Conan the Liberator

INTRODUCTION

Conan the Cimmerian, hero of heroes, was first conceived by Robert Ervin Howard (1906-36) of Cross Plains, Texas. Howard was an active pulp writer, and his career coincided with the greatest expansion of the pulp-magazine field. There were scores of such periodicals, all in the same format (about 6.5 X 10 inches) and printed on grayish uncoated paper. Now these magazines have disappeared, save for a few that still carry the old titles under a different format.

During the brief decade of his writing career, Howard wrote fantasy, science fiction, Westerns, sport stories, detective stories, historical fiction, stories of oriental adventure, and verse. But of all his heroes, the one with the widest appeal is Conah the Cimmerian. In the genre of fantasy, the Conan stories have made Howard’s work second only to that of J. R. R. Tolkien in popularity.

Born in Peaster, Texas, Howard lived all his short life in that state except for brief visits to adjacent states and to Mexico. His father was a frontier physician from Arkansas; a man of brusque, domineering manner, he was well regarded as an able country doctor. Robert Howard’s mother, bom in Dallas, Texas, thought herself socially above her husband and, for that matter, above all the folk of Cross Plains, where the family settled in 1919.

Both parents, but more especially the mother, were extremely possessive toward their only child.

When Robert was a boy, his mother kept a vigilant watch over him and decided what friendships to permit him. When he grew to manhood, she actively discouraged any interest on his part in girls, although he did manage to date one young woman, a teacher, frequently during his last two years. Robert grew up slavishly devoted to his intermittently sickly mother; when he bought an automobile, he took her with him on long trips around Texas.

Puny and bullied as a small boy, Robert matured into a large, powerful man. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds, most of it muscle. He kept himself in shape by bag punching and weight lifting. His favorite sport, both active and passive, was boxing; he also became a football fan. Despite his rugged exterior, Robert Howard was a voracious bookworm. A fast and omnivorous reader, he would race through an entire shelf in a public library in a few hours.

While still an adolescent, he determined to pursue a writing career. When in 1928 he finished one year of noncredit courses at Howard Payne Academy in Brownwood, Texas, his father agreed to let him try freelance writing for a year before putting pressure on him to get a more conventional job. At the end of that time his sales, while modest, had been encouraging enough for his family to let him follow his bent.

Robert also grew up extremely moody, alternating between moments of wit, charm, and spellbinding garrulity and spells of black depression, despair, and misanthropy. He was hardly out of adolescence when he became fascinated with suicide. This obsession grew and deepened all his life. By hints and casual remarks, he let his parents and several friends know that he did not intend to survive his mother; but nobody took these Veiled threats seriously.

In 1936, Robert Howard was a leading pulp writer with the best earnings of any man in Cross Plains. He enjoyed good health and had a congenial occupation, an adequate income, a growing circle of friends and admirers, and a promising literary future. But his mother lay dying of tuberculosis. When he learned that she was in a terminal coma, he went out, got into his car, and shot himself through the head.

From 1926 to 1930, Robert Howard wrote a series of fantasies about a hero called Kull, a barbarian from lost Atlantis who becomes king of a mainland realm. Howard had only meager success with these stories; of the nine Kull stories he completed, he sold only three. These appeared in Weird Tales, a magazine of fantasy and science fiction published from 1923 to 1954. Although its word rates were low and its payments often late, Weird Tales nevertheless proved Howard’s most reliable market.

In 1932, after the unsold Kull stories had languished in the trunk that Howard used as a filing cabinet, he rewrote one of these stories, changing the protagonist to Conan and adding a supernatural element; ‘The Phoenix on the Sword” was published in Weird Tales for December 1932. The story attained instant popularity, and for several years Conan stories occupied a large part of Howard’s working time. Eighteen of these stories appeared during Howard’s lifetime; others were either rejected or unfinished. In some late letters, Howard considered dropping Conan to devote all his time to Westerns.

Conan was both a development of King Kull and an idealization of Robert Howard himself—a picture of Howard as he would like to have been. Howard idealized barbarians and the barbarian life as did Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, all of whom influenced Robert E. Howard. Conan is the rough, tough, rootless, violent, far-traveled, irresponsible adventurer, of gigantic strength and stature, that Howard—whose own life was quiet, reclusive, aloof, and introverted—liked to imagine himself. Conan combines the qualities of the Texan frontier hero Bigfoot Wallace, Burroughs’s Tarzan, and A. D. Howden Smith’s Viking hero Swain, with a dash of Howard’s own somber moodiness.

Howard himself spoke, in a letter to H. P. Love-craft, of Conan’s having “stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me to work recording the saga of his adventures. … He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known … prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I have come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.”

After Howard’s death, some of his stories were published posthumously in the pulp magazines. Then the paper shortage of the Second World War slaughtered the pulps, and the Conan stories were forgotten save by a small circle of enthusiasts. In the 1950s, a New York publisher issued the Conan stories in small printings as a series of clothbound volumes.

The present writer became involved in this enterprise as a result of finding some unpublished Howard material in the hands of a New York literary agent and adapting it for publication as part of this series. A decade later I arranged for paperback publication of the whole series, including several new adventures of Conan written in collaboration with my colleagues Lin Carter and Bjom Nyberg. For years we have toiled to accommodate our own styles to Howard’s, with what success the reader must judge. The present novel, to which my wife Catherine Crook de Camp has contributed extensive editorial assistance, is the latest of these efforts.

Meanwhile Glenn Lord, literary agent for the Howard heirs, by clever and persistent detective work, tracked down the trunk containing Howard’s papers, which had disappeared after his death. This cache included more Conan stories or fragments of stories. These were also incorporated in the series, the incomplete tales being finished by Carter or me. Lord also arranged publication of scores of Howard’s non-Conan stories, some reprinted from the pulps and some previously unpublished. While Howard’s posthumous success has been gratifying, those who have taken part in it cannot help a feeling of sadness that Howard himself did not live to enjoy it.

There are several explanations for the extraordinary surge in Robert Howard’s posthumous popularity. Some attribute it to the Zeitgeist. Many readers have grown tired of the antiheroes, the heavily subjective, psychological stories, and the focus on contemporary socioeconomic problems that colored so much fiction in the 1950s and 60s. Fox a time it looked as if fantasy had become a casualty of the Machine Age; but the success of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings three-decker showed that a revival of fantasy was due. The Conan stories were among the first in the genre to benefit from this revival, and since their publication, they have begotten a host of imitations.

Equal credit for their success must go to Howard’s own ability as a writer. He was a natural storyteller, and this is the sine qua non of fiction writing. With this talent, many of any writer’s faults may be overlooked; without it, no other virtues make up the lack.

Although self-taught, Howard achieved a notable and distinctive style—taut, colorful, rhythmic, and eloquent. While using adjectives but sparingly, he achieved effects of color and movement by lavish use of active verbs and personification, as can be seen at the start of his one full-length Conan novel: “Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities … there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the Stars… .” With Howard’s perfected imagination, ingenious plots, hypnotic style, headlong narrative drive, and the intensity with which he put himself into his characters, even his pulpiest tales—his boxing and Western stories—are fun to read.

The fifty-odd Conan stories so far published relate the life of Conan from adolescence to old age. As a stage for his hero to stride across, sword in hand, Howard invented a Hyborian Age, set twelve thousand years ago between the sinking of Atlantis and the rise of recorded history. He postulated that barbarian invasions and natural catastrophes destroyed all records of this era, save for fragments appearing in later ages as myths and legends. He assured his readers that this was a purely fictional construct, not to be taken as a serious theory of prehistory.

In the Hyborian Age, magic worked and supernatural beings stalked the earth. The western part of the main continent, whose outlines differed signally from those on the modem map, was divided among a number of kingdoms, modeled on various realms of real ancient and medieval history. Thus Aquilonia corresponds more or less to medieval France, with Poitain as its Provence; Zingara resembles Spain; Asgard and Vanaheim answer to Viking Scandinavia; Shem with its warring city-states echoes the ancient Near East; while Stygia is a fictional version of ancient Egypt.

Conan is a native of Cimmeria, a bleak, hilly, cloudy northern land whose people are proto-Celts. Conan (whose name is Celtic) arrives as a youth at the easterly kingdom of Zamora and for several years makes his living as a thief. Then he serves as a mercenary soldier, first in the oriental realm of Turan and then in several Hyborian kingdoms. Forced to flee from Argos, he becomes a pirate along the coast of Kush, with a Shemitish she-pirate and a crew of black corsairs.

Later Conan serves as a mercenary in various lands. He adventures among the nomadic kozaks of the eastern steppes and the pirates of the Vilayet Sea, the larger predecessor of the Caspian. He becomes a chieftain among the hill tribes of the Himelian Mountains, co-ruler of a desert city south of Stygia, a pirate of the Barachan Isles, and captain of a ship of Zingaran buccaneers.

Eventually be resumes the trade of soldier in the senace of Aquilonia, the mightiest Hyborian kingdom of them all. He defeats the savage Picts on the western frontier, rises to general, but is forced to flee the murderous intentions of the depraved and jealous King Numedides.

After further adventures, Conan (now about forty years old) is rescued from the coast of Pictland by a ship bearing the leaders of a revolt against the tyrannical and eccentric rule of Numedides. They have chosen Conan as commander in chief of the rebelhon, and here the present story opens.

L. Sprague de Camp Villanova, Pennsylvania July 1978