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1. The Blood-Red Crescent- Taramis, queen of Khauran, awakened from a dream-haunted slumber to a silence that seemed more like the stillness of nighted catacombs than the normal quiet of a sleeping palace. She lay staring into the darkness, wondering why the candles in their golden candelabra had gone out. A flecking o... |
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2. The Tree of Death- The young soldier's hose and shirt were smeared with dried blood, wet with sweat and gray with dust. Blood oozed from the deep gash in his thigh, from the cuts on his breast and shoulder. Perspiration glistened on his livid face and his fingers were knotted in the cover of the divan on which he la... |
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That smile was on the lips of Constantius at that very moment. He sat his horse among a cluster of his men—thick-bodied Shemites with curled blue-black beards and hooked noses; the low-swinging sun struck glints from their peaked helmets and the silvered scales of their corselets. Nearly a mile behind, the walls and to... |
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3. A Letter to Nemedia- The savant Astreas, traveling in the East in his never-tiring search for knowledge, wrote a letter to his friend and fellow-philosopher Alcemides, in his native Nemedia, which constitutes the entire knowledge of the Western nations concerning the events of that period in the East, always a hazy,... |
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But the savant was incorrect in his conjecture concerning the whereabouts of the woman he called Taramis. The girl whom the world knew as queen of Khauran stood in a dungeon, lighted only by a flickering torch which played on her features, etching the diabolical cruelty of her beautiful countenance. On the bare stone f... |
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4. Wolves of the Desert- Olgerd Vladislav filled his jeweled goblet with crimson wine from a golden jug and thrust the vessel across the ebony table to Conan the Cimmerian. Olgerd's apparel would have satisfied the vanity of any Zaporoskan hetman. His _khalat_ was of white silk, with pearls sewn on the bosom. Girdled a... |
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5. The Voice from the Crystal- In a chamber in a tower near the city wall a group of men listened attentively to the words of one of their number. They were young men, but hard and sinewy, with a bearing that comes only to men rendered desperate by adversity. They were clad in mail shirts and worn leather; swords hung ... |
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This was true. The dawnlight glinted on peaked helmets pouring in a steady stream through the broad arch, on the bright housings of the chargers. This would be a battle of horsemen, such as is possible only in the lands of the East. The riders flowed through the gates like a river of steel—sombre figures in black and s... |
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The squadrons of the mercenaries were moving out into the plain. In the distance, just this side of the river, other dark masses were moving, barely recognizable as men on horses. Objects dotted the farther bank; Conan had not brought his siege engines across the river, apparently fearing an attack in the midst of the ... |
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6. The Vulture's Wings- It was the smoky light of a torch which roused Taramis, Queen of Khauran, from the slumber in which she sought forgetfulness. Lifting herself on her hand she raked back her tangled hair and blinked up, expecting to meet the mocking countenance of Salome, malign with new torments. Instead a cry o... |
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The sun was rising. The ancient caravan road was thronged with white-robed horsemen, in a wavering line that stretched from the walls of Khauran to a spot far out in the plain. Conan the Cimmerian sat at the head of that column, near the jagged end of a wooden beam that stuck up out of the ground. Near that stump rose ... |
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Alleys of Darkness- When the gong ended my fight with Kid Leary in the Sweet Dreams Fight Club, Singapore, I was tired but contented. The first seven rounds had been close, but the last three I'd plastered the Kid all over the ring, though I hadn't knocked him out like I'd did in Shanghai some months before, when I fla... |
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Presently I riz with a sigh and hauled on my duds. They was no sound outside. Apparently I was alone in the building except for Spike, my white bulldog. All at once I noticed him smelling of a closed locker. He whined, scratched at it, and growled. With a sudden suspicion I strode over and jerked open the door. Inside ... |
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It was purty late, and the route I took they wasn't many people abroad. Behind me I begun to hear Bissett stir and groan, and I pushed Spike over in the back seat to watch him. But he hadn't fully come to when I drawed up in the shadows beside the place Whithers had told me about—a ramshackle old building down by a old... |
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Before I reached the other door, I heered a quick patter of feet outside. I wheeled—the outer door bust violently open, and into the room rushed Glory O'Dale. She was panting hard, her dress was tore, her black locks damp, and her dark eyes was wet and bright as black jewels after a rain. And she had Ace's six-shooter ... |
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Galt was on his feet, his small eyes glinting savagely, his jaws grinding his cigar to a pulp. "What about it, Galt?" I demanded, all at sea and bewildered. He dashed down his cigar with a oath. His face was dark and convulsed. "What of it?" he snarled. "What you goin' to do about it? I've stood all the guff out of you... |
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Shaking the blood and sweat outa my eyes, I glared about at the battlefield, strewn with the dead and dying—at least with the unconscious, some of which was groaning loudly, whilst others slumbered in silence. Glory was just getting up, dizzy and wobbly. Spike was smelling each of the victims in turn, and Ace was beggi... |
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Alleys of Peril- The minute I seen the man they'd picked to referee the fight between me and Red McCoy, I didn't like his looks. His name was Jack Ridley and he was first mate aboard the Castleton, one of them lines which acts very high tone, making their officers wear uniforms. Bah! The first cap'n I ever sailed with ... |
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So I come out for the fourth round full of snap and ginger and promptly run into a right hook that knocked me flat on my back. The crowd went crazy, and the Whale's men begun to kiss each other in their ecstasy, but I arose without a count and, ducking the cruel and unusual right swing McCoy tossed at me, I sunk my lef... |
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Well, eventually the cops had things quieted, separated the dogs and even pried the Old Man and Cap'n Branner apart, with their hands full of whiskers they had tore off each other. I didn't take no part in the rough-house. As quick as I could get dressed and put some collodion on my cuts, I slipped out the back way by ... |
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She glided out and left me sitting there sipping my licker and wondering what it was all about. I'd heard of the White Tigress; who in China ain't? A white girl who had more power amongst the yellow boys than the Chinese government did. Who was she? How come her to get so much pull? Them as knowed didn't say. That she ... |
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With scarcely a glance at his recumbent form, I twisted the lock off the door and stalked forth into the darkness. I groped around in a lot of twisty back alleys for a while, expecting any minute to get a knife in my back or fall into the bay, but finally I blundered into a narrow street which was dimly lit and soon fo... |
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Well, I'd OF been in a jamb if she'd refused, because I don't know what I coulda done to make her—it just ain't in me to be rough with no women—but my bluff worked. She didn't argue at all. She led me out of the courtyard, down three or four narrow, deserted streets, across a bunch of back alleys, and finally through a... |
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So I went over and untied Ridley, and he never said a word; acted like he was kinda stunned. He worked his fingers and glanced at the victims on the floor, some of which was groaning and cussing, and some of which was slumbering peaceful. "Gettin' the circulation back in your hands?" I asked, and he nodded. "All right,... |
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Apparition in the Prize Ring- READERS OF THIS magazine will probably remember Ace Jessel, the big negro boxer whom I managed a few years ago. He was an ebony giant, four inches over six feet tall, with a fighting weight of 230 pounds. He moved with the smooth ease of a gigantic leopard and his pliant steel muscles ripp... |
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WHILE THE CHAMPION was still off balance, Ace measured him coolly and shot in a fierce right hook, flush on the chin. Gomez' head flew back as if hinged to his shoulders and he was stopped in his tracks! But even as the crowd rose, hands clenched, lips parted, hoping he would go down, the champion shook his bullet head... |
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BUT GOMEZ WAS after him; the champion missed twice with his left and then sank a right under the heart that turned Ace ashy. A left to the jaw made his knees buckle and he clinched desperately. On the break-away Ace sent a straight left to the face and right hook to the chin, but the blows lacked force. Gomez shook the... |
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AND JESSEL WAS up! The crowd went insane and screaming. A supernatural might fired his weary limbs and lit his dazed brain. Let Gomez do his worst now—how could he beat a man for whom the ghost of the greatest of all black warrriors was fighting? For to Ace Jessel, falling on the astounded Mankiller like a blast from t... |
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BUT AFTER THE bout the referee, a steely-nerved, cold-eyed sportsman of the old school, said to me: "Listen here! Am I crazy—or was there a fourth man in that ring when Ace Jessel dropped Gomez? For a minute I thought I saw a broad, squat, funny-looking negro standing there beside Ace! Don't grin, you bum! It wasn't th... |
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Dataset Card for Dataset Name
This is 94 fictional works written by Robert E Howard.
Dataset Details
Dataset Description
This is 94 fictional works written by Robert E Howard. It includes all the stories/novellas/novels I could find by Robert E Howard that are in the public domain, minus the Breckenridge Elkins stories. I didn't want the extreme dialect/slang in those to affect any models trained on this.
This second version of the dataset is to more closely match the style of the "chosen" (read: original from the book) texts in gutenberg-dpo-v0.1
At some point, I will update and release a third version, maybe as a second dataset, that fully matches the schema of gutenberg-dpo-v0.1.
- Curated by: leftyfeep
- Language(s) (NLP): en
- License: Public Domain
Dataset Sources [optional]
Dataset created by pulling public domain text from gutenberg.org and wikisource.org, and then cleaning it up and merging it.
Uses
Train an LLM
Dataset Structure
Each story, novella, or novel was split into chunks by switching all the scene breaks to chapter breaks, then splitting by chapter. Then each chunk had all newline characters removed to have each one on one line, then <|endoftext|> separating lines.
[More Information Needed]
Dataset Creation
Curation Rationale
Every public domain Robert E. Howard story I could find, except for the Breckenridge Elkins ones. Those ones have a ton of slang and dialect that I wouldn't want creeping in to text generations.
Source Data
Dataset created by pulling public domain text from gutenberg.org and wikisource.org, and then cleaning it up and merging it.
Bias, Risks, and Limitations
Text generated with an LLM based on this might be too awesome.
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