Introduction:

The Cormac Mac Art Cycle

Robert E. Howard began the recounting of the fifth century Irish hero’s exploits in Tigers of the Sea, which Ace has reprinted. They and the keeper of the REH papers and the Howard literary agent then asked me to continue the cycle (none of which was printed during Howard’s lifetime).

My first three novels followed Tigers chronologically. The fourth went back to recount the treachery-born events that led to Cormac’s becoming outlaw, then exile from Erin. Later forced also to flee Alba/Caledonia/Scotland, he bitterly took to the sea as a reiver or reaver: pirate. He met the giant Wulfhere the Dane in prison. Later still Cormac became the only Gael aboard Raven, a Wulfhere-commanded ship crewed by Danes. Some of their exploits formed the four stories in Howard’s Tigers.

This is the fifth of the novels I have written, but the second in chronological order. It precedes Tigers by a few years. Herein the mac Art is younger-indeed, he lies about his age because of that embarrassment of youth we have all experienced. An exile, he has not forgotten her he left behind: Samaire. He loved her as he loved their mutual land: Erin or Eirrin.

He is a grim and sombre fellow. He is to become less so only in later years, when he re-meets Samaire and gains purpose and goal-and Irish shores. With Keith Taylor, this chronicle returns to that Cormac of less optimism and more dourness, and a different part of the world. Cormac is the exiled pirate among foreigners, crafty and untrusting.

Howard clearly indicated that mac Art’s activities were hardly confined to the area of the British Isles. Rome had withdrawn from Britannia after four centuries of interference and domination. Britons were dying to invading Saxons and Jutes and Angles who would give the land its new name: Angle-land or Angle-terre: England. (Strangely, some Britons had fled from the continent whence came the conquerors. There they founded lesser Britain-Brittany-and clung to it.)