Welcome back, Cromrades! We're excited to get rolling down
The Road of Revisions, and we go big with our first episode! Here we tackle the roots of Robert E. Howard's brand of sword and sorcery by going deep with the Kull/Conan dichotomy, and we call in our friend and Howard Scholar Karen Joan Kohoutek to provide us with her insight into this topic. Karen authored an insightful essay comparing "By This Axe I Rule!" and "The Phoenix On The Sword" which was
published on On An Underwood #5 July 22, 2018. Read that, and prepare for an epic exploration of these two stories!
The text analysis we discuss toward the end of the episode is below.
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| Fig. 1 - The Phoenix on the Sword - Most Common Words |
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| Fig. 2 - By This Axe I Rule - Most Common Words |
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| Fig. 3 - Most Frequent Words in "Axe" and "Sword" Combined. |
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| Fig. 4 - Frequent Word Pairs - Arrows Point to Second Word of the Pair, Increasing Shade of Arrow = Increasing Frequency of the Word Combination |
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| Fig. 5 - Sentiment Scores by Section of "Axe" and "Phoenix" |
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| Fig. 6 - Words Contributing Most Heavily to Sentiment Analysis in "Axe" and "Phoenix". |
One Things
Karen:
Star Wars Celebration in Chicago!
Jon:
Monster - The Zodiac Killer podcast
Josh: Joining The Appendix N Book Club Podcast for a series of episodes! Luke joined in for a discussion of L. Sprague De Camp's The Goblin Tower on
Episode 41, Jon was up next for Conan The Wanderer on
Episode 42, and Josh joined in for a Leiberian conversation about Swords Against Wizardry on
Episode 43.
Also, we joined Trick or Treat Radio for
Episode 350 and discussed
The Head Hunter.
If you haven't subscribed to these great shows, you absolutely should!
Luke: Death Metal Gardening! Spring renewal, green growth, and renewal by raiding the soil's nutrients for your crops!
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| Growth and Graves |
Next: A long-awaited story, and an old friend returns...
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| "In Mitra's name what is in that chamber?" |
Questions? Comments? Curses?
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Legal Mumbo-Jumbo
Our episode is freely available on archive.org and is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Themes by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0.
Outro: "
Steel and Silver" by Visigoth. All music was obtained legally; we hope our discussion of this content makes you want to go out and purchase the work!
