THE DEEP ONES: "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" by Robert E. Howard

"The Fire of Asshurbanipal" by Robert E. Howard

Discussion begins May 13.

First published the December 1936 issue of Weird Tales.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601741.txt
http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1667/the-fire-of-asshurbanipal (free eBook)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?59563

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Nameless Cults: The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert E. Howard
Skull-Face Omnibus
Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors

MISCELLANY

http://www.robert-e-howard.org/Dwelling2.html
http://www.sffaudio.com/?p=29829
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashurbanipal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mtL8e4hE78
http://tinyurl.com/pob87zh

The vaunted cover-story treatment!

Online for me, tip o' the pith helmet to artturnerjr & KentonSem.

Downloaded the Feedbooks version linked to in >1 semdetenebre: and read it last night. I gotta say, the similarities between it and the Clark Ashton Smith story we discussed earlier this week kinda freaked me out.

> 2

You know, if I had a pith helmet, I'd wear it every day. Unless I was wearing my fez, of course. Nameless Cults for me!

I read it over the weekend in The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard.

I accidentally read the non-supernatural version in Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos. I've found the later version in The Haunter of the Ring & Other Tales

>6 housefulofpaper: non-supernatural version

! (just discovering this differentiation)
Odd that it should have been published in a collection with that title and theme. The supernatural one in WT was the first published, if not the first drafted.

That's what I get for failing to read the editorial notes in The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, which I feel confident covered this issue. Maybe tonight when I get home.

Oh, Bob.

It was not altogether greed for the fabled gem that had prompted Steve Clarney to risk his life in that grim wilderness; deep in his soul lurked the age-old heritage of the white man, the urge to seek out the hidden places of the world, and that urge had been stirred to the depths by the ancient tales.

That line gave me a chuckle, too. And there were a few others, I think, a bit purple. But I'm not a regular reader of REH, and overall I found it effectively written. Certainly it benefits from recent comparison with that unfortunate CAS story.

I remarked this line: "The desert became not merely a material wasteland, but the gray mists of the lost eons, in whose depths dreamed sunken things."

With "The Fire of Asshurbanipal", I discovered everything missing from CAS's "Invisible City": tentacles! The Necromonicon! References to deep time and a universe seemingly all too willing to annihilate anything on Earth, without a blink! And, ancient wisdom, this time Bedouin, warning puny scientists there's more out there than will ever be understood.

I will say, however, that explorers would do better than slogging through desert wastes in the blazing heat of day. That Explorer Handbook at the bottom of the Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs should have told them that, but apparently neither CAS nor REH ate much breakfast cereal.

>6 housefulofpaper: >7 paradoxosalpha:

That was my first inkling of the two versions. Can't imagine the non-supernatural version would do much for me, but I'm curious what happens absent the supernatural menace.

I think Ryan Harvey (LT member Z-Ryan) pretty much nails this one in his review of the tale on the Black Gate website:

...Howard cleverly (or perhaps unconsciously, if he was writing this story at his usual furious speed) grafts the alien mythos beings into his fantasy-historical-adventure setting, where two tough adventurers can confront the unfathomable of a Lovecraftian nasty, and emerge intact on the other end. Changed, but not destroyed. The last few paragraphs utilize a common Lovecraft trope, one that Derleth would employ over and over again in his pastiches: the post facto revelation of the horror that had previously gone undescribed when the characters confronted it. Clarney here describes a distinctly Cthulhoid creature (wings, tentacles, “toadish”), offers a few passages about cosmic creatures the Assyrians may have summoned, and swears never to speak of it again. But this Lovecraftian conclusion is counterbalanced by the paragraph before: “Steve made no reply until the comrades had once more swung into the saddle and started on their long trek for the coast, which, with spare horses, food, water and weapons, they had a good chance to reach.”

(https://www.blackgate.com/2010/01/22/%E2%80%9Cthe-fire-of-asshurbanipal%E2%80%9D-the-first-time-i-met-robert-e-howard/)

As I noted in >3 artturnerjr: above, the resemblance to our last tale (CAS' "The Invisible City") is almost uncanny. In both stories, two adventurers, running low on supplies, exploring a Middle Eastern locale (Turkestan is mentioned by name in both tales, iirc), encounter a lost city. Together, they present a good argument for the notion that the Indiana Jones films were at least as influenced by the pulps as they were old movie serials.

I like REH's desert tales. The sense of place is so evocative, one practically requires a glass of water while reading. High adventure, lots of exotic action and deadly menace. They make an interesting counterpoint to his westerns. I really didn't care too much for the Mythos template being retrofitted over the original non-supernatural tale in this case. The "you can look but please don't touch" rule for the gem is kind of silly. And what is it with all the fearsome toad-monsters (with or without tentacles) in early weird tales?

>11 artturnerjr:

From a craft perspective, Harvey's note about "the post facto revelation of the horror" struck me as very Edgar Allan Poe, where the rising pitch of tension and drama in the prose is at odds with my reading experience, since the story has fairly well revealed already what is stated in the closing sentences. "The Tell-Tale Heart" is an exemplar, if I recall aright. I see that it has a purpose, it emphasizes Steve's subjective experience at the time of the encounter, precisely by making the reader wait for it. Another example of the narrator focusing not on the Thing, but on the character's reactions to it. But for me at least, reading the actual revelation to the reader is a let-down.

Interestingly, I don't think it would work quite as well if the author simply left off the revelation. It would seem a cop out. But there's something about this approach that doesn't quite work for me, even admitting it's better than some alternatives.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

"They believed it to be the ancient City of Evil spoken of in the Necronomicon of the mad Alhazred" is in the original. That, and its obscurity, was I gather sufficient for Robert M. Price to include this version in his anthology.

>10 elenchus:

The first half of the story is virtually identical to the supernatural version. Once Steve Clarney and Yar Ali find the gemstone, the menace isn't laid on quite so thick. The gem is evidently just a gem. Nuredin el Mekru gets the drop on them identically in both versions. The Bedouin warn against touching the gem, but we don't great the long info-dump about Xuthltan (comparing the two versions really exposes that section for what it is). When Nuredin touches the gem, he is bitten by a snake that had been hiding in the skull. His followers flee, Steve and Yar Ali get the abandoned horses, water, and the gem. A happy ending!

Ah, very much more in the Indiana Jones vein, with Nuredin standing in for the nefarious Belloq.

Thanks for the summary, guess I'd enjoy both versions well enough, but not enough to seek out the other version.

>14 housefulofpaper:

Thanks for that, Andrew.

A lot of nested stories in this, but it worked as an historically based adventure story. We hear the story of the jewel. Nureddin has a story to tell about Xuthltan.

Howard makes his history credible and his references to Assyrian art and history anchor the story to our world than Smith's story.

Despite the end and Clarney's unease, I didn't feel any great sense of cosmic horror, though.

BTW, can those familiar with Howard's whole work tell me if scriptwriters John Milius and Oliver Stone were inspired by this skeleton clutching a jewel for the scene in Conan the Barbarian where Conan gets his sword from a skeleton?

>17 RandyStafford: tell me if scriptwriters John Milius and Oliver Stone were inspired by this skeleton clutching a jewel for the scene in Conan the Barbarian where Conan gets his sword from a skeleton?

Nope. That scene was inspired by a Conan story by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, called "The Thing in the Crypt."

It may be (in fact, is likely) that de Camp and Carter were inspired by "The Fire of Asshurbanipal." A wikipedia article on the story notes its similarity to the 14th-century Icelandic Grettis saga.

>18 paradoxosalpha: Thanks for that insight. I'll take a look at the wiki article.

>18 paradoxosalpha:

Does it strike you (or anyone else here) as slightly insane that all the Conan pastiche stories have their own Wikipedia entries but several important REH stories (e.g., many of his Kull tales and all of his Solomon Kane stories) do not?