Full points to Vancouver's Trinity Baptist Church for celebrating Hallowe'en by posting a bible verse* that sounds like the elevator pitch for a zombie horror movie.
- Sid
* And it's canon:
Colossians 1:18
And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.
I've been casually re-reading Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories - the originals from the 1930s, rather than the 1960s Lancer/Ace pastiches or the later efforts by other authors* - and I'm currently finishing off The Hour of the Dragon, Howard's only full novel-length tale of the grim Cimmerian warrior's adventures. Howard has a deft hand as an author: he's no Tolkien, but his style is well suited to his chosen material. However, even the best writers occasionally slip up, and Howard is no exception.
In The Hour of the Dragon, Conan has managed to achieve the throne of Aquilonia, one of the newer nations in Howard's Hyborian Age. However, his enemies have summoned up Xaltotun, a centuries-dead wizard, to aid them in invading Aquilonia, and they succeed in defeating Conan and his army through black sorcery. Conan is taken prisoner but manages to escape, and then seeks to find the Heart of Ahriman, a magical jewel which can be used to send Xaltotun back to the grave and allow Conan to regain his throne.
Howard writes the following descriptions of Conan's armour, specifically his helmet, over the course of his search for the gem:
Conan rode a great black stallion, the gift of Trocero. He no longer wore the armor of Aquilonia. His harness proclaimed him a veteran of the Free Companies, who were of all races. His head piece was a plain morion, dented and battered.
He heard a rush of feet, a bellow of oxlike agony. He was stunned but not wholly senseless, and realized that Beloso had caught up the iron box and crashed it down on his head as he stooped. Only his basinet had saved his skull.
Conan reeled out of the chamber, sword in hand, blood streaming down his face from under his burganet.
Whereas I appreciate Howard's desire to avoid repeating himself in his description of Conan's headgear, in this case he's actually gotten things completely mixed up in the process. The history of arms is a catalogue of description: the Roman lorica is distinct in its characteristics as opposed to Viking lamellar armour, and the evolution from 15th century full Gothic plate to 16th century Maximillian armour is quite clear.**
In this case, Conan begins his trip wearing a morion, a high-combed brimmed helmet from the 16th century, generally associated with Spanish conquistadors.
However, Howard then refers to Conan's helm as a basinet, which is a medieval open-faced helmet with a conical peak, generally worn with a chain mail aventail or scarf, and often equipped with a visor.
Conan then staggers out of the chamber in a burganet, a full-headed, high-peaked Renaissance helmet with a brim, and neck and cheek guards.
Admittedly, it's not like Howard could sit down at his keyboard and Google variations in armour, but it's still a surprising run of contradictory nomenclature - and a slightly ironic one, considering that generally illustrators have decided to equip Conan with some kind of non-functional fantasy helm with little horns on it.
- Sid
* Even some of the versions of the Conan stories that claim to be "original" suffer from minor changes in the hands of well-meaning editors. I suppose I could track down the individual stories through The Pulp Project, which has scans of early pulp magazines such as Weird Tales that published many of Howard's stories, but it feels like a lot of work.
** This is all drawn from my OTHER hobby, military history. As with my science fiction/fantasy/gaming/comics/movies fandom, I haven't focused on a specific area, but have a general historical interest in the field.
In addition to finding a Captain Canuck comic book that was a long way from home while shopping in Cardiff, I also spotted a bit of a curiousity, which, really, is what I most love to find in a used book store.
In this case, it was The Other Sky, a hard cover collection of Keith Laumer stories published by Dobson Science Fiction*, an imprint that was completely new to me - and I have a LOT of books.
Keith Laumer is a bit of a favourite author of mine, and that, coupled with the unknown provenance of the book's publisher, made it an easy purchasing decision at the modest price of ten pounds sterling - along with a pound and a half for the comic book.
However, the book had more than its share of the distinctive smell of old paper, with a touch of mould in the mix. As such, I bagged it up tightly for the remaining few days of our trip and kept it out of my luggage for as long as possible.
Once home, I did some research on the topic of old book smell, and the internet advised that I seal up the book with the contents of a box of baking soda in an airtight container for a few days. I was a bit amused to find out that the easy solution was apparently the same as dealing with refrigerator odour, and added baking soda to the shopping list.
Once equipped wth baking soda, I emptied out an appropriately sized plastic bin, dumped in the contents of the box, and put in a couple of vintage 35mm plastic film canisters as supports.
I added the innovation of a few toothpicks to spread some of the pages out and provide more surface area for the process, and sealed up the box.
I removed the lid three days later, and a cautious sniff revealed that there was still some lingering mustiness, but that it was overall much reduced. I put the lid back on and gave it a full week of adeodorizing, and the result is an almost odourless book - voilà, the system works, as I like to say.
- Sid
* As it turns out, Dobson Books was essentially a one-man publishing imprint run by one Dennis Dobson from 1944 until his death in 1978. Based in London and described as "a small but very literary and somewhat idiosyncratic firm", Dobson published a wide range of science fiction in addition to its other offerings. To my mild amusement, the Wikipedia listing for Dobson concludes with:
After his death the publishing company was wound down and his widow bought and restored Brancepeth Castle.
I love the implication that she was just waiting for Dennis to get out of the way so that she could ditch all of this publishing nonsense and follow her passion by buying a fixer-up fortification.
