History doesn’t proceed amidst this never ending, bloody melee. A key feature of the trope is that the lives of the combatants have become a kind of strange, ahistorical purgatory, where nothing happens except violent death after violent death. The war has become one of mutual extermination because reconciliation between the two sides is no longer possible the conflict has festered to the extent that both sides have completely dehumanized the other side and they have dehumanized themselves as well. Each sides’ victory conditions have become amorphous, dangerously ill-defined if they are expressed, victory consists, quite simply, in the complete destruction of the enemy. Raw thirst for blood now defines the unending conflict. The original injustice cannot be rationally judged and righted because, sadly, no one really understands it or cares about it. At the beginning of the story, the original cause of the conflict is often obscured by the passage of time and has been forgotten by both sides therefore, the war has become interminable, even absurd. “The stalemate war” generally consists of two sides locked in a violent, hatred-fueled conflict.

Howard did this with “Red Nails,” and he did this masterfully. Their origins notwithstanding, there are undeniable recurring structures of story that resonate with us, and so storytellers return to them over and over, hone them, and reinvent for their own purposes. Why storytellers hew to these enduring patterns, who knows? Some speculate that these mythic patterns are evolutionary residues, instinctual psychological narratives that unconsciously narrate the crucible of our evolution. Howard’s most famous sword and sorcery character, Conan of Cimmeria: the way the barbarian maintains his humanity through compassion.įirst, let me briefly clarify what I mean by the literary trope of “the stalemate war.” Identifying tropes and patterns in literature and popular culture is more an art than a science, but it’s fun and often reveals surprising dimensions to works. “Red Nails” engages with several ancient literary tropes, but the one that centers “Red Nails” is what I term “the stalemate war.” By focusing on the stalemate war between the murderous Tecuhltli and insane Xotalanc, I hope to bring into focus a surprising facet of Robert E. Howard’s sword and sorcery tale “Red Nails,” published as a three-part serial in Weird Tales in 1936, tells the story of the city of Xuchotl, the enduring, blood-soaked war between the Tecuhltli and the Xotalanc, and the dehumanizing effect of sustained hatred and violence.

Red nails howard