2. The Dreams of the Dane
Now autumn comes and summer goes,
    And rises in my heart again,
As witchfire glimmers through a pool,
   The mystic madness of the Dane.


    In a letter to Preece, written circa April 1930, Howard furnished further genealogical data, correcting some of his previous statements, but also confirming the idea that he was slowly abandoning his idea of a pure - Gaelic - ancestry:
 

One of my great-grandfathers was born somewhere on the Atlantic ocean between the coast of Kerry and New York - I mean, my great-great-grandfather - he was of the old Gaelic family of the MacEnry. He married Anna O'Tyrrell, who was born in Connaught. Another of my great-great-grandfathers was born in Georgia of Scotch-Irish parents. Another was born in Denmark and he married an Irish-American woman in Mississippi. But enough of that; I didn't start out to give my family tree - only to illustrate the unlikelihood of our ancestors to perform according to the mandates of pure racial lineage. Looking back over three hundred years I can find only one member of the family who did not trace his line back to Ireland, whether his name was English, Irish or Scotch - the red bearded Danish giant who was one of my great-great-grand-fathers.


    Anna O'Tyrrell's name was now correctly-spelled, and the "Dano-Irish O'Walser" had become a "red-bearded Danish giant", though this particular ancestor is not mentioned by name. It seems difficult to say whether Howard was aware or not at this time of the identity of his ancestor. That he was red-headed was perhaps deduced from the fact that Howard's great-grandmother - Mary Ann Walser - had been red-haired: "Well, I am largely Gaelic; Irish, and Scotch-Irish, and Norman-Irish, and Anglo-Irish, and straight Norman, with a touch of the Dane - Dano-Irish, from a red-headed great-grandmother." ("A Touch of Trivia" (circa 1930), in Glenn Lord (Ed.) The Last Celt).
    He repeated all this to Lovecraft in a September 1930 letter, once again without mentioning the name of the mysterious ancestor:
 

My branch of the Howards came to America in 1733 and the first of the American line married an Irish girl, an example from which no Howard has since deviated, to my knowledge. Behind my English name are lines of purely Gaelic Eiarbhins, O'Tyrrells, Colquhouns, MacEnrys, and Norman-Irish Martuins, De Colliers, FitzHenrys. Yet there is a Scandinavian strain at [sic] me, for one of the MacEnrys of my line married the daughter of an Irish woman and a red-bearded Dane who first opened his eyes on the cold shores of the Skaggerack.
    Howard thus appears to have been more and more interested in this peculiar Danish strain. And if the realization of his Norman heritage was instrumental in the creation of Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, one could also wonder if the Dano(-Irish) heritage could not explain the emergence of Nordic characters in Howard's fiction. Athelstane the Saxon (in the Turlogh O'Brien stories) may have been the first of a series of characters born out of Howard's interests in his own ancestry: just as Turlogh is a Gaelic warrior and exile, Athelstane is a warrior and "a strange man… [a] renegade Saxon who hunted with the wolf-pack of the North - a savage warrior in battle, but with fibers of kindliness in his make-up which set him apart from the men with whom he consorted" ("The Gods of Bal-Sagoth"). Shortly after the creation of Athelstane, Howard came up with another Irish character, Cormac Mac Art, always accompanied by the ferocious Wulfhere. His kinship with Howard's red-bearded ancestor makes little doubt, since he is described as a "Viking from the Dane", and a "red-bearded giant".
       Hence, at a time when Howard considered his "Danish strain" a minor element of his ancestry, his Nordic characters were only secondary characters to the stories.

    The comparison of two letters sent to Harold Preece at the occasion of a change of season, one in September 1928 and the other in October 1930, perfectly illustrates the change that was taking place in Howard. In the September 1928 letter, Howard wrote:
 

The tang of winter is in the air and in the brain of me. Old age comes upon me prematurely, like a mist from the cold sea and deep and dreary in the gulfs of my soul stir old ghosts of dreams. For the love of winter is not upon me and the desire moves in me ever for green trees and grass bursting in jade tides up through the pulsing sod. And the love of slow lazy rivers is on me, and leaf gowned branches bending close to their bosoms; and warm winds and blazing stars when the nights are still and the good lush earth caresses your careless limbs with her warmth. […] When the cold winds come and the sleet is sharp in the air, when the fogs drift grey and the frost is white, the desire of me wings south and the song of the wild geese is a threnody which shatters my brittle heart with fierce longing. […] Why should I dream of lazy islands dreaming on the surging jade breast of the deeps? Should my dreams follow the lines of my ancestry as men say, I would only dream of rocky hills and mesquite flats shimmering in the sun; of flat valley bottom plantations where sweating negroes sang beneath the lash; of the wild barren wind swept wastes of Galway's coasts; of a wilder and more brooding land of icy cliffs and sullen harbors.


    In October 1930, the sensations were the same, but the longings had changed:
 

The tang of fall is in the air and the whisper of autumn in the skies. Summer is waning into the yellow leaves of all the yesterdays and the heart of me is thin and old. The sky is deep and blue and mysterious with the changing of the seasons and strange thoughts stir deep in me, but age forever steals on me in the autumn of the year, and though I am young, my soul is old and wavering like a thread-bare garment outworn. All that is deep and gloomy and Norse in me rises in my blood. I would go east into the sunshine and the nodding palm trees, but I bide and the dream of the twilight of the gods is on me, and the dreams of cold and misty lands and the ancient pessimism of the Vikings. It seems to me, especially in the autumn, that that one vagrant Danish strain that is mine, predominates above all my Gaelic blood. It is in the autumn that the wanderlust grips me, and my sleeping dreams are not of the lazy palm fringed lagoons, the desert caravans, the loud bazaars and the tropic jungles to which my waking thoughts turn, but of cold blue seas beneath a clear and frosty sky, of clean sandy fens stretching from the cold foam to blue mountains, of boats racing through the flying spray, and fishers' nets, shining like silver on the shore. I never saw such things; yet they gleam plainly in my dreams. I see them with the eyes of old Samuel Waltser, who knew them and loved them in his youth, aye, and with the eyes of a thousand generations of blue eyed, red haired fishermen and sailors and Vikings behind him, who were his ancestors, and who were no less ancestors of mine.


    In the interim, Howard's mysterious ancestor had at last acquired a name - Samuel Waltser - and was now responsible for Howard's strange Nordic leanings. In a letter to Lovecraft, written three months later, Howard went one step further:
 

I believe that many dreams are the result of ancestral memories, handed down through the ages. I have lived in the Southwest all my life yet most of my dreams are laid in cold, giant lands of icy wastes and gloomy skies, and of wild, wind swept fens and wildernesses over which sweep great sea-winds, and which are inhabited by shock headed savages with light fierce eyes.


    Howard was now ready to tackle the question of ancestral memories in his tales, to write of characters that could "remember" the heroic deeds of their Nordic ancestors. He was also ready to begin to track down his ancestors…