Cimmeria!

Cimmeria
by Robert E. Howard

It was gloomy land that seemed to hold
All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,
With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,
And the dark woodlands brooding over all,
Not even lightened by the rare dim sun
Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.
It was so long ago and far away
I have forgotten the very name men called me.
The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,
And hunts and wars are like shadows. I recall
Only the stillness of that sombre land;
The clouds that piled forever on the hills,
The dimness of the everlasting woods.
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

The 1932 poem "Cimmeria" was discovered by Glenn Lord and first published in The Howard Collector #7 in 1965.


Later Barry Windsor-Smith got hold of it and developed an interesting version of his own. It first appeared in Savage Tales #2 in 1973.


That Smith original was apparently in a somewhat incomplete condition and later Roy Thomas and Tim Conrad developed another version using much of Smith's original material. Here are Conrad's version and a more complete and more lush Smith version compared page by page.











You can see that the endings in particular are different.

This piece has been reprinted in some form many times.






I offer this up in memory of the late Glenn Lord.

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