Partha na Lagen, and realized that this “Partha (mac Othna) of Laigin or Leinster” was indeed Cormac, written of as his cloak-name or alias. From the musty library of an aged scholar-now deceased-living near Dublin that was Dubh-linn (and formerly Baile Atha Cliath or Ath-Cliath), came into Proctor’s hands the nigh-unreadable Longes mac Airt: the Exile of Art’s Son. In the Leinsterish archives is proudly recorded Tain Bo an Ard Riogh: The Cattle-Raid of the High-king or the Driving off of the High-king’s Kine.

Laboriously Proctor checked and cross-checked, questioned and collected, compiled and discarded, and somehow pieced together the story of a heinous plot by High-king and priest… and the story of young Cormac. His work does shame on scholars and historians (whom in truth I have caught out in errors, in my own researches-while doubtless making errors of my own).

Geo. and I were already in contact, and I am the chronicler and supposed expert. To me he sent his account-and two copies of his pages and pages of notes. Pleading gross ignorance of Gaelic, I asked him to compile it all into a sort of narrative, in outline form. (We agreed to leave out The Matter of the Queen’s Chamber, and the Story of the Twelve Picts, as being surely fanciful, apocryphal additions by later enthusiasts.)