‘”Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian,
black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with
gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jewelled thrones of the
Earth under his sandaled feet.”
The
Nemedian Chronicles’
[Excerpt
from ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’]
Conan
the Barbarian is a stock Fantasy character who has appeared in many different
forms and influenced many things over the years. During what I think of as the high-tide of
Generic Fantasy, the ‘80s and ‘90s, Conan (or legally distinct versions of him)
appeared in numerous places; Marvel comic-books, cheap Fantasy novels, video
games, a couple of films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, a cartoon series,
hundreds of knock-off films not starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, board games,
and pen-and-paper RPGs. One might think he was created by a committee just like
everything else at the time – a committee who saw that certain types of
demographic would be willing to throw their cash on a surly, violent,
ridiculously muscle-bound man who spent his entire existence overpowering
countless rivals with his trusty weapon, but you would be wrong. Conan was
already fifty years old by the time Mister Schwarzenegger donned the famous furr-lined leather pants,
having been created by a young lunatic in rural Texas during the height of the
Great Depression.
Robert
E. Howard (abbreviated to REH) was a prolific writer of pulp fiction
during the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, adventure stories being his forte.
Having created numerous characters for the pulp magazines of the era, such as
Solomon Kane and King Kull, Robert E. Howard’s final creation was to prove his
most successful and influential – a barbarian called Conan the Cimmerian. Between
1932 and 1936, seventeen separate Conan stories appeared in the magazine Weird Tales, in which this beloved
character hacked his way through countless enemies, slew monsters, defeated
evil wizards, rescued nubile young women in various states of undress, and
journeyed the pick-and-mix lands of the long-lost Hyrborian Age. No challenge
was too great, no enemy too tough, and Conan was always assured of victory. In
order to better illustrate these... fascinating and... varied... works of fiction,
we shall delve into them via the medium of excerpts.
The World of Conan
‘Thutmekri was Stygian, an adventurer and a
rogue whose wits had recommended him to the twin kings of the great hybrid
trading kingdom which lay many days’ march to the east. He and the Cimmerian
knew each other of old, and without love. Thutmekri likewise had a proposition
to make to the king of Keshan, and it also concerned the conquest of Punt –
which kingdom, incidentally, lying east of Keshan, had recently expelled the
Zembabwan traders and burned their fortresses.’
[Excerpt from ‘Jewels of Gwahlur’]
One could argue that most
works of Fantasy fiction care more about setting than they do about characters.
Tolkien for instance has an incredibly detailed world, many of his characters being
quite poor when you actually look at them, and it would not be amiss to say
that most subsequent Fantasy writers pay as much attention to their own worlds
as they do to the characters who inhabit it.
But
with Conan stories, it’s ALL about Conan! One gets the impression that REH’s
Hyborian Age is merely a playground for his barbarian hero to mess around in,
to save and influence in whatever way he sees fit. The world itself is
effectively just a psuedo-historic version of our own world, meant to be a lost
age before pre-history, inhabited by the ancient ancestors of more modern
peoples. Hence the peoples, names and regions of the Hyborian Age roughly
correspond to our own world; there are no Elves, Dwarfs or Orcs in Conan, just
a whole multitude of different humans. The confusing thing about this setting
is that all the names and peoples tend to morph into a confusing mass of
meaninglessness. The problem is outlined in the opening spiel of the first
Conan story, ‘The Phoenix and the Sword’:
‘Know, oh prince, that between the years when
the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of
the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay
spread out beneath the stars – Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora
with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with
its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its
shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But
the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the
dreaming west.’
[from
‘The Phoenix on the Sword’]
Fortunately
one of the first things REH ever wrote about Conan was not a story, but an
essay detailing the lands, peoples and history of his world. Sadly it’s all so
quick-fire and muddled that it still remains nearly impossible to actually
commit to memory who all these various people are, and why they’re significant.
The sad thing is that most of REH’s world building is like this.
I
know the name ‘Stygian’, and I’m fairly sure they’re REH’s take on Egypt. Or
was that Keshan? And I’m certain that Aquilonia is a sort of Roman-type
kingdom, and that one’s important because Conan eventually takes it over, but
how do the Cimmerians themselves fit into this world again? And who the hell
are the Nemedians? And then there’s Zingara and Zamora, and Argos and
Corinthia, who all blend into the same mass as far as I’m aware. Punt and
Turan? Forget it.
Each
of the races is meant to be distinct, and have a particular relationship with
each of the other races which has some bearing on character motives, but
they’re always fired at you with such rapidity that you can’t really keep up,
and thereby cease to care about who is who and how that effects what happens.
Not to mention that it’s a distinctly racist way of doing things: ‘if these
people belong to this racial group, then they have these characteristics’ sort
of thing; although all are presented in a suitably unfavourable light, with the
exception of the Cimmerians who are supposedly descended from the Atlanteans,
which somehow makes them better, and they have not taken on the supposedly
corrupt ways of civilisation, but in a different way to the Picts who are
somehow not REH’s idea noble barbarians, but are instead just murderous
savages. And I’m not even going to get into his rather heavy-handed treatment
of black people.
The
Character of Conan
‘Balthus looked at his companion [Conan] with admiration.
“I knew you hadn’t spent your life on
the frontier. You’ve mentioned several far places. You’ve travelled widely?”
“I’ve roamed far: farther than any
other man of my race ever wandered. I’ve seen all the great cities of the
Hyborians, the Shemites, the Stygians and the Hyrkanians. I’ve roamed in the
unknown countries south of the black kingdoms of Kush, and east of the Sea of
Vilayet. I’ve been a mercenary captain, a corsair, a Kozak, a penniless
vagabond, a general – hell, I’ve been everything except a king, and I may be
that, before I die.” This pleased him, and he grinned hardly. Then he shrugged
his shoulders and stretched his mighty figure on the rocks. “This is as good a
life as any. I don’t know how long I’ll stay on the frontier; a week, a month,
a year. I have a roving foot. But it’s as well on the borders as anywhere.”’
[Excerpt from ‘Beyond the Black River’]
Conan’s story is not a
single, complete tale as you might expect. By its very nature REH’s pulp
writing needed an episodic structure, but there’s nothing wrong with that. What
is wrong is the chronological headache that can be caused when trying to work
out what he did and where he was at certain times in his life, and whether this has had any effect on his development as a character or not. It got off to a
bad start in this respect with the very first Conan story ever written, in
which our ‘barbarian’ hero starts of as a middle-aged king in Aquilonia facing a
court conspiracy. Subsequent stories jump around throughout his life; in one
he’s a warrior fighting savages in the west of the world, while another takes
place many years before, when he’s a leader of a barbarian horde in the far
east, another has him as a pirate, and another a thief stealing round a house
in some city, which could be anywhere.
In many ways it’s quite fascinating, this character who moves
around the world and slowly climbs up through it, eventually taking a throne
for himself. Were all the stories not just the same elements of battle, fight
monster, rescue girl, kill sorcerer The End, it might almost be an interesting
way of telling a story.
Conan
the ‘King of Macho’
‘Standing shoulder to shoulder, the two men
presented a formidable picture of primitive power. Olmec was as tall as Conan,
and heavier; but there was something repellent about the Tlazitlan [Olmec], something abysmal and monstrous that
concentrated unfavourably with the clean-cut, compact hardness of the Cimmerian
[Conan]. Conan had discarded the
remnants of his tattered, blood-soaked shirt, and stood with his remarkable
muscular development impressively revealed. His great shoulders were as broad
as those of Olmec, and more cleanly outlined, and his huge breast arched with a
more impressive sweep to a hard waist that lacked the paunchy thickness of
Olmec’s midsection. He might have been an image of primal strength, cut of
bronze. Olmec was darker, but not from the burning of the sun. If Conan was a
figure out of the dawn of Time, Olmec was a shambling, somber shape from the
darkness of Time’s pre-dawn.’
[from ‘Red Nails’]
Conan himself is an
unbeatable, muscle-bound superhero, who goes anywhere, fights anything, and
always comes out on top – because that’s
the way it is for you, isn’t it Mister Howard! He’s a wish-fulfilment
fantasy, to see what it’s like to be an amazing, unbeatable man who always
sweeps women off their feet, who overawes his enemies, and who represents the
‘correct’ way of thinking – that civilisation is innately corrupt, and the only
way of doing things is by being a ‘noble barbarian’ about it. It’s quite clear
that REH loved this guy so much because he wanted to be Conan; rather than a
middle-class Texan in the 20th century who was pretty much held
captive by his own mother.
What’s strange about ‘Conan the Character’ is that he’s
never really the main focus of the story. Usually the narrative takes place
from the point of view of another character, often the token girl of the story,
as they witness the appearance and actions of Conan. The story does not really
take place because of Conan; he often appears half way through the narrative,
in time to get involved and put things right – do the hero thing.
It’s quite odd really. REH was never interested in telling
the story from Conan’s point of view, but rather wanted to portray how he
appeared to other people – particularly how he might appear to the ladies. I’m
sure you could read a lot into this using psychological or literary theory, but
I’m decided. REH had a massive man-crash on his own creation, because he was
the idealisation of what he wanted to be – an unbeatable badass, irresistible
to the ladies, the envy of his enemies and a cause of admiration from his
allies.
The
Women of Conan
‘...as
he scrutinised her by the light of the stars. She was white, though a very
definite brunette, obviously one of Zamboula’s many mixed breeds. She was tall,
with a slender, supple form, as he was in a good position to observe.
Admiration burned in his fierce eyes as he looked down on her splendid bosom
and her lithe limbs, which still quivered from fright, and exertion. He passed
an arm around her flexible waist and said reassuringly: “Stop shaking wench;
you’re safe enough.”’
[from ‘Shadows in Zamboula’]
REH
always uses the same three words to describe the women in his Conan stories. Slender. Supple. Lithe.
I’m not exaggerating by the way. Whenever his female characters appear he
describes their physique using at least two of these words in some way, often
all three, and if one is missed off at any point then it will usually be
deployed for the same character at a later time in the narrative. And yes, the
story ‘Shadows of Zamboula’ also seems to contain an uncomfortable amount of
racism throughout – in fact, if you want to see the real Conan the Barbarian,
the real Robert E. Howard, then by all means this story in particular is the
one you must read. It is absolutely dire, and had me in stitches.
REH
also likes to detail what the female characters are wearing, usually with
greater attention than how the male characters are clothed. It’s not uncommon
for his slender, supple girls to have their lithe young bodies completely
exposed at some point, in some rather kinky manner, and so to illustrate this
I’ve gone to the efforts of getting another excerpt for you, simply because
there are so damn many like this:
‘Taramis, sensing the doom that was
intended for her, was fighting against it with all the strength of her splendid
young body. Once she had broken away from the brutish beast, only to be dragged
down again.
...Taramis’s breath came in panting
gasps; her tattered garment had been torn from her in her struggle. She writhed
in the grasp of her apish captor like a white, naked nymph in the arms of a
satyr’
[from ‘A Witch Shall be Born’]
I wonder if REH had to take many cold showers during his
work. At any rate I don’t actually want to read about the fevered imaginings of
some man in 1930s Texas, with the knowledge that it was a distinct likelihood
he had erection while he was hammering out these words on his typewriter.
Nobody wants to be thinking that when reading something, so it’s an uncomfortable fact
that REH does this so often.
It could be described as ‘Mature Fantasy’ or ‘Adult
Fantasy’, with so much sex and violence. I can’t see why they call it that; it
all seems really quite childish to me, to have a big man swinging a big sword
at big monsters while surrounded by ladies losing all their clothes. Maybe it
should be redefined as ‘Immature Fantasy’ instead.
The
Writing Style of REH
‘Four men stood on guard, of the same
lank-haired, dark-skinned breed as Techotl, with spears in their hands and
swords at their hips. In the wall
near the door there was a complicated contrivance of mirrors which Conan guessed
was the Eye Techotl had mentioned, so arranged that a narrow, crystal-paned
slot in the wall could be looked through within without being discernible from
without.’
[from
‘Red Nails’]
The writing abilities of
Robert E. Howard are... well, they’re not great, it must be said. There is a
certain energy behind his work, but his attempts to shoehorn the odd archaism
into the flow usually ends up falling flat on its face. The action scenes are
all right, yet the way he relates it is not especially effective; an attempt to
make it seem as though the narrator were someone from a previous time, which
only makes the whole thing feel a bit artificial and somewhat ridiculous.
The
narrative stride is a bit clumsy in places, somewhat unwieldy. One problem is
REH’s reliance on a certain range of words, which I’ve already hinted at by his
use of the same three words to describe each and every one of his female
characters. He also quite likes the word ‘naked’, which he actually uses more
frequently to describe the ruggedness of the landscape or the nature of a bare
weapon than the clothing state of any of his characters; but only just. The
ratio is ever so slightly weighted in favour of the former, but that’s only
because he uses it so bloody often! A
particular phrase he likes is when describing the barbaric dress of his male
characters, being usually ‘...naked but for a [Insert-generic-loincloth-type-item-conveniently-covering-genitals-Here]’.
He also likes the word thews, to describe the bulging muscles of Conan, ‘iron-thewed’
as he is. I'm not totally sure what a thew actually is, but it’s one of those
words that REH loves.
Conclusion
‘Cautiously holding the poisoned pike away
from him, [Conan] thrust his head
through the branches, and addressed the monster.
“What are you waiting down there for,
you misbegotten offspring of questionable parents?” was one of his more
printable queries. “Stick your ugly head up here again you long-necked brute –
or do you want me to come down there and kick you loose from your illegitimate
spine?”’
[from
‘Red Nails’]
In 1936, not long after
the serialised publication of his only novel-length Conan story, The Hour of the Dragon, Robert E. Howard was informed that his mother was on death's door, and promptly
committed suicide. Strangely enough this was not the end of Conan the
Barbarian; the series of Conan stories had been quite popular, and several more
of REH’s unpublished Conan
manuscripts were uncovered and published over the following decades. But it was
thanks mainly to writers L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter and Björn Nyberg that
new Conan stories were written alongside these. One may wonder what they saw in
Conan that they actually wanted to preserve and expand this body of work, but they
certainly made the effort. The complete list of Conan-pastiche writers is extensive, and it is mainly because of their
numbers that Conan still lives.
For
better or for worse Conan did not perish with his creator, but survived and
went on to become a staple of Generic Fantasy, where identical (though legally
distinct) versions of him were often dumped alongside the Elves, Wizards,
Dwarfs, Dragons and Orcs that were wholesale strip-mined from J.R.R Tolkien’s
work, in order to feed the growing entertainment industries of the late 20th
century. It seems that RPGs, video games, table-top war games, films and cheap
Fantasy novels have all had some influence from Robert E. Howard – not bad
going for a ‘momma’s boy’ who shot himself through the head before he was aged 31.
In the end though I cannot help but agree most of all with
the young Robert Bloch, future member of the Lovecraft Circle and otherwise fan
of Robert E. Howard, who in November 1934 wrote in to Weird Tales to express his views:
‘I am awfully tired
of poor old Conan the Cluck, who for the past fifteen issues has every month
slain a new wizard, tackled a new monster, come to a violent and sudden end that was averted
(incredibly enough!) in just the nick of time, and won a new girlfriend, each
of whose penchant for nudism won her a place of honour, either on the cover or
on the interior illustration. Such has been Conan’s history, and from the
realms of the Kushites to the lands of Aquilonia, from the shores of the
Shemites to the palaces of Dyme-Novell-Bolonia, I cry: “Enough of this brute
and his iron-thewed sword-thrusts – may he be sent to Valhalla to cut out paper
dolls!”’
This most effectively sums up everything wrong with Conan. As such, I went
through each and every one of Robert E. Howard’s original Conan stories,
including the posthumous ones, and tested which of these various plot elements
it contained: monsters, evil wizards, large battles with plenty of death on both
sides, &c., and have made a special table for rapid consumption. You can
find it just below, at the end of the review.
So
then, in actual conclusion is there any point in reading the original Conan
stories? Is there any merit to them, and should we appreciate the effects he’s
had on wider culture? In answer to this last, he most certainly has had an
effect on wider culture; all the dungeon-crawling games, all the cheesy
sword-and-sorcery films, and all the giant spiders and snakes have their roots
in Conan and his bulging thews. Some may say that Tolkien was the father of
Fantasy, but I reckon that most imitations Fantasy Fiction actually have a
lot more in common with the works of Robert E. Howard and his down-to-earth
brutality and sensationalism, than to Tolkien’s more sober, deliberate and
empathetic works.
In that case there is a point to reading them. If you love
Fantasy, then maybe you ought to introduce yourself to its terrible pre-Tolkien
beginnings. They are awful, clumsily-written, misogynistic, slightly racist
pieces of pulp fiction, and it’s difficult to not cringe in horror and disgust
at some of the stuff this man wrote. Are they all terrible? Well, the action
scenes are competently handled on occasion, and sometimes the stories are at least
vaguely interesting. ‘A Witch Shall be Born’ contains one of the most famous
images of Conan the Barbarian, of him being crucified by his foe and killing
one of the circling vultures with his own teeth, and it presents the character
with a rare challenge to overcome that merits a small amount of respect. Aaaand
I suppose, if one were to look for a good Conan story then The Hour of the Dragon, his only novel-length adventure, is
actually a half-decent piece of pulp Fantasy if one has the time for it –
though the ending was a bit of a cop-out, sadly.
That’s
the main problem with Conan; he’s set up to be this unbeatable super hero, and
he’s just that. Unbeatable. He will always triumph, and he’ll do it by being
stronger and a bit less stupid than his enemies. It’s repetitive and kind of
spoils each particular story. The reason I picked out those two examples, ‘A
Witch...’ and The... Dragon is because
they each give him a slightly tougher challenge. Being crucified is no picnic,
even for Conan, and The... Dragon is
the last original Conan story, which sees him undone as king of Aquilonia,
makes him consider his life, and gives REH a bit of a longer canvas to work
with – though eventually it reverts to the same old ‘bumbling through event
after event’ like the other Conan stories.
But
I think that the real character behind Conan the Barbarian, the real story, is
that of Robert E. Howard himself. The young maladjusted pulp writer, who held
such contempt for ‘civilisation’ and wanted so desperately to get away from his
own time and place that he created this terrible hero, and who was so attached
to his mother that when she passed away he immediately went and killed himself.
That is infinitely more interesting than any adventure Conan ever went on. In
many ways Conan is not a work of fiction at all, but is a particularly strange
symptom of Howard’s troubled mind, something of a projected desire to be something
he was not. Conan was irresistible to the ladies, yet REH had next to no
contact with women other than his own mother. Conan was a leader amongst men,
the envy of his enemies and admirers, yet Howard was something of a social
outcast. Conan could defeat anything, yet Howard thought he was continuously
stalked by enemies. Need I go on? It seems strange that so many people have
gone on to indulge this crazy-man’s deluded imaginings.
In
the end, if J.R.R Tolkien was the father of Fantasy, then Robert E. Howard must
be Fantasy’s lecherous, deranged uncle, who gave the whole of Fantasy something
of his less desirable moral fibre. Conan is still with us, as static as he has
always been despite his action-oriented character.
Here is my final word on the matter:
Evil Wizard
|
Dungeon/ Ruined City
|
Monster
|
Scantily-Clad Lady
|
Battle
|
Pirates!
|
||
The
Phoenix on the Sword
|
X
|
X
|
|||||
The
Scarlet Citadel
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|||
The
Tower of the Elephant
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
||||
Black
Colossus
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
||||
The
Slithering Shadow
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
||||
The
Pool of the Black One
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
||||
Rogues
in the House
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
||||
Shadows
in the Moonlight
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
||||
Queen
of the Black Coast
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|||
The
Devil in Iron
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
||||
People
of the Black Circle
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
||
A
Witch Shall be Born
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|||
Jewels
of Gwahlur
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
||||
Beyond
the Black River
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
||||
Shadows
in Zamboula
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
||||
Red
Nails
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|
The
Hour of the Dragon
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|
The
God in the Bowl
|
X
|
X
|
|||||
The
Black Stranger
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|||
Frost-Giant’s
Daughter
|
X
|
X
|
Vikings
|
||||
The
Vale of Lost Women
|
X
|
X
|
|||||
Conan the Bibliobarian
Howard, Robert E. The Complete Chronicles of Conan. Edited
by Stephen Jones. Gollancz: St. Ives.
(2006)
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