Spear and Fang

by Robert E. Howard

"Spear and Fang" is a short story by Robert Ervin Howard. Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He is well known for his character Conan the Barbarian and is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre. Howard was born and raised in the state of Texas. He spent most of his life in the town of Cross Plains with some time spent in nearby Brownwood. A bookish and intellectual child, he was also a fan of boxing and spent some time in his late teens bodybuilding, eventually taking up amateur boxing. From the age of nine he dreamed of becoming a writer of adventure fiction but did not have real success until he was 23. Thereafter, until his death at the age of 30 by suicide, Howard's writings were published in a wide selection of magazines, journals, and newspapers, and he had become successful in several genres. Although a Conan novel was nearly published into a book in 1934, his stories never appeared in book form during his lifetime. The main outlet for his stories was in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Howard’s suicide and the circumstances surrounding it have led to varied speculation about his mental health. His mother had been ill with tuberculosis his entire life, and upon learning that she had entered a coma from which she was not expected to wake, he walked out to his car and shot himself in the head. In the pages of the Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales, Howard created Conan the Barbarian, a character whose cultural impact has been compared to such icons as Tarzan, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and James Bond. With Conan and his other heroes, Howard created the genre now known as sword and sorcery, spawning many imitators and giving him a large influence in the fantasy field. Howard remains a highly read author, with his best works still reprinted. Howard spent his late teens working odd jobs around Cross Plains; all of which he hated. In 1924, Howard returned to Brownwood to take a stenography course at Howard Payne College, this time boarding with his friend Lindsey Tyson instead of his mother. Howard would have preferred a literary course but was not allowed to take one for some reason. Biographer Mark Finn suggests that his father refused to pay for such a non-vocational education. In the week of Thanksgiving that year, and after years of rejection slips and near acceptances, he finally sold a short caveman tale titled "Spear and Fang", which netted him the sum of $16 and introduced him to the readers of a struggling pulp called Weird Tales. Now that his career in fiction had begun, Howard dropped out of Howard Payne College at the end of the semester and returned to Cross Plains. Shortly afterwards, he received notice that another story, "The Hyena," had been accepted by Weird Tales. During the same period, Howard made his first attempt to write a novel, a loosely autobiographical book modeled on Jack London's Martin Eden and titled Post Oaks & Sand Roughs. The book was otherwise of middling quality and was never published in the author's lifetime but it is of interest to Howard scholars for the personal information it contains. Howard's alter ego in this novel is Steve Costigan, a name he would use more than once in the future. The novel was finished in 1928 but not published until long after his death.

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories

150 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1925

About the author

Robert Ervin Howard was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. Howard wrote "over three-hundred stories and seven-hundred poems of raw power and unbridled emotion" and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of "a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror."

He is well known for having created—in the pages of the legendary Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales—the character Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian, a literary icon whose pop-culture imprint can only be compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.

—Wikipedia

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Drew Canole · Rating 2 out of 5]

A short caveman story. Pretty generic stuff but with REH's usual verve so it's not bad.

Adapted in comics by Richard Corben.

[Nomon Chaudhry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty simple and straight forward story. I was looking for more stuff like Gendy Tartakovsky's Primal. Leave to R.E.H. to have what I was looking for. It's pretty simple and plays by the common beats; pretty girl, bad man, monster, good boy save girl. Can't fully fault it though, this was one of R.E.H.'s first published stories.

[John Yelverton · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have never been a huge fan of caveman stories, particularly when there's an undercurrent of racism involved, but add to that the premise of the story is a series of attempted rapes and I just could not enjoy this short story.

[Michael Sorbello · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent stone-age fantasy story. A girl gets abducted by a beast-man, a strong warrior fights the kidnapper to the death and gets her back. Not spectacular, but a nice example of early sword and sorcery.

[Per · Rating 1 out of 5]

https://archive.org/details/WeirdTale...
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0607...

The Clan of the Cave Bear meets Conan the Barbarian.

Robert E. Howard's first published short story and his first appearance in Weird Tales, a Tale of the Cavemen -- Neandertalers and Cro-Magnards. Given what we know about these relatives of Homo sapiens today, it's certainly both racist and misogynistic... honestly, even if our understanding hadn't changed in the last 100 years, it would still be pretty damn racist and misogynistic.

[mabuse cast · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first published short story of sword and sorcery fiction pioneer Robert E Howard, which is celebrating its 100 year of publication this year in 2025!

Mostly a pretty standard caveman/prehistoric adventure yarn but still very well done and executed for what it is and it is always fun to take a look at an author like Howard's first published work and see just how far they would go!

[Erik Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great story & a great look at one of Mr. Howard’s earliest work. Its simply written for simpler times, one just needs to remember this before discounting it.
Its a short story that hits all the right points for its time from an incredibly imaginative man.

[Gianluca Fiore · Rating 4 out of 5]

A simple, even simplistic, short story that can be read in minutes. Not Conan-related, and not fantasy either.

[Andrew Hale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure: any man or beast that forced themselves on anybody in this tale, whether through societal hierarchy elitism or through savage beastly mentality, is met with a bloody demise. No glorification for them so no need to be upset about the topic. More so, I did not in any way take the Neandertals to be any race-specific group for modern-day humans (though oddly others do?), but the Neandertals here are as one that died out to the Cro-Magnon humans, and therefore all men and women, black and white and so forth, come from the Cro-Magnon group here. Any modern day viewings of the Neandertals would be werewolves or ogres, etc, as clearly stated by Howard in this tale.

Ga-nor, a pre-historic sandy-haired "artist", captures the wonderment of A-aea, a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. Both, as the author states, fine specimens of the Cro-Magnon peoples. The Cro-Magnon have seemingly emerged to overcome the Neandertals, man-apes, savage creatures that spawn the legends of werewolves and ogres. Scarier even than these archaic beasts is the over-privileged son of a councilor, Ka-Nanu, a man who takes what he wants with the political power to back him, even if we are talking about a prehistoric and barbaric people. Ka-Nanu and Ga-nor are examples of progressed humans, one who is proud of his domineering nature over men and women, using it over women to his pleasure, and the other willing to meddle in things that interest him but are no affair of his. A-aea is an example of the primitive cultures more strict and narrow attitudes towards the roles of men, women, and hierarchies. With the Neandertals, they take what they want, like Ka-Nanu, but without targets of malice, without the political intrigue of connections, and without even caring to mingle with each other. They hold no interest and wonderment or fondness or concern, like Ga-Nor. No desire for the romance of man and woman. It's a barbaric world and a quick story of struggle between the classes of the "modern man", and between the older ages of savage beasts.

I wonder if Genndy Tartakovsky took any inspiration from this tale, from the name, to the barbarism of civility and expansion, to the brutality of man and creature.