The Thing in the Crypt

The greatest hero of Hyborian times was not a Hyborian but a barbarian, Conan the Cimmerian, about whose name whole cycles of legend revolve.

From the elder civilizations of Hyborian and Atlantean times, only a few fragmentary, half-legendary narratives survive. One of these, The Nemedian Chronicles, gives most of what is known about the career of Conan. The section concerning Conan begins: Know, O 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 across the world like blue mantles 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. 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 jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

In Conan's veins flowed the blood of ancient Atlantis, swallowed by the seas eight thousand years before his time. He was born into a clan that claimed an area in the northwest of Cimmeria. His grandfather was a member of a southern tribe who had fled from his own people because of a blood feud and, after long wandering, took refuge with the people of the North, Conan himself was born on a battlefield, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding Vanir.

There is no record of when the young Cimmerian got his first sight of civilization, but he was known as a fighter around the council fires before he had seen fifteen snows. In that year, the Cimmerian tribesmen forgot their feuds and joined forces to repel the Gundermen, who had pushed across the Aquilonian frontier, built the frontier post of Venarium, and begun to colonize the southern marches of Cimmeria. Conan was a member of the howling, blood-mad horde that swept out of the northern hills, stormed over the stockade with sword and torch, and drove the Aquilonians back across their frontiers.

At the sack of Venarium, still short of his full growth, Conan already stood six feet tall and weighed 150 pounds. He had the alertness and stealth of the born woodsman, the iron-hardness of the mountain man, the Herculean physique of his blacksmith father, and a practical familiarity with knife, ax, and sword.

After the plunder of the Aquilonian outpost, Conan returns for a time to his tribe. Restless under the conflicting urges of his adolescence, his tradition, and his times, he spends some months with a band of the AEsir in fruitless raiding against the Vanir and the Hyperboreans. This latter campaign ends with the sixteen-year-old Cimmerian in chains. He does not, however, remain a captive long...