Man, no one could translate the fiction of Robert E. Howard into an image like Frank Frazetta! — as above, in his painting for the Lancer paperback of the novel Conan the Conqueror, and in pretty much every other Howardian image he ever tossed out.
The guy was kind of definitive on showing off a horse to best advantage, too.
The Howardian mode of transport this week is The Horse, which perhaps appears more times in his writing than even The Viking Ship. As above, ridden by Conan — and in other Conan exploits. In “Worms of the Earth” and others featuring the last Pictish King, Bran Mak Morn. In the saga of the Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane. In the form of Cap’n Kidd, the wild steed straddled by old Breck Elkins. In the many other Western tales, and the ripping yarns of El Borak.
And more.
Howard got a lot of mileage out of horses.
I guess I could do like some other REH websites and ripoff some technical mumbo jumbo from the web — such as this opening off Wikipedia: “The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus. It is an odd-toed ungulate mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature, Eohippus, into the large, single-toed animal of today. . . .”
Yeah, yeah — if you want to know more about the horse, just punch it up. Some of the REH sites seem to think their audience is too dumb to use Google. Hey. . . .
Today, celebrate the Howardian horse from the pastern (Iä! Dr. Sam: Johnson!) to the mane.
