Dark Age

One of the great unmentioned issues with the classic Sword & Sorcery fiction is the extremely iffy treatment of race. Now, race as a whole has been and remains a problem in fantasy fiction overall, with far too many authors content to imagine worlds where the only dark-skinned people are either servants or nonexistent. Far too often, fantasy worlds are just “Medieval England, only everywhere,” positing a world where other races and cultures exist only as distant theoreticals.

But Sword & Sorcery started off a little different. When Howard invented the Hyborian Age, he based it on a fictionalized version of a historical Earth, and so he included a lot of kingdoms and people who were not white people. This was, it has to be said, somewhat revolutionary for fantasy at the time, though not so much when one considers the adventure fiction Howard was strongly inspired by.

“Adventure Fiction” as it was understood in the late Victorian period and into the 20^th century, could be more accurately called “White Explorer Fiction”. After all, the genre itself grew out of the colonial experience of mostly British writers who had served in the overseas possessions of the crown: Africa, India, and the Middle East. Their experiences with criminal elements, fractious politics, and unfamiliar cultures led them to write down their stories, and led to a public appetite for such stories of adventure in “exotic” lands. Writers who had never been out of their home country were more than happy to supply the demand, filling in with imagination what they lacked in knowledge.

Howard was inspired by this tradition, though the colonial age had largely passed by the time of his writings. The tropes and archetypes of those kinds of stories remained, and the market for them remained as well. Howard himself wrote and sold numerous tales set in the Middle East or Africa, spinning action-packed stories about the brave white adventurer against Tuaregs, Yezidis, and Thugee cultists.

So when he made his fantasy world, he made room for those kinds of settings and the people who lived there. His world features nomadic Hyrkanians, mysterious and ancient Shemites, and Kushites standing in for (respectively) Mongols, Egyptians, and Africans.

Howard grew up in the post-oak belt in Texas, a country that had been part of the deep south, and in the 1920s was only a few generations removed from slavery. It was not a progressive, inclusive environment to grow up in, and furthermore, this was the era when “scientific racism” was quite well thought of, and there was thought to be real science behind the idea that white Europeans were superior to everyone else.

So considering his background, Howard was pretty liberal. He no doubt discovered that if you are going to have other civilizations, then you have to accord the people who built them a degree of intelligence and humanity you can otherwise not bother with. Ironically, as his hero was a barbarian, he was able to see all civilizations as equally strange and foolish, and this worked against the overt racism.

Because Howard was a racist, it is just not possible for a white man of his time and place to not be. However, it is interesting to note that Lovecraft – who lived in New England and had little contact with non-whites most of his life – was virulently racist. While Howard, who no doubt had much more familiarity with African Americans, was not nearly so bad about it. He openly considered different races to be different, because that was the prevailing idea of his time. But even though he never wrote a non-white protagonist, he accorded the nonwhite characters he did have a degree of respect and admiration for their good qualities you do not often find in fantasy fiction, even if the openly racial way he expresses this is deeply uncomfortable to a modern reader. Howard may not have considered nonwhites to be as good as whites – though he never really said one way or another – but he certainly considered them to be human.

Sadly, this is a position a lot of other S&S authors have avoided or simply muffed. Too many fantasy worlds are simply too white, and nonwhite cultures rarely appear in them, or only as some place referred to, far away over the sea. Even Moorcock bungled it when he was making Elric into his anti-Conan, because really, despite how tanned he is depicted in art, Conan is as white as it gets, and to really be his opposite Elric should have been black. It remains a fact that authors who want a barbarian hero will bend over backwards to create white barbarians and then laud them for their vigor and strength, while never considering any other color.  It is sad that after almost a hundred years, things have not changed very much.