My Universe R Bookshelf
Like Howard Andrew Jones, my monitor occasionally reflects a view of my study in a parallel world: Universe R. The bookshelf is interesting indeed. I managed to email my counterpart, Wodehawk, and he told me about his two favourite books:
Good King Richard’s Book of the Fight (1487-1492)
After winning the Battle of Bosworth by single-handedly striking down his rival (often termed “The Coolest Axe-Blow in History”), King Richard worried that gunpowder and the natural indolence created by peace would kill of the Martial Arts. For this reason he commissioned a book capturing the fighting styles of the knights and commoners of Merry England. It runs to seven volumes, and was Caxton’s bestseller. The table of contents is enough to make me weep.; “Of Sword and Shield… Of Great Falchion… Of the Great Sword… Of the Bill and Glaive… Of How a Knight Shall Fight Alongside his Lance… Of How a Knight Shall be Armed (including a discourse on which is better: Armet or Sallet?)… Of the Folly of Fighting with Two Swords… and Good King Richard’s Axe and Buckler Plays.”
Howard and Tolkien’s “Strider the Ranger Series”
One of the stranger quirks of literary history is the collaboration between the big morose Texan pulpster and the genteel Oxford don.
To blame is a mechanical fault that saved Howard’s life when he tried to commit suicide, propelling him into volunteering in the Spanish Civil War. The wounded Howard had been shipped to England by sympathisers. Though he was still distraught by the death of his buddy Hemmingway - as everybody knows, the two finally egged each other on into a heroic but fatal escapade within six months of the war’s end – he immediately hit it off with the academic.
Tolkien, on his part, saw in the Texan “…the very manifestation of the men of Middle Earth.” Abandoning attempts to create what would have been a very cumbersome work in the Romantic tradition, Tolkien set about cheering up his new friend.
What started out as a weekend’s literary game on the banks of Lake Windermere, blossomed into a collaboration that only ended with Tolkien's death in 1973. Who has not thrilled at Strider’s adventures in the mysterious Eastern Lands (the classic example being “Strider the Oliphant Rider”)? Or gawped at arguably the highpoint of the series where Strider carves his way into Mordor, hacks off the head of the Dark Lord, and casts it into the pit of a volcano?
An interesting literary footnote is Tolkien’s little-read solo effort “Lord of the Hyborian Age”. Howard, in mourning for his friend, revived this project and spent the years 1975 until 1990 knocking out well over a million words in the what became known as the Conan Saga. The child who grew up listening to the tales of old gunfighters, lived to see his vision translated to silver screen, TV, and ultimately - as a grand old man - computer games.
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