Eric's Notes: Robert E. Howard, Grettir the Outlaw, and the origins of two-fisted Weird Fiction

I’m a big fan of Eric Williams’s blog, where he posts his read-throughs of classic pulp fiction. It’s the inspiration for my series on Pepys’s diary and Luigi Pulci’s Morgante. I asked if he’d fill in for me this week with a guest post and he didn’t disappoint, digging up a letter to the editor in Weird Tales from none other than REH on the topic of the Icelandic Sagas. Thanks Eric!

— Adam

Robert E. Howard, Grettir the Outlaw, and the origins of two-fisted Weird Fiction

One of the reasons for my admittedly obsessive interest in the pulps (popular fiction magazines printed in the U.S. during the early 20^th century, up to roughly World War II) is that they’re a rich archive of not only writers, but of readers as well. Almost every magazine had a “letters to the editor” section where readers wrote in to praise authors they loved, grouse about stories they hated, and generally offer their thoughts, suggestions, and musings about the magazine and the genres they were interested in. John Cheng, in his book Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (2012, University of Pennsylvania Press) makes a strong argument that the early expression of what we’d term science fiction “fandom” in the pulps was hugely influential on how people articulated ideas about science, technology, and their role in society; less grandly, these letter sections are also a remarkable record of the creation and codification of new genres of literature.

Case in point: dear old Weird Tales magazine. Ever since Farnsworth Wright took over the editorship of the magazine in late 1924, a constant topic of discussion in The Eyrie (the punningly named letters section of the magazine) was what, exactly, was a weird tale? It was often a contentious argument, and it led to some interesting editorial decisions on the part of Wright, including the blanket banning of “humorous” stories, the curtailment of the more “gruesome” horror, and perhaps most interestingly the introduction of a “classics” reprints section that included translations.

Now, if you want to read about these translations, check out Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation from Paradise Editions; I selected the stories and wrote an introduction that, hopefully, explains the importance of these stories to the history of the weird tale. But, as is so often the case, I had to cut a lot of fun stuff out of my intro in the interest of space, so I’m going to use this chance to dig a little deeper into one particular reader’s suggestion about translations that belonged in Weird Tales. Here it is, a little excerpt from a letter sent in to the magazine, printed in the May 1926 issue of Weird Tales:

That’s right, this is THE Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Cimmerian and the whole genre of Sword & Sorcery, writing in to suggest that Weird Tales might look into reprinting the Norse Sagas! Isn’t that great? It’s a tragedy that this excerpt is all that we have of this particular letter – almost all of the institutional archives of Weird Tales, including the accounting books, memos, contracts, original manuscripts, and (most tragically) the full text of readers’ letters were all lost to water damage, bugs, and a backyard garbage fire when they were stored incorrectly in some asshole’s garage for a couple of decades, an absolute crime. Howard was a voluble fellow, particularly in his letters, so I’d love to see what else he might’ve had to say about the sagas, or about other classics that he felt should be introduced to the readers of Weird Tales.

You might’ve noticed that Howard is identified as the author of “Wolfshead” here; this was a story that got the cover for the April ’26 issue of Weird Tales and, while it wasn’t his first work published with them (that’d be “Spear and Fang”, published in July of 1925), it was a particular favorite with a lot of the readers, who always loved a good werewolf story. Of course, most importantly, all of this is well before Conan, who wouldn’t show up until December of ‘32 (in “The Phoenix and the Sword”); this letter even predates other of Howard’s proto-S&S stories, like Solomon Kane (August ’28), Kull (August ’29), and Bran Mak Morn (Nov ’30)! So at this point, Howard is, from the view of the readers, a writer working firmly in the vein of horror and monsters and the weird tale. And that’s mostly what this letter of his seems to be about—he’s specifically calling out the fight between Grettir and a “vampire” as being the “peak of horror.” It’s only by taking a retrospective view that we can maybe glean the seed of some of Howard’s later action-oriented weird adventure stories that would be the foundation of later Sword & Sorcery.

Anyway, point being, this is a much younger Howard—he’s on the cusp of his twentieth birthday when this letter is published in Weird Tales. In fact, this is so early, Howard hasn’t even made the acquaintance of H.P. Lovecraft yet, with whom he would begin a voluminous correspondence in 1930! Moreover, Howard here is still a few months away from quitting his job to pursue professional writing—he’s still working as a stenographer at an oil company in Texas, doing his writing on the side when he can.

So for all of those reasons, when I first came across this little missive from Howard in Weird Tales, I was intrigued! He’s a young man at a very formative time of his writing career expressing a pretty strong opinion about what he considers to be some of the best horror in literature, and he’s advocating for it as a foundational part of the newly created genre of “weird fiction!”

The immediate thing that struck me as interesting here is the title Howard gives for this particular saga: Grettir the Outlaw. Now, I’m an inveterate reader of the sagas (in translation, of course), and I’d never encountered “Grettir the Outlaw.” I was familiar with the character of Grettir the Strong; my copy, a 1965 edition from the Everyman’s Library based on a translation by G.A. Hight from 1914, is titled Grettir the Strong. It’s often cited or discussed under that name, or else as the simplified Saga of Grettir or, if you’re real fancy, the Gretlla. It’s one of the big famous Icelandic Sagas, a major part of the corpus, so it stood out to me that Howard referred to it with such an idiosyncratic name that I’d never seen before.

Given that Howard is writing about this thing nearly a hundred years ago, I went back and looked for older translations of the saga that he might’ve had access to; these included the Hight translation I just mentioned, as well as a William Morris translation from 1869, Grettis Saga: The Story of Grettir the Strong; but there’s another one, and sure enough, this one is titled Grettir the Outlaw, published in 1880 and, even more interestingly, it’s the work of Sabine Baring-Gould!

Baring-Gould was a prolific writer and translator, but his name is near and dear to weird fiction afficionados because Lovecraft praised his book Curious Myths of the Middle Ages in his famous essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” It’s a fun book, and if you’re into that sort of thing, it’s available on the Internet Archive¹; lots of great medieval weirdness in it! For Lovecraft, Baring-Gould’s work was hugely important and very influential, inspiring (or at least suggesting some neat weirdness for) a number of Lovecraft’s own stories (including, synchronistically, “The Rats in Walls,” which was the story that precipitated Lovecraft and Howard’s friendship). So here is old Baring-Gould showing up once more to again inspire some weird fiction, this time for Robert E. Howard with his translation of Grettir’s Saga. That’s neat enough, seeing this connection between Howard and Baring-Gould’s Grettir the Outlaw, but I actually think it’s worth digging into the text of the translation to see how Howard was inspired by Baring-Gould in his own writing.

The “plain, almost homely language” that Howard claims “reaches the peak of horror” can only be from the part of the saga where Grettir, a rough and very Howardian protagonist who dreams of adventure and glorious battle, is fighting the undead shepherd Glam, who has been terrorizing the neighborhood. Now, in the Hight translation, from 1914 and therefore technically accessible to Howard, the fight is perfectly fine, but told with a certain bloodless remove:

When about a third part of the night had passed Grettir heard a loud noise. Something was tearing through the house, riding above the hall and kicking with its heels until the timbers cracked again. This went on for some time, and then it came down towards the door. The door opened and Grettir saw the thrall stretching in an enormously big and ugly head. Glam moved slowly in, and on passing the door stood upright, reaching to the roof. (p. 97)

Good stuff to be sure, but not exactly the spookiest scene in literature, is it? And what comes next in Hight’s translation would hardly seem to qualify as the “terrific night-long battle” that Howard is so excited about:

Suddenly Grettir sprang under his arms, seized him round the waist and squeezed his back with all his might, intending in that way to bring him down, but the thrall wrenched his arms till he staggered from the violence. Then Grettir fell back to another bench. The benches flew about and everything was shattered around them. Glam wanted to get out, but Grettir tried to prevent him by stemming his foot against anything he could find…(p. 98)

A perfectly fine wrestling match, but not necessarily what I’d call a “terrific night-long battle” you know? Both of these scenes are similarly dryly told in Morris’s translation, presented in the kind of stately, austere style that is meant to convey the dignity and importance of these texts as literature. But now compare these to Baring-Gould’s translation of Grettir the Outlaw:

There was a fire burning on the hearth, a smouldering heap of glowing embers, and by the red light Grettir looked up at the rafters of the blackened roof. The smoke escaped by a louvre in the middle. The wind whistled mournfully. The windows high up were covered with parchment, and admitted now and then a sickly yellow glare from the full moon, which, however, shone in through the smoke hole, silvering the rising smoke. A dog began to bark, then bay at the moon. Then the cat, which had been sitting demurely watching the fire, stood up with raised back and bristling tail, and darted behind some chests. The hall door was in a sad plight. It had been so torn by Glam that it had to be patched up with wattles. Soothingly the river prattled over its shingly bed as it swept round the knoll on which stood the farm. Grettir heard the breathing of the sleeping women in the adjoining chamber, and the sigh of the housewife as she turned in her bed. Then suddenly he heard something that shook all the sleep out of him, had any been stealing over his eyes. He heard a heavy tread, beneath which the snow crackled. Every footfall went straight to Grettir’s heart. A crash on the turf overhead. The strange visitant had scrambled on the roof, and was walking over that. The roofs of the houses in Iceland are of turf. For a moment the chimney gap was completely darkened—the monster was looking down it—the flash of the red fire illumined the horrible face with its lack-lustre eyes. Then the moon shone in again, and the heavy tramp of Glam was heard as he walked to the other end of the hall. A thud—he had leaped down. (p. 106-108)

I mean, holy smokes, that’s some atmosphere, huh? Obviously, Baring-Gould is taking some liberties with the original text, filling out the scene, expanding the descriptions, and generally just dramatizing the hell out of everything, adapting the story for a modern, late 19^th century audience… and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work! There’re some classic ghost story sensory descriptions in here—the howling dog, the startled cat, the mournful wind, the silvery moonlight. The red light of the fire and the dark night outside are perfectly evocative of the kind of menace that Howard would highlight in his own work, contrasting an all-consuming and dangerous wilderness with the small, fragile world of home and hearth. And the image of Glam walking up and over the turf roof of the house is phenomenal; compare it to the more staid “riding the roof” passage in the Hight translation. And how about Baring-Gould’s invention of Glam peering down into the house through the chimney louvre? I mean, that’s a great image, spooky and very menacing. It’s a very Howardian vision of the monster menacing the hero!

And if Howard liked that, you know he loved the fight that Baring-Gould describes:

Grettir started to his feet, bent his body, flung his arms round Glam, and driving his head into the breast of the visitor, tried to bend him backward and so snap his spine. This was in vain, the cold hands grasped Grettir’s arms and tore them from their hold. Grettir clasped them again about his body, and then Glam threw his also round Grettir, and they began to wrestle. Grettir saw that Glam was trying to drag him to the door, and he was sure that if he were got outside he would be at a disadvantage, and Glam would break his back. He therefore made a desperate effort not to be drawn forth. He clung to benches and posts, but the posts gave way, and the benches were torn from their places. At each moment he was being dragged nearer to the door. Sharply twisting himself loose, Grettir flung his arms round a beam of the roof, for the hall was low. He was dragged off his feet at once. Glam clenched him about the waist, and tore at him to get him loose. Every tendon in Grettir’s breast was strained; still he held on. The nails of Glam cut into his side like knives, then his hands gave way. He could endure the strain no longer, and Glam drew him towards the doorway, in so doing trampling over the broken fragments of the door, and the wattles that lay about. Grettir knew that the last chance was come for saving himself. Here, in the hall, he could hold to posts and beams, and so make some resistance; but outside he would have nothing to cling to, and strong though he was, his strength did not equal that of his opponent. (p. 109-110)

This might as well be a scene of Conan testing his mighty thews against some horrible, unearthly opponent! Now, again, you can definitely say that Baring-Gould is taking a liberal approach to his translation, but if what yer after is some serious blood-and-thunder Viking saga shit, then this is it! It’s scary, menacing, atmospheric, and there’s a knock-down drag-out fight with a horrible undead monster! No wonder Howard was so enthusiastic about this translation!

In terms of tone and approach, you can understand Howard’s enthusiasm for what is obviously a is a foundational text for him – atmospheric dread, the very visceral danger posed by something unearthly or unnatural, even having a horror tale set on the precarious edge of civilization (which Iceland was, at the time of Grettir’s Saga), all of these things are quintessentially Howard. It’s tempting to jump right to Conan and Sword & Sorcery, and while Grettir is basically a barbarian hero, we’re still a few years away from Howard exploring that particular approach to his stories. You can certainly argue that this translation of Baring-Gould’s is a part of Conan’s background, but when Howard is writing in to recommend Grettir the Outlaw to Weird Tales, he’s still very much a straight-forward weird fiction writer, interested in the horror aspect of the tale. And I think that, more directly, this saga inspires Howard to push his horror away from Lovecraft pastiches and more towards his own distinct style.

A good example of this is in his story “The Horror from the Mound,” published in Weird Tales in May of ‘32. This is one of the first “weird westerns,” a genre that is, basically, cowboy tales with monsters or magic in them. Now, obviously, Howard is well-positioned for this sort of thing, being an extremely regional writer from Texas fascinated by frontier folklore and horse operas. But there’re some interesting resonances between Howard’s story and Grettir the Outlaw.

First off, as I mentioned above, both the saga and “The Horror from the Mound” take place in farmsteads on a frontier, a setting of particular fascination for Howard. Secondly, the nature of the horrors in both is interestingly similar; in Grettir the Outlaw the undead monster, Glam, is a foreign farmhand who is killed by an unnatural evil thing, not given a proper Christian burial, and who then rises to terrorize the countryside, killing workers and even vampirically draining the life force of a landowner’s young daughter. In “The Horror from the Mound” the undead horror is a vampiric Spaniard that some conquistadors pick up in the Caribbean and bring along on their expedition through the southwest, before burying the monster in an old Indian mound (i.e., in unconsecrated ground).

But it’s the final battle between Howard’s protagonist, a cowboy farmer named Brill, and the vampire that borrows so heavily from Grettir the Outlaw. Brill, becoming aware that something is awry in the night outside, is seeking refuge in his little farmhouse when he’s confronted by a horrific face with icy piercing eyes staring in through his window, a scene very reminiscent of Glam staring in at Grettir through the chimney louvre in Baring-Gould’s translation. Then, mimicking Glam, Howard’s vampire pushes through the locked wooden door, scattering fragments everywhere as it bursts into the farmhouse. Brill and the vampire have a wrestling match that highlights the unnatural strength of the undead thing, a major point of Grettir’s struggle with Glam. Glam tears into Grettir with nails that cut like knifes, while Brill’s sides are scored by “long black nails like the talons of a panther.” Grettir perceives that his only hope is to break Glam’s back; Brill manages to lift the vampire up and break its back by dashing it against the edge of a fallen table. Both Glam and the vampire have horribly staring eyes that seem to pierce the soul. And, finally, both Glam and the vampire are finally and irrevocably slain when they’re burned and reduced to ashes.

Howard wrote in to Weird Tales to suggest Grettir the Outlaw in 1926, so it’s something that he, at barely 20 years old, had obviously already read and thought about and absorbed. Every writer draws on what they’ve read to some extent, so it’s not too surprising that Howard, a two-fisted lover of adventure stories, would find inspiration in the sagas. But it is interesting to see him drawing so much from Baring-Gould’s specific translation of a very particular saga, and I think his Grettir the Outlaw is a major source of both themes and style for Howard, perhaps just as much as Jack London or Talbot Mundy. Given the influence Howard has had on both weird fiction and sword & sorcery, I think it’s a pretty interesting to find a clue to his artistic lineage in a short little letter excerpted in a pulp magazine.

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Eric Williams lives on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous seaway in Austin, TX. His collection of original weird fiction, “Toadstones” (2022) is available from Malarkey Books, and he has selected and edited a collection of the fiction-in-translation that appeared in the early 20th Century pulp magazine Weird Tales, titled “Night Fears” (Paradise Editions, 2023).

1. Internet Archive is a great resource, and one that we’re at risk of losing, but I have a slight preference for Project Gutenberg texts where available, just as they have a tendency to be better formatted — Adam