H. Rider Haggard -- 95 Years Gone
Haggard near the end of his life. A titan amongst titans.
H. Rider Haggard passed away ninety-five years ago, as of yesterday. Vile meddlings by way of Stygian technomancy thwarted my efforts to pay my respects last night. Respects to the man whom each and every fan of "adventure" literature--no matter the stripe or flavor--owes a word of thanks.
Haggard was not quite sixty-nine when he passed away. He could rest easy, knowing that he'd written nearly sixty novels in forty years and that no author alive--with the possible exception of Agatha Christie--had sold more copies of their fiction. HRH’s classic novel, She, had sold well over thirty million copies at that point. That’s not counting the sales of King Solomon’s Mines or any of his other works.
The passing of HRH marked the end of a heroic era. He was the foremost titan amongst a titanic generation of mainly British authors--many of whom became Forefathers of Sword and Sorcery--who rose to prominence in the late 1800s. Haggard's torch was in good hands, having already been passed to the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Talbot Mundy, A. Merritt...and to a young Texan Haggard fan named Robert E. Howard.
The last ninety-plus years have seen Haggard's star slowly fade. There was a massive shift, in many ways, immediately after World War Two. A large percentage of the authors writing for the pulps and Men's Adventure Magazines after WWII were influenced by HRH either directly or indirectly. However, there was a zeitgeist in the air which said that all those titans from the time before the Bomb were somehow wrong, and that a "better way" could be found...or just hadn't been tried. Thus, the gradual memory-holing of H. Rider Haggard.
Haggard was also a victim of his decades-long success and ubiquity. Who needed to discuss HRH in Amra or other SFF fanzines when everybody already knew who he was and that he was a foundation-stone of the genre? I read The Spell of Conan--an anthology of Amra articles, which was basically my "Appendix N"--when I was twelve. Hardly any mention of HRH. Speaking of "Appendix N", it didn't mention Haggard either, although HRH invented many of the tropes used in various D&D modules. This utter failure to pass on an appreciation of Haggard is a major reason I didn't become a real HRH fan until five or ten years ago.
However, the times they are a-changin'. A lot of readers who simply want well-written adventure stories are getting tired of being told what and who to read. Looking around the blogosphere, there seems to be something Haggardian in the air. There have been several excellent blog entries on Haggard posted this year--and I'm not just talking about those here on the DMR blog. You can click on the links below.
Since I brought it up...I consider the DMR Blog the "Haggard Blog of Record". We consistently mention Haggard month after month, whether in actual blog posts or in "The DMRtian Chronicles". Anyone who disagrees with me is welcome to say so in the comment section below. Quite honestly, I would love to lose that title. That would mean someone was really stepping up and doing HRH justice.
Raise your mead-horns and drinking-skulls to the shade of H. Rider Haggard, sword-brothers!
Links to outstanding posts about H. Rider Haggard from the DMR Blog and from around the Net:
Rider Haggard: The Mythopoeic Gift That Never Stopped Giving
Forefathers of Sword and Sorcery: H. Rider Haggard
H. Rider Haggard and Fritz Leiber
Victory or Valhalla! A Review of The Wanderer’s Necklace
H. Rider Haggard: Creator of Lost Worlds