The beginning of the 20th century, continued

The american author Robert Ervin Howard was a very peculiar person. As a child he was quite weak and hardly dared to go outside out of fear of being beaten by more robust boys, so he rather stayed inside devoting himself to literature. At the age of fifteen he decided to be an author and got his first story published at the age of seventeen. He published about 160 stories, many in the magazine "Weird Tales".
1932 was the year when he wrote the first story about Conan the Barbarian, which would become the character that Howard would be known for. Howard has had a deep influence on the genre Sword&Sourcery.
Howard had a mother fixation and when she lay on the death-bed in the year 1936 he killed himself.

In 1922 the english author Eric Rucker Eddison (1882-1945) published a novel by the name of "The Worm Ouroboros". The story was about an english man (by the name of Lessingham) who is transefered to a secondary world (Mercurius is mentioned briefly). He will there watch the conflict between different nations: The conflict is solved, but by then the conqueror realizes that their existence becomes pointless and they asks the Gods to be able to continue fighting, and the story starts all over. Ourous is the snake that bites is tale, a symbol of infinity.
Eddison major work was the trilogy about Zimiamvia. It consisted of "Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia" (1935), "A Fish Dinner in Memison" (1941) and "The Mezentian Gate" (1958), the latter uncompleted. They were assembled as "Zimiamvia: A Trilogy" (1992) together with other unreleased material.

- The Inklings

Books at Amazon.co.uk (England):
Beyond the Borders
Conan the Warrior
Conan the Conqueror
The Worm Ouroboros

Books at Amazon.com (USA):
The Worm Ouroboros

http://hem.passagen.se/gumby/
Calle Åsman [emsworth [at] gmx [dot] net]