Hey, on the cover for the comics, it says she was “created
by the author of Conan,” right? That means she was a pulp character, old as the
hills, with a long and storied tradition of publication before being ported to
the comics…right? There must be tons of old pulp era Red Sonja stories, right?
Not really.
Red Sonja was created in 1973 by Roy Thomas for Marvel
Comics, and she proved immensely popular. The name Red Sonja came from an utterly unrelated Robert E. Howard warrior
woman character, who didn’t even live in Conan’s time and used a pistol as well
as a sword. Every single detail about Red Sonja that we associate with the character,
her background as a Hyrkanian cossack and horse-nomad who’s family was killed, the chainmail
bikini, having the strength of many men, the fact she simultaneously loves and
also hates certain men in her life, and being a contemporary of
Conan, was all created by Roy Thomas for Marvel (the bikini armor she’s associated
with was created by Esteban Marroto).
There are “Red Sonja” novels, but they were written in the
1970s and 80s to cash in on the Sonja craze.
The primary inspiration for Red Sonja was not any of Howard’s
characters, but Catherine L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, a red-haired she-warrior
swordswoman described as having “the strength of many men,” who has trouble
with relationships because she both simultaneously loves and hates her
paramours, and who is a swordswoman with flaming red hair.
Ironically, Catherine Moore was actually friends with Robert E. Howard.
Drow
A lot of people assume Drow are in the same category of
fantasy creature as Trolls and Gnomes and so on, and have been around for
centuries in mythology and fairy stories. In reality, Wookiees have been around longer than Drow.
There are a couple of single-line references to
Black Elves in Keightley’s “Fairy Mythology,” and one totally unexplained
mention in the Eddas about elves below the earth….but nearly every single thing
about the Drow, including the name Drow, was created by Gary Gygax for his Dungeons and Dragons adventure module, Descent into the Depths
of the Earth, in 1978. Every detail about the Drow was created by Gygax:
the fact they are matriarchal, worship a spider-god, raise hunting panthers,
use two swords, have white hair and red eyes, and are completely evil empires
below the earth.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject, there were no Elves (at least as
fantasy gamers would recognize them) in Norse mythology. In the Edda, we learn there are beings called Alfar who are either supremely
beautiful and live in a world of light, or beings of pure darkness who dwell
under the earth. This could describe elves, sure…but it could describe angels and demons, too (in fact a common theory is that the Alfar are a very early sign of Christian influence on the Norse). Apart from two references in the Edda, we literally know
nothing about them. A few folklorists (including the Brothers Grimm,
incidentally, who were academics first and storytellers a distant second)
believe Alfar were a kind of household god that had to be appeased, and that
dark elves were just another name for Dwarves. Whatever “Alfar” were…they sure weren’t Legolas.
Flying Saucers
I see a lot of retro scifi art, and a personal pet peeve of mine is seeing people
who do retro art and they have flying
saucers in Republic-style 1930s serials. No science fiction featured flying
saucers until the 1950s, when it became a kind of post-war mass hysteria. Prior
to the 50s, most enemy, evil, or alien ships were depicted as rockets.
The term “flying saucer” came from an eyewitness report by a pilot named Kenneth Arnold in 1947, but it didn’t refer to the shape of the craft (he described it as boomerang shaped) but how it moved, describing it as “flying like a saucer skipping over water.” Because of the telephone game, this was garbled to mean a saucer-shaped craft.
The reason that flying saucers went away in scifi starting in the 1970s is that most scifi writers started to agree with Larry Niven: in space, there’s no resistance, so there’s no reason to give a spaceship aerodynamic lines. Niven was the first to make most of his starships spheres, since, as any geometry student knows, the sphere is the shape with the highest volume to surface area ratio (this is also why hot air balloons are spheres).
Talking like a pirate
Watch any of the Errol Flynn pirate movies of the 1930s/40s like the Sea Hawk and Captain Blood and you’ll notice something: nobody “talks like
a pirate.” The first movie to ever have characters that talk like a pirate is
the Disney Treasure Island film from 1950, where the actor who played Long John
Silver, Robert Newton, was of very, very rural West Country origin and used his
native “ooo, arr” sounding Cornish accent when playing Long John Silver. The West
Country/Cornish dialect has a few distinctive little quirks, like saying “Arr”
instead of “Aye,” and “he be” instead of “he is.” If you want to see another
movie with Cornish accents and words, see the Western “Legends of the Fall”
with Brad Pitt from 1994, which is about a Cornish immigrant family, and it’s
very funny because it’s a western where people “talk like pirates.”
On a related note, I’ve often heard that a number of
absolutely bizarre William Shatner mispronounciations (like saying sabotage “saba-TAY-ge”)
are actually a very real native Montreal thing.
The Klingon Language
A lot of people associate Star Trek with the ultra-nerdy
Klingon language, but for almost the first 20 years of Star Trek fandom, there was no Klingon language. The
Klingon language was created for Star Trek the Motion Picture by linguist Marc Okrand,
and the only time a Klingon dictionary was published was to coincide with Star
Trek III, in 1985.
Try to imagine if the most important and supremely geeky thing people associate with your fandom was something people started doing almost 20 years after it began.
Smallville
Superman had been published for years when the first reference was
made to Smallville in 1945. Early portrayals of Superman omit Smallville entirely, like the radio show and the serials.
The first reference to Smallville being in Kansas, though, was in John Byrne’s Man of Steel
series from 1986. If you read
Superboy stories from before then, while the geography was vague in a Springfield esque way…if anything,
it felt like rural New Jersey, not
Kansas (one Superboy story had a creature clearly modeled after the Jersey
Devil, and a flashback story showed pioneers in colonial times). It was clearly
not in the Midwest, since many stories put Smallville as close to a beach and
ocean.
Mooncustafer 