A Robert E. Howard Reader at Fantasy Con Scotland

"The Legend" by George Paul Chalmers (ca 1864),
illustrating a scene from The Pirate (1821) by Walter Scott

Scotland, befitting a land of inventors and innovators inspired by infinite imagination, has long been a fertile realm for the field of fantasy fiction. The enigmatic ruins & monuments of the land's lost peoples conjured tales of Fairies in the hearts & minds of Scots; the deep lochs veiled lurking Kelpies and monsters; the mountains & islands attributed to the work of Giants, or even the bodies of Sea Serpents. Those stories themselves sprouted forth poems, sagas, legends, and myths, clasping round history and geography like flame flowers around a standing stone, with new tales & works continuing to this day. So deeply entwined is our history with our legend, one could be forgiven for mistaking an unbelievable truth for a convincing legend, and the reverse. 

Writers across the world have taken a cutting or two from Scotland's wild garden of myth & history, from Shakespeare subverting & transforming history entwined with supernatural themes in Macbeth, to John William Polidori's Lord Ruthden in The Vampyr; Mary Shelley's time in Dundee & Edinburgh informing Frankenstein, to Bram Stoker's stay at Slains Castle providing a sumptuous visual canvas for Dracula; onward to David Gemmel fashioning his Rigante saga after the Scottish Highlands, Gregory Widen's visit to Scotland inspiring the immortal Highlander, & Diane Gabaldon's love of Scottish history leading to the Outlander series.  Authors as varied as Jules Verne, William Hope Hodgson, A. Merritt, Robert W. Chambers, M.R. James, Edmond Hamilton, Greye La Spina, Manly Wade Wellman, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Morgan Robertson, C. L. Moore, Seabury Quinn, Poul Anderson, Karl Edward Wagner, & many more besides have written stories about Scotland, Scots, or our stories.

Even a 20th century writer all the way in small-town Texas, who himself became founder & codifier of an entire genre within the wider field of fantasy, can trace those roots back to Caledonia.

Conan Across The Multiverse

The darkness hung in the old tomb's nighted halls like tapestries of a ghostly kingdom. Glinting pinpricks of dust flittered to the ground, disturbed for the first time in centuries by some errant gust from a nameless wind. The great jade sarcophagus laid upon a cracked lapiz-lazuli dais untouched for untold years, the silence unbroken since the death of the old dynasty. A thunderstroke cracked; a blast of dust and smoke burst as the sarcophagus lid shuddered open. A withered hand juddered from the gloom: grasping the lid, a skeletal husk heaved into the dim light. A skull wrapped in skin dry and pale as parchment loomed aloft. It gaped and gasped, coughing fitfuls of dessicated beard into the stagnant air like a dandelion clock. The figure looked, squinting its wrinkled eyelids uselessly over the sockets from which eyes once gazed.

"Ach, what are they up to now?"