BARBARIAN VS. HOBBIT: Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien and the fantasy gaming genre
When we think about the fantasy genre, whether in a gaming context or otherwise, our thoughts usually are filtered through J.R.R. Tolkien's remarkable, genre-defining vision. The Lord of the Rings has shaped the entire fantasy genre, and people's notions of it ever since Tolkien's work took root in the collective consciousness - even before Peter Jackson’s film epic faithfully (for the most part; true believers may disagree) adapting Tolkien's work for the masses.
But is Tolkien's work really a very good template to build games, game settings and role-playing game themes around?
Fat Aragorn vs. Flying Head: the early editions of Lord of the Rings don't really emphasize them as heroic fantasy.
In this essay I will offer a personal view - a case, if you will - for Robert E. Howard and how to consider his somewhat overlooked impact on the fantasy genre. His impact, especially, when we consider fantasy-themed games.
A full disclosure at first, to confess my shameful lack of expertize in the topic discussed. Firstly, I've never quite finished reading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. And secondly, while I have read Howard's work, it has been quite a while since I really read his prose. I am more familiar with adaptations of Howard's work which, again, have often been faithful to the source.
So I am a rube, a layman, an armchair literary scholar here. But I have done some research, contemplation and introspection and my claim is as follows:
When thinking about running a role-playing game set in the fantasy genre, the players or designers planning the game, should look at Howard's work just as much as they look at Tolkien's, for inspiration.
Tell me this does not look like a two-bit D&D scenario from the early 80s.
What does it mean, then, if Tolkien's work sets the template for your fantasy game or story? The reason I am addressing the issue is the fact I consider different campaign templates and found the one I really rather dislike. The template which I, as a player, must accept and work around to find my enjoyment in the game. And it is the template of the Quest to Stop the End of the World.
I will write in detail, later, about why a role-playing campaign where the stake is the end of the world is, at its heart, boring. But if one would use Tolkien as an inspiration for a game framework, one would default to a story of a group of unlikely heroes going after some quest, to stop some evil power from rising and laying this fantasy world to waste.
But how many games you would actually want to play are about this? Consider Frodo, the ostensible main character of Lord of the Rings. He is, basically, a hapless peasant (or a rural landowner, if we look at the subtle ways Tolkien establishes Shire as a class society), guided by greater and more experienced heroes to be a TOOL to resolve this threatening end-of-the-world scenario. Do Frodo and his vertically-challenged chums really have much of a say in the story? They may have doubts, yes, but we know from the very start of the narrative what is at stake here. And if Frodo does not comply, the world is LOST. What choice does he ever have, really?
(As an aside, an old webcomic called DM of the Rings takes the piss out of this set-up marvellously, imagining Lord of the Rings as a role-playing game with the Tolkienesque GM forcing the protesting players on one path and drowning them in detailed backstory. The author, Shamus Young, uses screencaps of Jackson's adaptions to create a "fumetti" which is actually pretty funny at its best.)
I'd rather play Mechwarrior, too.
Would you like to play as Frodo? I would not. I would have little agency over the game world, only the most trivial decisions to make while playing this hapless midget farmer from Nowhere-Ville, Middle-Earth, who is thrust on this quest while the endgame would be decided for me without even asking me: get the Magic Ring to the Magic Volcano, or the world is lost.
If you are given that "choice", what are you going to do? This is not really an interesting motivation for any character. But yet, so many - so very, very many! - fantasy stories, in games or otherwise, begin with the same premise. The premise being "do this one thing or it's the END OF THE WORLD". It's perhaps alluring for a game master or a game writer, planning their game, to set the stakes high to motivate the players to action.
But this is not terribly interesting, is it? You do a thing which you are told to do at the very start of the story, or it's the end of the world and everything you'll do in the story has been, basically, for nothing.
Let us then consider, in contrast, Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howard's most famous creation. Conan is the ultimate opportunist. An occasional mercenary, an adventurer motivated by his desire for battle and gold - and occasionally just motivated by his base desires for simple pleasure.
Conan is the character almost anyone making a character for a fantasy setting makes first, if they don't know anything more than to make an "adventurer". The archetype which Conan represents is present at the very first role-playing games ever made.
I SUPPOSE one can make an argument about Conan as a power fantasy as well.
Never in Howard's stories are the stakes more than local. There may be an evil magical bastard plotting away in the stories, but their plots, if successful, will ruin the city or land Conan is at. Never do they explicitly threaten to destroy EVERYTHING. Usually Conan is seduced to do an intervention by the fact there is money to be had, or perhaps some attractive wench will offer her graces if Conan chooses to battle whatever evil scumbag is scheming away where he is. If he were to walk away? The world would still continue to spin, sun would rise from the east and set to the west, even if one of the many Hyborian kingdoms would implode due to magical bastardry. Conan has no predetermined destiny and no overarching quest to tie his story together, even if there are emerging themes in Conan stories which give them their distinctive flavour.
(As an aside about attractive wenches: Howard was something of a stick-in-the-mud man of his time and occasionally wrote rather poor depictions of women in his stories, but he did also have female agency in these stories as well. On a couple of occasions, Conan would meet women that were his equals which, and if we consider the fact Howard wrote in the 1920s, is somewhat impressive and a trait which endears him to me somewhat.)
Not that I'd call any Conan story exactly a feminist masterpiece either.
Conan does not fight metaphysical dangers, and he always has - seemingly, at least - a choice to intervene or not.
This? This is the very essence of a role-playing game adventure, and a dynamic game setting. There are dangers and evil about, but protagonist is motivated by other, more relatable things than the generic catch-all of "doing good". And every time the protagonist has - seemingly, at least - a choice whether to risk his life or not.
And trust me when I say that I don't claim that Frodo is absent doubt or conflict as a protagonist. No, a lot of space in Lord of the Rings is dedicated to Frodo's (and, by extension, Samwise's) very personal struggle. This is, at its best, thrilling stuff where the underdog heroes must fight their own doubts and fears as well as magical beasts. But in the narrative, they don't do much else, do they? Lord of the Rings is the story of a singular quest. Even while Tolkien is prone to digressions and prosaic flights of fancy, the story is the quest. And the quest is, ultimately, the story.
If we look at the very first Dungeons & Dragons books published, you will find a list of influences written down in the appendixes. What is very curious here, is that Tolkien is not mentioned AT ALL. This is odd because Gary Gygax, the man often associated to being the mastermind behind D&D, and his co-writers seemingly stole everything but the kitchen sink from Tolkien. In the very first iterations of the game you'll find orcs, hobbits (halflings), treants and elves and a multitude of other elements taken DIRECTLY from Tolkien's seminal work. Of course we must remember that when D&D was first published, Tolkien was still very much alive. One can speculate that Gygax and company did not want to draw the attention of Tolkien, being Americans ever fearful of being sued. But the fact remains that the very essence of D&Ds setting was heavily influenced by Tolkien, up to the point of plagiarism.
Robert E. Howard is, however, mentioned as the very first influence in those early D&D books - the number one on a long list. Gygax also lists Howard as a personal inspiration when discussing D&D. Now, we must remember that Gary Gygax grew up reading dog-eared pulp magazines given to him by his father. The VERY SAME trashy, disposable pulp magazines which provided Howard his meager salary when he threw himself into writing. So: the creator of the role-playing genre grew up reading about Conan the Barbarian. And while he was involved in publishing the very first role-playing game in the 70's, Lord of the Rings was fairly new, being a book published in the 60's. Gygax and his colleagues might have stolen from Tolkien, but for Gygax it was Howard that SHAPED him as a child. It is both easy and difficult to imagine Gygax's childhood and youth in the 1960s. For a younger reader it might be difficult to imagine a time when fantasy fiction was so very scarce and not at all as mainstream as it is now, in the 2010s. But even a child of 1980s, a time when fantastical fiction was still very much at the margins of culture, can relate to the fantastic feeling of discovery Gygax must have had when diving into those pulp stories, the stories old even then.
I do like to visualize, when I write this, young Gygax under his blanket, reading trashy pulp magazines already falling apart, illuminating yellowed pages with his flashlight. And how the ideas would take root in this impressionable child's mind, driving him later to indulge in more elaborate flights of fancy and to help create a whole gaming genre.
Ironically, there was a supplement published to D&D in 1984 that was set directly into Hyboria, the fantasy land of Howard's Conan and it was not very well-received. One critic did not feel Conan was a good template for a D&D scenario at all, due to the lack of magic and exciting monsters:
"Conan and D&D go together like peanut butter and tuna fish—it can be done, but you can bet there's going to be a funny taste."
-Rick Swan, from his review in The Space Gamer
We can only suppose he never read the appendixes of those old D&D editions.
If we consider Howard and Tolkien, and put their lives on a timeline, one can notice a startling fact. When Howard was born, Tolkien was already 14 years old. And by the time Howard died, Tolkien had not published (or perhaps even written) any fiction. So the entire life and literary work of the man who is said to have created the so-called "sword and sorcery" genre begun and was over by the time Tolkien, a middle-aged man then, begun his own literary career. Both men shaped fantasy fiction but while Tolkien persisted and took his time with his epics, Howard burnt out brightly, and quickly.
There is only one reference to Tolkien ever even having known who Howard was. We must remember here that they were separated by both time, geography, culture and by the fact Howard become a well-known writer only posthumously. L. Sprague de Camp, the occasionally-criticized author of a study on Howard, met Tolkien once and in conversation, Tolkien mentions having read a story by Howard and, to quote, "rather liked it".
And that, perhaps, everything that links these two authors. The two persons that shaped what we consider "fantasy" nowadays may have worked in complete isolation relative to each other. The amalgam we nowadays see as the fantasy genre was not created in the same cultural context, but separately, and its modern version may well be amalgamation which was created in games, via Gygax and the like.
They were very different creatures, these two landmark creators. Howard is, in retrospect, a very much of a tragic character - for reasons I will get to later in this article. Bullied as a "sissy boy" in his youth, it is seen that he retreated into heroic tales of manly men of action in his prose. But this, I feel, is an oversimplification. Howard came from a time when in America, mostly untouched by the horror of the Great War, still considered war and fighting a manly and elevating pursuit. The fantasy of the superior fighting man was very much in the national psyche (look at president Teddy Roosevelt and his pre-Great War worldview, if you doubt me), and to this psyche Howard catered, with his stories of violent and righteous men. And he was not likely your stereotypical skinny nerd, either. Howard was a boxer - a very popular national sport at the time when he was young - and by looking at some of the photos of him, he looks more like a thug than a poet. I may be he was attempting to physically be what he wrote about.
Tolkien, however, was very much a fighting man - in a way, the kind Howard may have dreamt of being himself. He was, however, a somewhat reluctant soldier, bullied himself in 1915 when he was not on the front while his countrymen were. Tolkien was dragged to the trenches of the Great War with some reluctance, and he came out even more of a pacifist he was when he hesitantly enlisted. Some of the horror that Tolkien saw during his time in the trenches as an officer, throwing young men into the insatiable machine of death that the First World War, has been claimed of having seeped into the story of Lord of the Rings. A writer more poetic than I once drew these parallels and said, to paraphrase, that in both Lord of the Rings and the Great War, heroes set off to fight a battle that will leave them changed beyond repair. Metaphorically, we can see Frodo as a war veteran at the end to the story, sailing off from his homeland because he has become too changed, corrupted even, to have a normal life anymore.
Let us pause here, and consider. Tolkien wrote a bittersweet but ultimately optimistic story about perseverance of the "little people" against adversity. And he likely sent a number of men, the real life "little people", to their deaths. He may have killed people himself. He nearly died of disease in a hell made by men, for men, provided by then-modern murder technology. (This technology, we must note here, which was very much fantastical at the time it was introduced.) Howard glorified battle and manly tests of strength and willpower. And his closest brushes with violence were the bullying he suffered, the likely violent environment of Texas in the early 20th century, and punches thrown and received in the boxing ring.
It is said there are no atheists in the foxholes. But it can also be said that there are none that believe in the glory of battle in the ranks of those intimately involved in a modern war.
But I have no intention of painting Howard as a villain here. He was, very much, a man of his time, and his pulp fiction spoke to the audience of the age. Unlike Europe, America was not traumatized by the Great War and the myth of the war as an adventure prevailed still. (And it may still prevail, as America as a nation has never had to persevere through industrialized mass murder as Europe has; which Europe has done more than once.) To this audience, Howard offered many thrills with his subtly simple but elegant prose. Compared to Tolkien Howard was also the less educated one, self-taught in history but no professor like Tolkien. Some have described the American author as a "Texas yahoo" which may or may not be fair. Contrast him to the Very English Gentleman Tolkien was and you again can see two men of very different worlds.
A Very English Gentleman is never pictured absent his trusty pipe.
Howard however, despite the horror Tolkien saw and participated in, remains the more tragic of these two figures. To generalize, Tolkien led a happy life. He married the love of his life, led a successful and content academic career and died an old man, likely at peace. Tolkien was an orphan and a war veteran, but he persevered, late in his life blooming into a wonderful fiction writer. Howard's life was overshadowed by an uncaring father, and a mother he was, according to some interpretations, almost Norman-Bates-esquely attached to. He never saw respect for his literary efforts when he lived (apart from other writers working in the pulp genre) and he never married, even though he had one long courtship that seems to have mellowed the bitter Howard greatly. When his mother died, Howard left this world soon after with the barrel of a gun in his mouth as a man aged 30.
On a lighter note, Tolkien and Howard were both, as we would see them now, just incredible NERDS. Men devoted to detail - or perhaps OBSESSION - over the fiction they threw themselves into.
To go back to our gaming reference, Tolkien is your archetypical over-planning game master. After all, he wrote an ENTIRE MADE-UP LANGUAGE for Lord of the Rings, based on his research - perhaps even before he wrote his books. He fussed over the details of his fantasy world to the extent that books detailing his background work were published long after he had died.
Howard can be seen as the negative nerd stereotype: a loner living with his mother, with seemingly poor interpersonal skills. But this is, again, perhaps a misinterpretation or at least an oversimplification. Howard was said to have enjoyed listening to stories told by others up to the point it was his favourite pastime. He may have been introverted, but he had a keen interest in people, spoken history and, it was told, an encyclopedic knowledge of history onto which he based his fiction. He was a person that was ATTRACTED to go out and seek out other people and hear their tales, even if he may have been the quiet sort. Also, while Howard may seem to be a pulp writer that got paid by the word, his fantasy fiction was based on his research into the myths and ancient history he so keenly studied. It may have been that Howard's fantasy worlds were as elaborately planned as Tolkien's, but he never let it show, unlike Tolkien, whose apocrypha is available to read for all, in the form Silmarillion and the like.
As a side note here, both of these writers of a bygone age are people I could see myself inviting for dinner. Consider Tolkien: the scholar and likely a kind, attentive, soft-spoken man. And consider Howard, while prone to introversion, a keen listener and man knowing many obscure facts - especially facts learnt word-to-mouth about his homeland Texas. Most of these facts are likely lost to history as Howard, sadly, never lived long enough to put to paper all he learnt while listening to his countrymen. I could imagine them being lovely company in this fantasy dinner party scenario. Contrast them to H. P. Lovecraft, another great influence to fantasy fiction and gaming who - despite his undeniable skill in worldbuilding and prose - seems more like simply an insufferable cretin of a human being.
“One more mention of biologically inferior races and it’s no dessert for you.”
As YET another side note, Howard and Lovecraft led very much parallel lives, writing to same magazines and even corresponding much with each other, with Howard expressing his admiration to Lovecraft at certain points. But whereas Howard seems to have grown as a person throughout his life, Lovecraft remained a racist and a bigot to the grave: his life paints perhaps even more of a miserable picture than Howard's. However it may be, both of these pulp-era writers left their undeniable mark in western popular culture, and both remain giant influences in the gaming genre to this day; Lovecraft nowadays more recognized than Howard, due to more heirs-to-the-throne in the sword and sorcery genre, than compared to Lovecraft's cosmic-horror genre with which he remains synonymous with.
Fantasy genre seems forever engaged in a dialogue with the past. For Tolkien, this was a dialogue with myths like Beowulf and other folklore. For Howard, it was dialogue with actual history and the myths of ancient lost (and mostly fictional) civilizations as presented by Helena Blavatsky and other obscurists popular during Howard's time.
To those writers that followed them, the fantasy genre is a dialogue as much with their predecessors than it is with history and myth. Modern fantasy master George R. R. Martin may be seen as a revisionist, but his prose is deeply influenced by Tolkien, as is his meticulous world-building. Even though Martin's story has shocking violence rooted in his historical inspiration - lending from the War of the Roses and other past events - the story in the Song of Ice and Fire is very much a tale of magic, prophecy, fate and the end of the world. Other contemporaries like Joe Abercrombie, while (arguably) less masterful in his prose, attacks Tolkien more head-on, with the magical destinies in his stories proving to be lies at best or at their worst, containing unknowable horror best left unearthed.
And what of the fantasy genre in gaming? It remains ever overshadowed by Gygax and his contemporaries, with Dungeons & Dragons remaining, after over 40 years after its publication, the defining and still most popular work in the genre. Most fantasy games, be they board games, role-playing games or computer games, are in dialogue with the framework set up by Gygax, by the way of Howard and Tolkien.
In my opinion, if there is one thing we can learn from Howard, the often overlooked and unintended father of the sword and sorcery genre (whatever it really means - a 100 years on the jury appears to still be out), it is the power of brevity.
Tolkien had all the time in the world to create his fantasy epic. As a struggling pulp fiction writer, Howard had none: if he did not come up with a new story that particular week, he would starve. He had to put out prose or he would be forced to beg for food to live.
And it has been said that Howard had a unique talent to paint a great picture with only a few words. This? This is a wonderful talent to have as a game master; a wonderful experience to have as a player. Instead of spending time to set the scene, a master storyteller like Howard will offer the most basic details in such a way that it inspires all that hear to explore further. Tolkien may be the father of world-building in the fantasy genre as we see it today, but Howard was a writer that left you wanting for more - and left you to fill in the blanks, very much like a good GM running a role-playing game would. In his brevity he created a framework I can see young Gygax - again, under his blanket as a child - wanting to know more and throw himself more deeply into this fantasy world, to the point he had to make one up himself to sate his curiosity.
I dare say any game master working in the fantasy genre could learn from Howard, this supposed father of the sword and sorcery genre. Tolkien's stories are of burden and responsibility while Howard's tales offer fantasies of freedom and adventure. The latter, in my mind, provides a more alluring thematic set-up for a game.
In the one Dungeons & Dragons campaign I ran as dungeon master I used - perhaps morbidly - the words of Howard's suicide note as an incantation to activate a doomsday weapon the player characters had. In the note found in Howard's typewriter after he died, he quoted a poem by Viola Garvin (a woman, again, we must note, for a man sometimes accused of misogyny). The quote reads as follows:
"All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over and the lamps expire."
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