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Conan: Wandering Star/Del Rey editions

  

Contents

Note: items marked † will link to articles within this document; all other links lead to separate documents.

Vol. 1, The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian

Foreword

Well. It’s been a long haul.

As I sit here, reviewing the drawings and paintings I contribute to this book, the work of well over a year and a half—I must admit to mixed emotions.

It’s easy enough to know that you are up to the job of capturing the visual essence of the most famous creation of one of your favorite authors, a literary lodestone that has repeatedly drawn you back since childhood, so long as you don’t actually have to execute those visuals. Believe me, there have been many, many times in the last thirty plus years when I’ve indulged in the “what if” game—and every time been very impressed with the perfect phantom illustrations of Conan misting through the world behind my eyelids.

But when it comes time to belly up to the bar, put your money where your mouth is, and actually make concrete all the notions and grand designs that have previously flitted through your happily uncommitted mind—aye, there’s the rub. . . .

Robert E. Howard’s Conan has not been so easy to illustrate as I imagined he would be. I think this is in part because, while Conan and his Hyborian Age are nominally works of epic heroism, featuring hosts of brave warriors, fields of savage battle, and deeds of strength and bravery and derring-do as is the tradition of heroic fantasy, what makes them great is a deeper, darker context. Howard wrote them in a personalized style that is very post-heroic, is very much a part of a twentieth-century literary tradition which eschews the floridity, gallantry and nobleness of cause associated with the epic.

Howard took the nominal elements of heroic fiction, but he did not write them with the genteel sensibilities typically associated with the form. Hell no—he took those elements as sheep’s skin under which to fit his own agenda, which included railing at his personal circumstances; letting loose with a literary snarl and bark at the limitations and frustrations of the world he knew—isolated central Texas post oak scrubland and oil field.

What I’m trying to get at is that while Howard’s Conan stories live in the framework of classic heroic fantasy, their guts—the heart that drives the beast—is a much more personal sensibility. They are engineered and pushed forward at Howard’s famous driving pace by a gritty directness and stripped-down, take-no-prisoners attitude that is unique to Howard; an expression of his rage at his immediate world. Howard’s writing is not fast and furious and grim merely because he liked it that way, rather it is fast and furious and grim because that was a true expression of who Howard was. Howard’s genius was that he took literary forms that appealed to him and added to them and subtracted from them and molded them into entities that darkly reflected his deeply felt personal beliefs; his view of life as unending struggle and ultimate futility. But providing one hell of a ride along the way, if you were lucky.

We are lucky because we get the Old World tradition of the heroic epic as interpreted through the sensibilities of a Texan steeped in the lore of his home state—the violent history of its blood feuds and Indian wars, as well as its rich Southern United States folk storytelling tradition, with all its ghosts and swampy horror.

That mix made for something new, and for one hell of a ride, but it has also, for me, made Conan a bit difficult to visually interpret—to get back to my original chain of thought. On one hand I’m drawn to Howard’s vivid descriptions of pageantry and stateliness, the awesome sweep and grandeur of the Hyborian Age, Conan’s story as epic, and my desire is to do all that justice by hewing to the finest traditions of classic illustration. On the other hand, it is Howard’s New World spontaneity, his white-hot emotional explosiveness and relentless pacing that make these stories tick, that give them life far beyond that of their contemporaries, and to properly capture that calls for visuals that are bold, immediate, and raw.

There is no mistaking a Howard story. No one will ever write Conan, or any other sword and sorcery creation, with the ferocity and terrible beauty of Howard. There will never be a true Conan that was not written by Howard. Conan is too personal a creation, all wrapped up in Howard’s own strengths and foibles and idiosyncrasies, and that makes it easy to see why Conan is by far Howard’s best known creation.

Howard was all about story first and foremost—there’s no dishonor in that—but with Conan he seems to have arrived at a point in his growth as a fictioneer where he appreciated the importance of developing a fully-rounded lead.

The general public will enjoy a particular literary concept, featuring an imaginative world revolving around a well-turned plot, once or twice, but if the author wants them to return again and again to that world, he needs it anchored by an attractive and unique character who is more than just a construct. Howard got that with Conan, pulling personality from the Texas country roughnecks he well knew, and created a series of stories that in popularity have eclipsed all his other fine worlds.

In Conan we get that rarity in fantastic literature, a hero who actually changes and grows from story to story. The teenage, insecure Conan who kills a man for taunting him in The Tower of the Elephant is not the same headstrong bully who has his heart broken in The Queen of the Black Coast is not the same veteran mercenary who begins to understand that maybe he has it in him to go all the way in Black Colossus is not the same Conan who as king patronizes the arts (the arts, for Crom’s sake!), recognizing that poetry will live long after he is gone, in The Phoenix on the Sword.

Conan grows and matures, and more’s the pity that the popular view of the character is largely restricted to that of a scowling, jaw-clenched, muscle-bound killing machine. Howard wrote him as so much more. Yes, he brawls and slays, but he also reflects and laughs—at himself as well as others—loves and loses, doubts and falters, acts altruistically and empathizes with alien beings. He is, above all, totally charismatic; no outsider comes to command armies and nations without inspiring trust and loyalty and devotion. He’s no simple brute; he’s a multi-dimensional character, and I’ve done my best to reflect that, depicting him in a variety of moods and attitudes.

Not every one of the stories in this volume is great. Howard was writing for monthly publication at a white-hot pace, and perfection is never possible under those circumstances. Even so, even such minor efforts as The Vale of Lost Women offer passages of wonderfully turned prose—check out Livia’s view of the slaughter in the village for as compelling and compact a portrait of the horror of massacre as is seen in fiction, or the description of ghostly lunar beauty in Livia’s descent into the haunted vale.

But the bulk of these stories are great, and The Tower of the Elephant and The Queen of the Black Coast are indisputable classics of fantastic short fiction, richly deserving recognition and appreciation outside the genre.

The man could write, and Conan is Howard at the top of his game. My hope is that, if you do not care for my interpretations of his words, you are able to look beyond them, and enjoy Conan and his world, and Howard’s stirring prose, from the perspective of your inner eye.

Mark Schultz
2002

Introduction

When the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales appeared on newsstands, Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) probably didn’t imagine that he was making history. The Phoenix on the Sword, introducing his new character, Conan of Cimmeria, had been written in March of that year, and even if editor Farnsworth Wright thought the story had “points of real excellence,” it was not enough to warrant making it the cover story. The first Conan story was simply one tale among others in that particular issue of Weird Tales.

Seventy years later, the character has achieved international fame. Virtually every country in the world has published the Conan tales. One success leading to another, the character has been featured in motion pictures, comic books, cartoons, pastiches, television series, toys and roleplaying games. In the process, Howard’s creation has been diluted to the point that it is often nearly impossible to recognize Howard’s character in the iconic image of the fur-clad, hyper-muscled super-hero he has become in the public’s mind. Such a phenomenon is not rare in the history of popular culture. When a fictional character becomes such an icon, it is bound to escape its creator and take on a life of its own, the character taking precedence over the creator. Dracula, Fu Manchu and Tarzan are instantly recognizable figures, while creators Bram Stoker, Sax Rohmer and Edgar Rice Burroughs enjoy a popularity both inferior to and dependent upon these particular creations. As an example, many Burroughs readers had their first exposure to Tarzan by way of the movies or comic strips and were subsequently led to buy the original books. They could then judge for themselves whether the adaptations were faithful to the original. In Howard’s case, however, this has been impossible: until the present publication, Howard’s Conan stories had never been published as Howard wrote them, in the order in which he wrote them, in a uniform collection.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of establishing a character’s “biography,” no Sherlock Holmes scholar ever entertained the idea of repackaging Conan Doyle’s original stories in the order of their occurrence in Holmes’ life rather than the order in which they were written, or inserting pastiches amidst the established canon. This was, however, exactly what was done with the Conan stories: not only were they presented following someone else’s reconstruction of the character’s “biography,” but pastiches of arguable quality (to say the least) were interpolated among Howard’s tales. Further, some of Howard’s own stories were rewritten, other non-Conan Howard tales were artificially transformed into Conan ones, and Conan stories that Howard thought too little of to finish were completed by other writers. This whole concept of “posthumous collaboration,” as it was termed, made it very difficult for the casual reader to determine what was genuine Howard and what was poor aping or rewriting in those volumes. In other words, people lured to Howard’s Conan stories after encountering adaptations or pastiches simply found more of the same, not having detailed information to separate the wheat from the tares. This has made critical assessment of the Conan stories a difficult thing: the Texan has often been judged on writings that were either not his or had been tampered with.

Howard himself suggested why the stories should not be presented in the order they occurred in the character’s life: “In writing these yarns I’ve always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That’s why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.” Consequently, the stories in this volume are published as they “occurred” to Howard, in the order they were written and as they were written by Howard—no pastiches, no changes for the sake of “consistency,” no rewriting. Such a presentation not only respects Howard’s intentions, it also casts a very different light on the character and his evolution, and provides us with new insights to some of the major themes of the series.

At the time the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales went on sale, Howard was becoming one of the magazine’s pillars. The magazine had published the Texan’s first professional story, Spear and Fang, in July 1925, and over the years his tales had been appearing with increasing frequency between its covers. He had won his first cover with Wolfshead in the April 1926 issue and had introduced the fan-favorite character Solomon Kane with Red Shadows in August 1928, again featured on the cover. A year later Howard had won the admiration and respect of his peers, most notably Howard Phillips Lovecraft, with his two stories about Kull of Atlantis, The Shadow Kingdom and The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, published in the August and September 1929 issues.

It can be said that Robert E. Howard had been a protégé of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. Wright nurtured the young Texan’s burgeoning talent and would later describe him as one of his “literary discoveries,” as well as a “genius” and a “friend.” Wright was indeed an unusual editor. In a world of formula and cliché-ridden pulp magazines, Weird Tales often lived up to its subtitle, “The Unique Magazine,” walking a fine line between the magazine’s commercial imperatives and Wright’s literary inclinations. While Lovecraft would often have his tales rejected, unable or unwilling to submit to Wright’s editorial requirements or suggestions, Howard was more flexible. Studying and anticipating his editors’ needs, he had no problem turning out dozens of formula stories—with the occasional gem here and there—for such generic magazines as Fight Stories or Action Stories. On the other hand the Texan had genuine literary leanings, most evident in his poetry, but for which there was no viable market. Weird Tales came at the right time for the young writer. This atypical magazine published a large number of Howard’s poems as well as the cream of his fiction: the tales of Solomon Kane, Kull, Bran Mak Morn and Conan the Cimmerian. Not coincidentally, of all his rather numerous characters, Howard wrote poems about only those four (if we accept Cimmeria as a poem about Conan’s homeland). The Texan was evidently more involved when writing Conan tales than he was when writing for more generic markets.

It is significant to note that the first Conan story was a rewrite of a Kull story, By This Axe I Rule!, completed in 1929. Like the Conan tales, the Kull stories were centered around the exploits of a barbarian adventurer in exotic countries of Earth’s mythical past, but there ends the similarity: between 1929 and 1932, Howard had developed new ambitions for his fantasy stories. He had, first of all, succeeded in selling some historical fiction, which gave him the occasion to write on the epic scale. Howard infused those stories with an intensity that has been rarely equaled, delivering memorable tales of the later Crusades. He excelled at depicting the slow decay of the once-powerful empire of Outremer, crumbling under internal divisions and external attacks, a prevalent theme of the future Conan stories.

Selling historical fiction on a regular basis, however, proved to be an arduous task. Of his interest in the genre and difficulties in the market Howard wrote in 1933 : “There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction. I wish I was able to devote the rest of my life to that kind of work. . . . I could never make a living writing such things, though; the markets are too scanty, with requirements too narrow, and it takes me so long to complete one. I try to write as true to the actual facts as possible, at least, I try to commit as few errors as possible. I like to have my background and setting as accurate and realistic as I can, with my limited knowledge; if I twist facts too much, alter dates as some writers do, or present a character out of keeping with my impressions of the time and place, I lose my sense of reality, and my characters cease to be living and vital things; and my stories center entirely on my conceptions of my characters. Once I lose the ‘feel’ of my characters, I might as well tear up what I have written.”

All these elements were probably at the back of Howard’s mind in February 1932 when he transformed By This Axe I Rule! into The Phoenix on the Sword. By dropping the love-interest of the former story and adding a weird touch to his revision, Howard knew what he was doing: unlike his previous series, the first Conan tale was tailored specifically to meet Weird Tales’ requirements. However, taking control of the marketing aspects of the story was one thing; keeping in check the creative forces that brought the barbarian character to life was another entirely: “the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen—or rather, off my typewriter—almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-writing.”

With a first story featuring Conan as the middle-aged king of Aquilonia, a second as a young barbarian in the northern fringes of the world and a third as a young barbarian thief in the civilized city of Numalia, different periods of the character’s life and widely scattered geographic locations in each case, Howard was running the risk of losing himself in this character and his universe. This had happened with the Kull stories, in which the loss of Howard’s “sense of reality” is discernible. He thus decided to have his “background and setting . . . accurate and realistic.”

The creation of a self-coherent universe was the perfect solution to Howard’s needs and aspirations. His decision to people his Hyborian Age with Cimmerians, Vanirs, Nemedians and Afghulis, thinly-disguised names borrowed from history or legendry, was never really understood. Years later, Lovecraft would take Howard to task for this: “the only flaw in this stuff is R.E.H.’s incurable tendancy to devise names too closely resembling actual names—names which, for us, have a very different set of associations.” Lovecraft, and a host of others after him, couldn’t see that Howard never intended to create a universe removed from our own, as he had done when writing the Kull stories and as so many writers of epic fantasy have done since. By carefully choosing names that resembled those found in our history and legendry, Howard wanted to ensure that no reader would be left wondering what a Turanian looked like, or be unaware that his Vanir and Æsir lived in the northern parts of the world. By telescoping history and geography to create a universe that was new and yet familiar, Howard was deliberately striving for efficacy and stereotype, a technique that allowed him to create an exotic background with a minimum of description. He was at the same time answering his own need to have an “accurate and realistic” background for the series, while creating a method for writing (pseudo-)historical tales without the risk of anachronism or factual errors. The first three Conan stories, completed before The Hyborian Age was written, may be seen as experimental efforts, before Howard had a firm grasp of his character’s environment and of the new series’ potential. It was with his fourth and fifth offerings—The Tower of the Elephant and The Scarlet Citadel—that Howard added this epic and (pseudo-)historical dimension to his new series. From this point onward, the Conan stories became something more than the adventures of a barbarian adventurer in an imaginary kingdom, as had been the case with the Kull stories. From story to story, Conan could be a king in Medieval Europe (The Scarlet Citadel), a general in an antique Assyria torn with rivalries between city-states (Black Colossus), or a member of the wild kozaks—the term is transparent enough—of the East. As Howard once wrote: “My study of history has been a continual search for newer barbarians, from age to age.” With the creation of the Hyborian Age, he had offered himself a universe where all those barbarian peoples could co-exist in the same time-frame, and in Conan the Cimmerian the perfect vehicle to express his views on barbarism and civilization.

In many of these stories, the Cimmerian finds himself in one of the borderlands of the Hyborian Age where barbarism and civilization clash on an epic scale, with armies numbering in the tens of thousands. These large-scale battles find an echo in incidents of a more private order, often providing the stories with memorable scenes and lines of dialogue, such as Conan’s recounting his trial in Queen of the Black Coast: “I choked my ire and held my peace, and the judge squalled that I had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a dungeon to rot until I betrayed my friend. So then, seeing they were all mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge’s skull”; or Howard’s acerbic aside in The Tower of the Elephant: “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

Manifestly, the majority of Howard’s work—and the Conan tales in particular—can be read as an exploration of the theme of “Barbarism versus Civilization,” with Howard standing firmly on the barbarians’ side. This deep-rooted interest fueled Howard’s writings from the beginning and became the major theme of discussion in the Texan’s correspondence with Lovecraft, initiated in 1930. Confronted by the erudite writer from Providence, Howard found himself forced to back his opinions with historical and political data; consequently the Conan tales quite often echo ideas expressed in the correspondence and vice-versa. More aware than anyone else of Howard’s positions and convictions, Lovecraft was in a privileged position to fully appreciate the Conan tales and their subtext. Shortly after Howard’s death, Lovecraft thus wrote: “It is hard to describe precisely what made Mr. Howard’s stories stand out so sharply; but the real secret is that he himself is in every one of them.” The perceptive author here touched upon a major key to the Conan series—explaining at the same time the “internal force and sincerity” of the tales, and the reason no Conan pastiche could ever hope to attain the level of the original stories. If Howard’s Conan tales make for particularly well-crafted escapist fiction, providing the reader with colorful high-adventure stories, the best of them deliver much more. A grim undercurrent pervades the whole series, often leaving the reader with mixed emotions, the sensation of having experienced something at once exhilarating and depressing. Howard’s best Conan stories—we may cite The Tower of the Elephant, Queen of the Black Coast, Beyond the Black River and Red Nails—are also those that have a sad ending: dark undercurrents flow beneath the veneer of this “escapist” fiction.

Conan’s philosophy is best expressed in one passage from Queen of the Black Coast: “In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle. . . . Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

This is indeed one of the major characteristics of the Cimmerian. He lives for the moment, savoring each instant, not caring about the past, nor about the future. Yesterday a kozak, today a king, tomorrow a thief. It is in that sense that the Conan stories are escapist literature: their appeal seems universal, transcending generations and cultures. As Howard once confided: “A man reading [a] story about Conan, then, would feel again in the depth of his being those barbaric impulses; consequently, Conan acted as they felt they would act in similar circumstances.” What sets the Conan stories apart, however, is the distinct sensation that the thrill of adventure in these stories is but a mask, that it is in fact never really possible to forget the grim realities of the world. Conan’s Hyborian Age began with a cataclysm and ended with another cataclysm. Whatever the Hyborians—and Conan—can accomplish, has no meaning at all in the final analysis, and is eventually bound to destruction and oblivion. Human life and empires are equally transient in Howard. Civilization is not the final phase of human development; it may be an “inevitable consequence” of that development, but it is a transitory state: civilizations are bound to wither and decay, eventually to be swept over by conquering hordes of savages or barbarians who will themselves, after a time, become civilized. . . .

In this cycle, it was with the state of barbarism that Howard recognized his kinship. This was not a case, as some commentators have argued, of belief in the superiority of barbarism over civilization or of a conception of the barbarian as a “Noble Savage”: “I have no idyllic view of barbarism—as near as I can learn it’s a grim, bloody, ferocious and loveless condition. I have no patience with the depiction of the barbarian of any race as a stately, god-like child of Nature, endowed with strange wisdom and speaking in measured and sonorous phrases.” Probably the best metaphor of barbaric life as envisioned by Howard is found in Beyond the Black River, where the protagonists are caught between hammer and anvil: beyond their settlement and the Black River dwell the savage Picts, ready to attack them at any moment; behind it and Thunder River are the forces of civilization, too decadent and divided among themselves to ensure their own survival, much less that of their frontiers. The tale carries this grim predicament to its logical conclusion and Conan, the only one of the characters born into barbarism rather than civilization, is the sole survivor. The civilizing process had severed Conan’s allies from their instincts, and not having this elemental aspect, inborn in the Cimmerian, they could not hope to prevail. The tale’s concluding lines—without a doubt Howard’s most quoted statement—attest to that: “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. . . . Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” The civilizing process bears in itself the seeds of its own destruction by removing itself from what is natural. What is “unnatural” cannot endure: it will either succumb to “natural” forces, as described in Beyond the Black River, or it will slowly decay and destroy itself in a horrible fashion, as exemplified in Xuthal of the Dusk and Red Nails. The reasons behind Howard’s fascination with the theme of decaying civilizations, which may very well be at the root of his interest in barbaric life, were probably very complex. Much more than in the evolutionist theories of the time which the stories sometimes echo, it is probably in Howard’s biography and psychology that the answer resides. There is indeed something intensely personal in these convictions, which transcends the stories and contributes to much of their strength.

There is no denying that not all the Conan stories are on the same level as those we have mentioned. In a time of financial difficulties, it soon became easy enough for Howard to make of Conan his meal ticket. Most of the more routine Conan stories—systematically featuring semi-naked ladies, which had been entirely absent from the series until then—were indeed composed between November 1932 and March 1933, at a time when Howard was in dire need of money. (Incidentally, the fact that most Conan pastiches found their “inspiration” in such stories, and not Red Nails or Queen of the Black Coast, is a testimony to the critical eye of their authors.) Most of these stories have something genuinely Howardian in them—as Lovecraft once wrote, Howard “was greater than any money-making policy he could adopt”—but they are clearly exploiting a formula calculated to win the cover illustration.

With the tales of Conan of Cimmeria, Howard was out for more than pulpish fare. While he could have turned out story after story of the adventures of a Cimmerian killing monsters and lusting after scantily-clad damsels in distress, assuring himself a regular income, Howard decided not to turn his Cimmerian into an industry. The mark of the true author, he didn’t hesitate to experiment with new types of stories, to take risks at a time when their sale and commercial success would have been assured otherwise. If the true work of art is something that at once attracts and disturbs, then the Conan stories are something special, an epic painted in bright colors, featuring heroic deeds and larger-than-life characters in fabled lands, but with something darker lying beneath.

Scratch the veneer at your own risk.

Patrice Louinet
2002

Hyborian Names and Countries

The following is a list of names, countries, kings, etc., that was prepared in March 1932. The two names in italics were typed and later erased by Howard, though they are still visible on the original typescript.

     

Hyborian Age Maps

 

Click for (slightly) larger maps; the originals were sadly too large for me to capture in full scale.

Hyborian Genesis

Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories
by Patrice Louinet

In a December 1933 letter to fellow author Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard recounted the creation of his most famous character, Conan the Cimmerian:

“I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen—or rather off my typewriter—almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-writing. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn’t do it.”

Writing that his characters and stories came easily to him was customary with Howard, who almost never mentioned unfinished or unsold stories in his correspondence. In the case of the Kull series, for example, only three tales had been published while a dozen others were either left unfinished or rejected. Yet Howard wrote to Lovecraft:

“Thanks for the kind things you said about the Kull stories, but I doubt if I’ll ever be able to write another. The three stories I wrote about that character seemed almost to write themselves, without any planning on my part; there was no conscious effort on my part to work them up. They simply grew up, unsummoned, full grown in my mind and flowed out on paper from my finger tips.”

In fact, drafts survive for almost every Kull story, indicating that much more work was involved than Howard suggests. How then can we give credence to his intimation that the creation of the Conan stories was virtually a case of automatic writing? Things were not as easy and straightforward as Howard would have Clark Ashton Smith—and us—believe.

In October 1931, Howard completed the first version of a story titled People of the Dark and sent it to Clayton Publications’ new magazine, Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, a direct competitor to Weird Tales. Editor Harry Bates liked the story, but asked for some rewriting. Howard complied and a few weeks later Bates accepted the story, along with another tale Howard had sent him, The Cairn on the Headland.

People of the Dark is a remembrance/reincarnation story. In this first-person narrative, protagonist John O’Brien tells of re-experiencing an episode in the life of one of his previous incarnations, one “Conan of the Reavers,” a black-haired Gael who swears by the Celtic deity Crom. It is tempting indeed to see in this Conan a direct prototype for his more famous namesake (and in fact some commentators have done so), were it not for the fact that People of the Dark is a first-person remembrance/reincarnation story, while the Conan stories are not.

Or are they?

With the sale of People of the Dark, Howard had found a new market—one that, unlike Weird Tales, paid on acceptance. When the money arrived a few weeks later, Howard was overjoyed:

“I finally made Claytons’. I sold them a couple of yarns in a row, and while they kept me waiting awhile for the dough, they paid well when they did pay—$134 for one, and $144 for the other. Short stories too. I hope to gosh I can sell them a long novelet.” (REH to Tevis Clyde Smith, ca. February 1932)

Thus in February 1932 Howard was suddenly richer by $278, and it was probably this, rather than any lack of inspiration, that was behind his decision to take a vacation to the southern parts of Texas.

Howard commented to Wilfred Blanch Talman a few weeks later: “I spent a few weeks wandering about in the south part of the state, along the Border mainly, and didn’t get any work done during that time—my main occupation being the wholesale consumption of tortillas, enchiladas and Spanish wine.”

If he didn’t write any stories or letters—probably having left his typewriter behind—Howard at least wrote one poem during his stay: Cimmeria. In 1934 Howard sent Emil Petaja a copy of the poem with the comment: “Written in Mission, Texas, February 1932; suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredericksburg seen in a mist of winter rain.”

We do not know whether Howard already had the idea of Conan by the time the poem was written; certainly both the character and the poem were conceived within a matter of days:

“Conan simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande. I did not create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.” (Quoted in Alvin Earl Perry, A Biographical Sketch of Robert E. Howard, 1935)

It has been shown that much of Howard’s description of the poem’s Cimmeria echoes specific passages in Plutarch’s Lives. Like Howard, Plutarch linked the Celtic Cimbri to the Cimmerians, saying they “live in a dark and woody country hardly penetrable by the sunbeams, the trees are so close and thick, extending into the interior as far as the Hercynian forest.”

The poem is more than mere description, however. The first line of the poem—“I remember”—makes it quite clear that we are dealing with the themes of reincarnation and remembrance, as was the case in People of the Dark. The protagonist of the latter, John O’Brien, is an American of Irish stock, living in the American Southwest. He thus clearly evokes Howard himself; and if O’Brien can remember his past life as Conan of the Reavers, did Howard believe, or fancy, he also could “remember” having lived in Cimmeria in a past life?

Inquiring further in this autobiographical vein, one is struck by the strong resonance between the descriptions of Cimmeria in the poem and those found in Howard’s reminiscences of the land of his birth, Dark Valley, in Palo Pinto County, Texas. He wrote to H.P. Lovecraft, in October 1930:

“I believe, for instance, that the gloominess in my own nature can be partly traced to the surroundings of a locality in which I spent part of my baby-hood. It was a long, narrow valley, lonesome and isolated, up in the Palo Pinto hill country. It was very sparsely settled and its name, Dark Valley, was highly descriptive. So high were the ridges, so thick and tall the oak trees that it was shadowy even in the daytime, and at night it was as dark as a pine forest—and nothing is darker in this world. The creatures of the night whispered and called to one another, faint night-winds murmured through the leaves and now and then among the slightly waving branches could be glimpsed the gleam of a distant star.”

Similar imagery combining evil, gnarled trees and an aura of terror can also be found in Howard’s poem The Dweller in Dark Valley, which concludes with “I go no more in Dark Valley which is the gate of Hell.”

Dark Valley and Cimmeria may thus have been very closely linked in Howard’s mind. But the “memory” they evoke is of a very peculiar nature. Howard’s memories of Dark Valley are no less fantastic than John O’Brien’s of his past life: the Howards left Dark Valley when Robert was barely two years old, and he would not see Dark Valley again until the spring of 1931. Reincarnation can then be seen as a solution to escape one’s biography, just as in Jack London’s The Star Rover, a Howard favorite, in which the protagonist is a prisoner who finds relief—and escape—from torture by remembering his past lives. There is a definite pattern here, since Howard completed his first reincarnation story—The Children of the Night—the same month he wrote to Lovecraft about Dark Valley, and his second one—People of the Dark—only a few weeks after having seen Dark Valley again.

All these elements were combined in the first Conan story, The Phoenix on the Sword, where the description of Cimmeria echoes Plutarch, Dark Valley and the poems:

“A gloomier land never existed on earth. It is all of hills, heavily wooded, and the trees are strangely dusky, so that even by day all the land looks dark and menacing. As far as a man may see his eye rests on the endless vista of hills beyond hills, growing darker and darker in the distance. Clouds hang always among those hills; the skies are nearly always grey and over-cast. Winds blow sharp and cold, driving rain of sleet or snow, and moan drearily among the passes and down the valleys. There is little mirth in that land, and men grow moody and strange. (Unpublished draft a, pp. 9-10)

If Howard could attribute the “gloominess” in his nature to what he thought he remembered of Dark Valley, a similar argument can be put forward to explain Conan’s own moody temperament. While many readers see in Conan a projection of Howard, what they primarily see is Conan as an idealized version of Howard: the conquering, irresistible, devil-may-care barbarian. The gloominess inherent to the character has passed largely unnoticed, and understandably so. This feature was rarely mentioned by Howard himself, at least in the published versions of the stories.

In its final form, The Phoenix on the Sword opens with a passage from the “Nemedian Chronicles.” It is in those lines that we first see Conan mentioned; the character himself doesn’t appear until the second chapter of the story. The passage in question reads: “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 sandalled feet” (italics mine). “The Nemedian Chronicles” were only introduced into the story because Farnsworth Wright (the editor of Weird Tales) had asked Howard to rewrite and condense his first two chapters. The short extract’s function was to replace lengthy passages on, respectively, some countries of the Hyborian Age, and some character traits of the Cimmerian.

And if Howard attributed his gloominess to Dark Valley, Conan seems to attribute his own “gigantic melancholies” to his Cimmerian origin:

“Well,” grinned Prospero, “the dark hills of Cimmeria are far behind you. And now I go. I’ll quaff a goblet of white Nemedian wine for you at Numa’s court.”

“Good,” grunted the king, “but kiss Numa’s dancing girls for yourself only, lest you involve the states!”

His gusty laughter followed Prospero out of the chamber. The carven door closed behind the Poitanian, and Conan turned back to his task. He paused a moment, idly listening to his friend’s retreating footsteps, which fell hollowly on the tiles. And as if the empty sound struck a kindred chord in his soul, a rush of revulsion swept over him. His mirth fell away from him like a mask, and his face was suddenly old, his eyes worn. The unreasoning melancholy of the Cimmerian fell like a shroud about his soul, paralyzing him with a crushing sense of the futility of human endeavor and the meaninglessness of life. His kingship, his pleasures, his fears, his ambitions, and all earthly things were revealed to him suddenly as dust and broken toys. The borders of life shrivelled and the lines of existence closed in about him, numbing him. Dropping his lion head in his mighty hands, he groaned aloud.

Then lifting his head, as a man looks for escape, his eyes fell on a crystal jar of yellow wine. Quickly he rose and pouring a goblet full, quaffed it at a gulp. Again he filled and emptied the goblet, and again. When he set it down, a fine warmth stole through his veins. Things and happenings assumed new values. The dark Cimmerian hills faded far behind him. Life was good and real and vibrant after all—not the dream of an idiot god. He stretched himself lazily like a gigantic cat and seated himself at the table, conscious of the magnitude and vital importance of himself and his task. Contentedly, he nibbled his stylus and eyed his map. (The Phoenix on the Sword, first submitted draft, see pp. 360-361)

When Howard said that “the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part,” he was probably telling the truth. What he did not realize was that this act of creation obeyed deep-seated motives: Conan’s “gigantic melancholies” echo Howard’s “black moods,” as he called them, just as Cimmeria echoes Dark Valley. And just as Dark Valley was a haunting memory for Howard, “a gloomier land” than Cimmeria never existed for Conan.

Howard’s Conan, at least in the early phases of his creation, was thus much more a projection of what Howard was, than what he wanted to be.

The poem Cimmeria is not, strictly speaking, part of the Conan canon, but it is the piece of writing that helped bring about the Conan stories: Conan—or Howard—can only “remember” Cimmeria; it is a terrible land, the mere evocation of which brings unhappy recollections and invites forgetfulness. This is why no Conan story can take place in Cimmeria and why no other Cimmerian is—or could be—ever featured in any of the Conan tales. In Queen of the Black Coast, Conan will explain to Bêlit that “[i]n this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle. . . . Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.” This is what the Conan series is really about then, a wish to drown oneself in a turbulent life. Conan’s intense physical life appears as a desperate attempt to forget Cimmeria and whatever frightful memory is associated with that country. Perhaps the same can be said of Howard’s intense writing activity, which could be seen as an attempt to forget Dark Valley. When Conan is inactive—as is the case at the beginning of The Phoenix on the Sword—and reminded of Cimmeria, his first reflex is to seek oblivion and drink his gloominess away. Different solutions to the same problem.

Once Cimmeria was written, after having expressed the need to flee that country and to forget it as much as possible, Howard was psychologically ready to compose the first of these action-filled Conan stories.

When Howard returned to Cross Plains in February 1932, there still remained the task of creating what was to become known as the “Hyborian” world.

The reasons behind the invention of the Hyborian Age were probably commercial. Howard’s sole market up to 1929 had been Weird Tales, but in the early thirties several new markets opened up to him, notably Oriental Stories and the short-lived Soldiers of Fortune. Howard had an intense love for history and the stories he sold to Oriental Stories rank among his best. At the same time he recognized the difficulties and the time-consuming research work involved in maintaining historical accuracy. By conceiving a universe that was not ours but that may once have been ours, by carefully choosing names that resembled our past history, Howard skirted the problem of anachronisms and the need for lengthy explanatory chapters. Lovecraft later criticized him for this, but concluded that: “The only thing to do is to accept the nomenclature as he gives it, wink at the weak spots, and be damned thankful that we can get such vivid artificial legendry.” (Letter to Donald Wollheim, used in the introduction to The Hyborian Age, 1938)

Howard was perfectly able to come up with imaginary names when he wanted to: the Kull stories that Lovecraft so much admired feature strange-sounding empires such as Zarfhaana, Valusia and Grondar. But by dubbing Howard’s method “artificial legendry,” Lovecraft had touched upon one of the most important factors presiding over the creation of the Hyborian Age.

Although he is not represented in Howard’s library, nor alluded to in his papers and correspondence, there seems a strong likelihood that Howard’s conception of the Hyborian Age originates in Thomas Bulfinch’s The Outline of Mythology (1913), acting as a catalyst that enabled him to coalesce into a coherent whole his literary aspirations and the strong psychological/autobiographical elements underlying the creation of Conan.

Bulfinch (1796-1867) had a keen interest in classical studies and much of his spare time was spent writing a series of books popularizing classical legends and mythological episodes. The Outline of Mythology combines his three most famous books, The Age of Fable (1855), The Age of Chivalry (1858) and Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages (1863). Between the covers of Bulfinch’s books were heroic tales set in various places and epochs of history and legendry, that is to say, the very substance of the Hyborian Age. It is thus not surprising to find that many of the names used in Howard’s early conception of his imaginary world are found in Bulfinch, beginning with Conan:

“. . . the next event of note is the conquest and colonization of Armorica, by Maximis, a Roman general, and Conan, lord of Miniadoc or Denbigh-land, in Wales.” (Bulfinch, The Outline of Mythology, p. 388)

Of course, Howard was familiar with the name Conan before the inception of the Hyborian series, since he had already used the name for the protagonist in People of the Dark. But perhaps this only indicates that Howard had already read or was reading Bulfinch by the time he wrote that story.

As to the country of Conan’s birth, Cimmeria, Bulfinch offers a description similar to Howard’s:

“Near the Cimmerian country, a mountain cave is the abode of the dull god Somnus. Here Phoebus dares not come, either rising, at midday, or setting. Clouds and shadows are exhaled from the ground, and the light glimmers faintly. The bird of dawning, with crested head, never there calls aloud to Aurora, nor watchful dog, nor more sagacious goose disturbs the silence. No wild beast, nor cattle, nor branch moved with the wind, nor sound of human conversation, breaks the stillness. Silence reigns there; but from the bottom of the rock the River Lethe flows, and by its murmur invites to sleep.” (Bulfinch, pp. 71-72)

Some commentators have noted the closeness of description between Howard’s Cimmeria and Herodotus’ description of this country; this could well have come from Bulfinch, who drew some of his material from Herodotus. Bulfinch adds: “The earliest inhabitants of Britain are supposed to have been a branch of that great family known in history by the designation of Celts. Cambria, which is a frequent name for Wales, is thought to be derived from Cymri, the name which the Welsh traditions apply to an immigrant people who entered the island from the adjacent continent. This name is thought to be identical with those of Cimmerians and Cimbri, under which the Greek and Roman historians describe a barbarous people, who spread themselves from the north of the Euxine over the whole of Northwestern Europe” (p. 529). In March 1932, precisely at the time he was writing the first Conan tales, Howard echoed Bulfinch, writing to Lovecraft that “Most authorities consider the Cimbri were Germans, of course, and they probably were, but there’s a possibility that they were Celtic, or of mixed Celtic and German blood, and it gratifies my fancy to protray [sic] them as Celts, anyway.”

These elements alone are far from conclusive, but are sufficient to show that Howard may have been using Bulfinch’s recountings of widespread legends as a handy reference for his own Hyborian world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the first Conan tale, The Phoenix on the Sword.

Around May of 1929, Howard wrote two drafts of a Kull story entitled By This Axe I Rule! The story was submitted to—and rejected by—Argosy and Adventure. Nearly three years later, in March 1932, Howard salvaged this story from the unpublished files and rewrote it as The Phoenix on the Sword. It is impossible to ascertain exactly what was modified between the last draft of the Kull story and the first draft of the Conan one, since the final draft of By This Axe I Rule! has not come to us (the published text is that of the first—and only extant—draft). At any rate the physical description of Kull was carried over to Conan, with the notable exception of the color of his eyes: grey for the Atlantean, blue for the Cimmerian. The Conan version of the story also dropped the love interest of the Kull tale and replaced it with a supernatural element; understandably so since the Conan story was aimed at a fantasy market while the Kull version had been intended for general fiction magazines. In the three years that had elapsed since the writing of the Kull story, Howard had begun corresponding with Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Many of Howard’s weird stories from the year 1931 were attempts at writing stories in Lovecraft’s style. By the end of the year, however, Howard had successfully assimilated the influence, and he was now able to include Lovecraftian elements in his stories without aping his Providence colleague. The Lovecraftian monster of this story is a perfect example, as is the fact that the published version’s discreet reference to the “Nameless Old Ones” replaced the first draft’s “Cthulhu, Tsathogua, Yog-Sothoth, and the Nameless Old Ones.”

In the Kull story, the names of the conspirators were Ascalante, Gromel, Volmana, Kaanub and Ridondo. In the Conan version, all names were retained except Kaanub and Ridondo. The replacement of Kaanub by Dion is easily explained, since the former was mentioned in the Kull stories Howard had sold to Weird Tales. However, this was not the case with Ridondo. So why change the name to Rinaldo? Rinaldo, in fact, appears in Bulfinch: “Rinaldo was one of the four sons of Aymon, who married Aya, the sister of Charlemagne. Thus Rinaldo was nephew to Charlemagne and cousin of Orlando” (p. 660). Not only are there lengthy passages about Rinaldo in Bulfinch, but the fact that he was not always in favor at the court of his king furnishes enough explanation for Howard’s change from Ridondo to Rinaldo: the two Rinaldos share ambivalent feelings toward their respective kings.

It seems likely that all the names introduced between the Kull and the Conan version, with the notable exceptions of Prospero and Publius (undoubtedly derived from Shakespeare) came from Bulfinch:

“Hyborea/Hyboria” and “Aquilonia” (The word “Hyborian” was not introduced by Howard until the last draft of his essay The Hyborian Age; the original word was “Hyborean”): “When so many less active agencies were personified, it is not to be supposed that the winds failed to be so. They were Boreas or Aquilo, the north wind.” Since “Hy” is Irish for “country of,” and given Howard’s interest in things Celtic, Hyboria would thus be “the country of Borea” or “the country of the north wind.”

“King Numa” : “It was said that Numa, the second king of Rome. . . .”

“Epemiteus/Epemitreus” (in the first draft of Phoenix, this character was named Epemiteus): “Prometheus was one of the Titans, a gigantic race, who inhabited the earth before the creation of man. To him and his brother Epimetheus was committed the office of making man, and providing him and all other animals with the faculties necessary for their preservation.”

“Hyperborea”: “The northern portion of the earth was supposed to be inhabited by a happy race named the Hyperboreans, dwelling in everlasting bliss and spring beyond the lofty mountains whose caverns were supposed to send forth the piercing blasts of the north wind, which chilled the people of Hellas (Greece). Their country was inaccessible by land or sea. They lived exempt from disease or old age, from toils and warfare.”

“Hyrkania”: “. . . no less a personage than the Prince of Hyrcania. . . .”

“Brythunia and the Picts”: “. . . a history of Britain, brought over from the opposite shore of France, which, under the name of Brittany, was chiefly peopled by natives of Britain, who from time to time emigrated thither, driven from their own country by the inroads of the Picts and Scots.” (Of course, Howard was well aware of the Picts before reading Bulfinch.)

“Stygia”: as such, several times.

“Thoth-amon”: “The Egyptians acknowledged as the highest deity Amun, afterwards called Zeus, or Jupiter Ammon.” (The name “Thoth” doesn’t appear in Bulfinch.)

“Boethian/Bossonian Marches” (“Boethian Marches” was used in the first draft): “fleet and army assembled in the port of Aulis in Boeotia.”

“Zamora”: as “Zumara.”

The second Conan story completed by Howard, The Frost-Giant’s Daughter, borrowed more than names from Bulfinch. The idea for the plot probably emerged while Howard was writing The Phoenix on the Sword, which would account for the remarks about Conan’s days with the Vanir and the Æsir found in that story:

“Asgard and Vanaheim,” Prospero scanned the map. “By Mitra, I had almost believed those lands to be fabulous.”

Conan grinned fiercely and involuntarily touched the various scars on his clean shaven face. “By Mitra, had you spent your youth on the northern borders of Cimmeria, you had realized they are anything but fabulous! Asgard lies to the north, and Vanaheim to the northwest, of Cimmeria, and there is continual war along the borders. These people are tall and fair and blue-eyed, and of like blood and language, save that the Aesir have yellow hair and the Vanir, red hair. They are great ale drinkers and fighters; they fight all day and drink ale and roar their wild songs all night. Their chief god is the frost-giant Ymir, and they own no over-king, but each tribe has its war-chief.” (Draft a, p. 9)

The following names are found in both Howard’s story and Bulfinch: Asgard, Vanaheim, Ymir, Horsa, Heimdal, Bragi, and even the Frost-giants. While Howard had already written many stories featuring northern characters, the inspiration here was much more than the names: the basic plot of The Frost-Giant’s Daughter can be found in its entirety in Bulfinch. For Howard’s Atali, the frost-giant’s daughter, owes more to Atalanta than just her name. As Bulfinch tells us:

The innocent cause of so much sorrow was a maiden whose face you might truly say was boyish for a girl, yet too girlish for a boy. Her fortune had been told, and it was to this effect: “Atalanta, do not marry; marriage will be your ruin.” Terrified by this oracle, she fled the society of men, and devoted herself to the sports of the chase. To all suitors (for she had many) she imposed a condition which was generally effectual in relieving her of their persecutions—“I will be the prize of him who shall conquer me in the race; but death must be the penalty of all who try and fail.” In spite of this hard condition some would try. (Bulfinch, pp. 141-142)

Howard combined this basic outline with yet another reworked Bulfinch legend, that of Daphne and Apollo, but he reversed the roles. Whereas Apollo was a god and Daphne a mortal, Howard made Atali a goddess and Conan a mortal. In the original, Cupid had struck Apollo with an arrow to excite love for Daphne, but struck her with an arrow to cause her to find love repellent. Howard kept the idea of the love-maddened Apollo (rather a lust-maddened Conan) pursuing the girl until she invokes the aid of her divine father:

Apollo loved her, and longed to obtain her [. . .] He followed her; she fled, swifter than the wind, and delayed not a moment at his entreaties. [. . .] The nymph continued her flight, and left his plea half uttered. And even as she fled she charmed him. The wind blew her garments, and her unbound hair streamed loose behind her. The god grew impatient to find his wooings thrown away, and, sped by Cupid, gained upon her in the race. It was like a hound pursuing a hare, with open jaws ready to seize, while the feebler animal darts forward, slipping from the very grasp. So flew the god and the virgin—he on the wings of love, and she on those of fear. The pursuer is the more rapid, however, and gains upon her, and his panting breath blows upon her hair. Her strength begins to fail, and, ready to sink, she calls upon her father, the river god: “Help me, Peneus! open the earth to enclose me, or change my form, which has brought me into this danger. . . .” (Bulfinch, pp. 20-22; compare with Howard’s: “Oh, my father, save me!”)

It seems Howard was telling Clark Ashton Smith the truth when he wrote that, “Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan.” After Howard sent The Phoenix on the Sword and The Frost-Giant’s Daughter to Farnsworth Wright in early March 1932, he didn’t even wait for them to be accepted or rejected before he wrote another story, The God in the Bowl.

The God in the Bowl took three drafts before Howard was satisfied with it. This time Howard probably borrowed his names from Plutarch’s Lives, some of which had already been jotted down in a list of names and countries Howard had prepared while writing The Phoenix on the Sword (see Appendix, p. 417). Compare the names from Plutarch with their equivalent in Howard’s story: Oenarus (Enarus), Demetrius (Demetrio—Howard used Demetrius in error in three instances in the first draft of the story), Postumius (Postumo), Dion (Dionus), Areus (Arus), Deucalion (Deucalion in the page of notes, Kallian [Publico] in the story) and Petinus (as [Aztrias] Petanius). The story takes place in Numalia (Numantia appears in Plutarch), and the Palian Way undoubtedly corresponds to the Appian Way. As had been the case with Phoenix, it seems the “influence” was limited to the borrowing of those names.

Howard was writing these stories in very quick succession and his page of names and countries had become obsolete. Howard, probably sensing that this new series had potential, began writing what would become The Hyborian Age. The essay required four successive versions before he was satisfied with the result. Starting out as a brief two-page outline, it soon developed into an 8,000 word essay, enriched with each successive version.

Over the years, the idea that Howard had written The Hyborian Age first and the stories later has become widespread, no doubt because of Howard’s own ambiguous phrasing on the subject: “When I began writing the Conan stories a few years ago, I prepared this ‘history’ of his age and the peoples of that age, in order to lend him and his sagas a greater aspect of realness.”

While there is no denying that Howard had some ideas as to what his Hyborian world was to become, there was no attempt at systematization until after the first three stories were written. The country of Zingara and the Sea of Vilayet (as the “inland sea”) were introduced with the first draft, Ophir and Gunderland in the second, and Corinthia, Argos, Ophir and Turan in the third. Two very similar maps were then prepared (see pp. 421-423) as well as the short Notes on Various Peoples of the Hyborian Age (see pp. 375-378).

Of the many countries first described in these essays and maps, several would never actually be used or mentioned in the rest of the series. The term “Border Kingdom,” for instance, only appears in these documents, and others were simply discarded: “South of Stygia are the vast black kingdoms of the Amazons, the Kushites, the Atlaians, and the hybrid empire of Zimbabwe.” Only the Kushites would make it to the series. In 1936, Howard would explain his position in a letter to P. Schuyler-Miller:

“I’ve never attempted to map the southern and eastern kingdoms, though I have a fairly clear outline of their geography in my mind. However, in writing about them I feel a certain amount of license, since the inhabitants of the western Hyborian nations were about as ignorant concerning the peoples and countries of the south and east as the people of medieval Europe were ignorant of Africa and Asia. In writing about the western Hyborian nations I feel confined within the limits of known and inflexible boundaries and territories, but in fictionizing the rest of the world, I feel able to give my imagination freer play. That is, having adopted a certain conception of geography and ethnology, I feel compelled to abide by it, in the interests of consistency. My conception of the east and south is not so definite or so arbitrary.”

Howard remained quite faithful to his conception of the Hyborian world as defined in his essay. As he wrote more and more Conan stories, countries or regions were added to it. This did not prevent him, however, from recycling names first used in a discarded story. For example, the name “Punt” was first used in an unfinished story for a city, but was used in later stories as the name of a country.

Just as he had completed these documents, Howard wrote an outline for a new Conan story (see p. 399), in which the Cimmerian was to operate as a thief in the Maul of a Zamorian city. Howard decided not to flesh out this tale, possibly due to news received from Farnsworth Wright. In a letter dated March 10, 1932, Wright wrote:

“Dear Mr. Howard: I am returning ‘The Frost Giant’s Daughter’ in a separate envelope, as I do not much care for it. But ‘The Phoenix of [sic] the Sword’ has points of real excellence. I hope you will see your way clear to touch it up and resubmit it. It is the first two chapters that do not click. The story opens rather uninterestingly, it seems to me, and the reader has difficulty in orienting himself. The first chapter ends well, and the second chapter begins superbly; but after King Conan’s personality is well established, the chapter sags from too much writing. I think the very last page of the whole story might be re-written with advantage; because it seems a little weak after the stupendous events that precede it.”

Given the work Howard was putting into building his new series, the news must have dealt him a temporary blow, the more so since The God in the Bowl, undoubtedly sent a few days after the first two stories, would be rejected too.

The God in the Bowl was relegated to the archives. Howard thought highly enough of The Frost Giant’s Daughter, however, to give the story to a fanzine a few months later—with Conan’s name replaced by Amra—under the title The Frost-King’s Daughter. (In the meantime, The Frost-King’s Daughter may have been unsuccessfully submitted to another magazine.) By the time The Frost-King’s Daughter was published, in 1934, readers familiar with the Conan stories wouldn’t fail to note that the name Amra was mentioned in The Scarlet Citadel (published in Weird Tales for January 1933) as an alias for Conan.

Howard then reworked The Phoenix on the Sword according to Wright’s suggestions, eliminating the lengthy descriptive passages of the Hyborian world and recycling his country-names into the newly-created “Nemedian Chronicles.” A few days later Howard sent off the new version, and by April 1932 he could report to Lovecraft:

“I’ve been working on a new character, providing him with a new epoch—the Hyborian Age, which men have forgotten, but which remains in classical names, and distorted myths. Wright rejected most of the series, but I did sell him one—‘The Phoenix on the Sword’ which deals with the adventures of King Conan the Cimmerian, in the kingdom of Aquilonia.”

By “most of the series,” Howard meant The Frost-Giant’s Daughter and The God in the Bowl.

After having completed and sent the revised version of The Phoenix on the Sword, Howard immediately proceeded to write a new Conan story, one that would be the first to really integrate his new conception of the Hyborian world, and thus to introduce it to the reader. The idea for The Tower of the Elephant was likely born as Howard was revising The Phoenix on the Sword (whose final draft mentions “Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery”). The new tale was also born on the ashes of the never fleshed-out synopsis mentioned above, in which (as in Tower) Conan is a thief in the Maul of a Zamorian city. The early phase of the creation of Conan was over. Howard now had a firm grasp not only of his character, but also of the universe he was operating in.

The Tower of the Elephant is one of the best Conan stories, in which Howard masterfully inserted as many elements of the Hyborian world as was possible. He opened his story in a tavern of ill-repute and peopled it with as many representatives of the Hyborian nationalities—excepting, of course, another Cimmerian—as he could:

“Native rogues were the dominant element—dark-skinned, dark-eyed Zamorians, with daggers at their girdles and guile in their hearts. But there were wolves of half a dozen outland nations there as well. There was a giant Hyperborean renegade, taciturn, dangerous, with a broadsword strapped to his great gaunt frame—for men wore steel openly in the Maul. There was a Shemitish counterfeiter, with his hook nose and curled blue-black beard. There was a bold-eyed Brythunian wench, sitting on the knee of a tawny-haired Gunderman—a wandering mercenary soldier, a deserter from some defeated army. And the fat gross rogue whose bawdy jests were causing all the shouts of mirth was a professional kidnapper come up from distant Koth to teach woman-stealing to Zamorians who were born with more knowledge of the art than he could ever attain.”

In a later portion of the tale, Howard had Yag-kosha explain to Conan—and the reader—the most important phases of the creation of the Hyborian world:

“We saw men grow from the ape and build the shining cities of Valusia, Kamelia, Commoria, and their sisters. We saw them reel before the thrusts of the heathen Atlanteans and Picts and Lemurians. We saw the oceans rise and engulf Atlantis and Lemuria, and the isles of the Picts, and the shining cities of civilization. We saw the survivors of Pictdom and Atlantis build their stone age empires, and go down to ruin, locked in bloody wars. We saw the Picts sink into abysmal savagery, the Atlanteans into apedom again. We saw new savages drift southward in conquering waves from the arctic circle to build a new civilization, with new kingdoms called Nemedia, and Koth, and Aquilonia and their sisters. We saw your people rise under a new name from the jungles of the apes that had been Atlanteans. We saw the descendants of the Lemurians who had survived the cataclysm, rise again through savagery and ride westward, as Hyrkanians. And we saw this race of devils, survivors of the ancient civilization that was before Atlantis sank, come once more into culture and power—this accursed kingdom of Zamora.”

Howard sent the new story late in the month, and he could report to Lovecraft a few days later that:

“Wright took another of the Conan the Cimmerian series, ‘The Tower of the Elephant,’ the setting of which is among the spider-haunted jeweled towers of Zamora the Accursed, while Conan was still a thief by profession, before he came into the kingship.”

In the sole month of March 1932, Howard, “without much labor on [his] part,” had written an estimated 250 pages of Conan material, to sell only two stories.

It appears that Howard did not work on Conan for the next several weeks. Presumably he did not wish to deluge Weird Tales with more Conan stories until those which had been accepted were scheduled. But the Hyborian world was quite present in Howard’s mind.

One of the elements from the prototypical phase of the series had apparently disappeared: the remembrance/reincarnation theme that had been present in People of the Dark, Cimmeria and the early drafts of The Phoenix on the Sword. This was surprising given the importance we have ascribed to this theme in the very inception of what was to become the Conan series. In fact, as he had just completed the first Conan tales, Howard mentioned to Lovecraft that he was also “working on a mythical period of prehistory when what is now the state of Texas was a great plateau, stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the sea—before the country south of the Cap-rock broke down to form the sloping steppes which now constitute the region.” The story alluded to here was Marchers of Valhalla, in its first version. The story would be rejected in May by Farnsworth Wright. Marchers of Valhalla was the first of the James Allison stories. Allison is a crippled Texan of the post-oak country, condemned to a drab life, who acquires the ability to relive his past, heroic, lives. In October 1933, Howard wrote to Clark Ashton Smith that The Garden of Fear—another James Allison story—was “dealing with one of my various conceptions of the Hyborian and post-Hyborian world.” To fully understand the implication, Smith would have had to be familiar with one of the drafts for Marchers of Valhalla, where Ishtar’s dialogue was quite different than in the published version of the tale:

“Listen, and I will tell you!” she cried, hitching toward me on her knees and catching at the skirt of my tunic. “Only listen, and then grant me the little thing I ask! I am Ishtar, a daughter of a king in dim Lemuria, which the sea gulped so long ago. Thoth-amon, the sorcerer of Stygia, hated my father, and to spite him, he put the curse on me of Life ever-lasting!

“Oh, man, I have lived for so many, weary, weary ages! I saw Atlantis and Lemuria sink below the waves, and the rise of the Hyborians. But for over a thousand years I have dwelt in this domed chamber, beneath the golden dome of the temple of Khemu, whither a galley of distant Khitai bore me. . . .” (unpublished draft)

The “Hyborian Age” was thus on the verge of becoming much more than just Conan’s world, and would have been included in the James Allison stories. Somewhat later, Howard also began, but didn’t complete, a story set in modern times that mentions the “Hyborian Age” (fragment published in The Howard Collector, 1979), and sold The Haunter of the Ring, yet another reincarnation story, which mentions Thoth-amon, his ring and Stygia.

In the spring of 1932, Howard began work on The Scarlet Citadel (Weird Tales, January 1933). The story was the second to concern Conan’s reign as king of Aquilonia, but it had much more of the medieval to it than The Phoenix on the Sword. The Scarlet Citadel is the first Conan story to display Howard’s interest in history and epic. It seems probable that an anecdote in Bulfinch furnished the idea for the beginning of the story, in which Conan and his army are led to an ambush by supposed allies. While describing the Battle of Roncesvalles, Bulfinch writes:

“Marsilius began by lamenting, not as to the ambassador, but as to the friend, the injuries which Charles had done him by invading his dominions, charging him with wishing to take his kingdom from him, and give it to Orlando; till at length he plainly uttered his belief that, if that ambitious paladin were but dead, good men would get their rights. Gan [. . .] exclaimed: “Every word you utter is truth; die he must, and die also must Oliver, who struck me that foul blow at court. [. . .] I have planned everything,—I have settled everything already with their besotted master. Orlando will come to your borders,—to Roncesvalles,—for the purpose of receiving the tribute. Charles will await him at the foot of the mountains. Orlando will bring but a small band with him: you, when you meet him, will have secretly your whole army at your back. You surround him, and who receives tribute then?” (Bulfinch, p. 801)

From this brief passage, Howard built an epic that owed nothing to Bulfinch. Why borrow when the whole purpose of the creation of the Hyborian world was precisely to be free from historical contraints? Howard’s readings were springboards from which he crafted tales that were entirely his: who could detect, for instance, that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company and Sir Nigel very probably provided Howard with some background data for his story from a reading of the published version of The Scarlet Citadel? In a letter received August 9, 1932 by Lovecraft, Howard casually mentioned: “Like Samkin Aylward, I warm to a man with the bitter drop in him.” Samkin Aylward is a character in Doyle’s novels, both books taking place in Medieval England and France during the Hundred Years War. In the published version of The Scarlet Citadel, there is a cryptic mention of “the land torn with the war of the barons.” In the first drafts of the story, the passage was much more detailed: “The aristocrats had long memories; they would remember rich merchants who gave freely to Conan’s cause, they would remember the sturdy yeomen with which Conan had broken the power of the feudal lords in the War of the Barons” (from draft b, pp. 29-30). The reason for the toning down is simple: there was an historical “Barons’ War” in England, in the thirteenth Century, alluded to by Doyle in Sir Nigel. A similar example is found in the mention that “six rich merchants, sent as a delegation of protest, were seized and their heads slashed off without ceremony.” (The Scarlet Citadel, p. 108.) This is probably derived from the famous historical episode of the six burghers of Calais, though these actually escaped death. The fact is mentioned by Doyle: “Bethink you how he swore to hang the six burghers of this very town [i.e. Calais], and yet he pardoned them.” Much of the Howard’s story’s medieval terminology, notably that for armor and weapons, may very well have come from Doyle’s novels.

The Scarlet Citadel was the first story to mention the Hyborian Age’s equivalent of the African coasts, in a scene in which a jailer recognizes Conan as “Amra”: “the name by which the Cimmerian had been known to the Cushites in his piratical days—Amra, the Lion.” Thus in the same way that The Tower of the Elephant followed the mention of Zamora in Phoenix on the Sword, the next Conan story would take place in an exotic region of the Hyborian world.

Completed around August 1932, Queen of the Black Coast is one of the more famous Conan stories, and understandably so. Its most interesting feature is of course the pirate Bêlit (whose name was originally Tameris in the first draft), the first female character of any importance to appear in a Conan story. It took four successive drafts for Howard to complete this story and it seems, judging from the drafts, that he had little idea as to how the story would end. He probably understood that the real force of the tale lay not in its plot, but in the strange relationship binding Conan and Bêlit.

In the first draft of the story, Bêlit (Tameris) explicitly states that she has kept herself a virgin: “I am Tameris, queen of the Black Coast, and I have known the embraces of no man! No man, black or white, can say he had the gift of my lips and my love! Always I have kept myself inviolate for the man I knew I would some day meet” (draft a, p. 11).

The relations between Conan and Bêlit, though of an amorous nature, are far from the stock pulp-fiction romance. Throughout the story, and especially so in the early drafts, a very strong undercurrent of sadism pervades their exchanges. To the published version’s “Take me and crush me with your fierce love” corresponds the earlier drafts’ “Take me and crush me and bruise me with your fierce love!” This is far from being an isolated example. In the third draft, just following the line of dialogue “ ‘Very well,’ she said absently, hardly heeding him. ‘I’ll get the loot aboard’ ” were found the following lines:

“Conan glared at her narrowly, aware of a dim upsurging jealousy, centering on those murky jewels on her ivory bosom. He had a primitive impulse to tear them from her throat and cast them into the river. And for the first time, he felt an impulse to lock his iron fingers in his companion’s black locks and subject her person to moderate violence” (draft c, p. 22).

We do not know whether it was Howard who toned down the story in his final draft or if this was the result of Farnsworth Wright’s editorial interference. A comparison of the few later Conan stories for which definitive typescripts survive and their published versions shows that Wright systematically censored lines of dialogue that he deemed too “sensual.”

It was also in this fierce and grim story that Howard let the reader have a glimpse of the Cimmerian’s philosophy of life, in a discussion on religion and life after death between Conan and Bêlit:

“What of your own gods? I have never heard you call on them.”

“Their chief is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man’s soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?”

[. . .]

“There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people. . . . In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity.”

From May 7 to July 23, 1932, Collier’s Magazine ran the serialization of Sax Rohmer’s latest novel, The Mask of Fu Manchu. It was published in book form a few weeks later, and made into a movie before the year was over. Rohmer had long been a favorite of Howard, whose library contained many of his books, so surely he noticed the new story, especially under Collier’s particularly attractive cover. The Mask of Fu Manchu details the Chinese mastermind’s failed attempt to revive the cult of Mokanna, “the Hidden One, sometimes called the Veiled Prophet”:

“(Mokanna), about 770 a.d., set himself up as an incarnation of God, and drew to his sect many thousands of followers. He revised the Koran. His power became so great that the Caliph Al Mahdi was forced to move against him with a considerable army. Mokanna was a hideous creature. His features were so mutilated as to be horrible to see. . . . He and his staff poisoned themselves in the hour of defeat. From that day to this, no one has known where he was buried” (The Mask of Fu Manchu, chapter 4).

Rohmer’s novel opens just after Mokanna’s tomb in Khorassan has been brought to light, the relics secured, and the tomb destroyed in a measure of precaution against fanatics. However, “An outcry—‘Mokanna has arisen’—swept through Afghanistan. . . . None of the tribesmen who, as you suspect, and rightly, still hold the Mokanna tradition had any idea that you or any human influence had been concerned with the eruption which reduced a lonely shrine to a dusty hollow.”

From these tantalizing premises, Rohmer built an atmospheric “yellow peril” detective novel revolving around Fu Manchu’s vain attempts to secure the relics so he could pose as Mokanna reincarnated. Howard very probably saw the unexploited potential of Rohmer’s novel, and began an epic story that would recount the successful reincarnation of a “veiled prophet” of the desert, whose first task would be to unite the desert clans in a war of conquest that would soon threaten the Hyborian (i.e. Indo-European) nations. Rohmer was bound by imperatives of historical verisimilitude which Howard’s Hyborian Age could ignore, and thus was born Black Colossus:

“There were rumors from the desert that lies east of Stygia, far south of the Kothian hills. A new prophet had arisen among the nomads. Men spoke of tribal war, of a gathering of vultures in the southeast, and a terrible leader who led his swiftly increasing hordes to victory. The [Stygian] priests were making magic to fight that of the desert sorcerer, whom men called Natohk, the Veiled One; for his features were always masked.”

In Rohmer’s novel Mokanna’s tomb lies in “Khorassa,” while Howard’s story begins in “Khoraja”; in his synopsis for the story, this was “Khoraspar.”

The background of Howard’s tale was probably derived from his then-current readings on Mesopotamian history. The portrayal of Bêlit (an Assyrian name) in Queen of the Black Coast already attests to Howard’s interest in the subject, which would ultimately be fully expressed in his late 1932 story The House of Arabu.

As was the case with Queen of the Black Coast, Black Colossus was originally intended to contain some flagellation scenes: in the synopsis, Howard writes that Yasmela “stripped her most beautiful maid and stretched her whimpering on the altar, but did not have courage or cruelty to sacrifice her,” and in the first draft wrote, “On each birthday, up to her twentieth, Yasmela had been laid across the knees of the image in Ishtar’s temple and birched soundly by a priestess to teach her humbleness in the sight of the goddess” (draft a, p. 13).

Even in its published version the story contains many sexual allusions, from Khotan’s “I will teach thee the ancient forgotten ways of pleasure” to Yasmela’s dubious “It is not fitting that I come before the shrine clad in silk. I will go naked, on my knees, as befits a suppliant, lest Mitra deem I lack humility.” As to the story’s conclusion, Howard himself commented in a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith:

“My heroes grow more bastardly as the years pass. One of my latest sales concluded with a sexual intercourse instead of the usual slaughter. My sword-wielder grabbed the princess—already considerably stripped by the villing [sic]—and smacked her down on the altar of the forgotten gods, while battle and massacre roared outside, and through the dusk the remains of the villing, nailed to the wall by the hero, regarded the pastime sardonically. I don’t know how the readers will like it. I’ll bet some of them will. The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.” (REH to TCS, circa December 1932, unpublished)

It is interesting to note that in the first draft, the story ended differently:

For an instant he held her, then he shook himself free.

“Crom’s devils!” he grunted. “Some forty thousand men have perished today, and I linger here cuddling a whimpering chit of a girl! Here—put on some garment, and we’ll begone. There’s work to be done.”

It is arguable whether Howard himself was an “average man,” but when he submitted the story, Wright apparently had no complaints about the sex elements: his only quibble concerned the length of the story, which he probably felt was overworded. Howard himself had been reducing the length with each successive draft, and complied with Wright’s request. But the Texan seemed to have understood that the sexual elements helped sell his Conan stories. What Wright was objecting to, apparently, was “profane” dialogue much more than “evocative” scenes.

The next three Conan stories, Iron Shadows in the Moon, Xuthal of the Dusk and The Pool of the Black One, were written in that order—and in very short succession—between November and December of 1932. All three feature scantily-clad female characters, irresistibly attracted to the Cimmerian. All three sold immediately. With the exception of The Frost-Giant’s Daughter and The Tower of the Elephant, all previous Conan stories had gone through three or four drafts. In contrast, these three new stories required only two each, a rough and a final version. The sale of Black Colossus had convinced Howard that quality and strong characterization were not the essential elements when it came to selling a Conan story. Not surprisingly, Black Colossus was the first Conan story to be featured on the cover of Weird Tales, in the June 1933 issue, followed in September by Xuthal of the Dusk (published as The Slithering Shadow). It is amusing to note that neither cover features Conan, but instead portrays the women of the story, as nearly naked as the censors would allow. The Pool of the Black One appeared the following month, while the infinitely superior Queen of the Black Coast would not be published until the May 1934 issue. It is probably not a coincidence that Margaret Brundage, who excelled at depicting scantily-clad women, became Weird Tales’ regular cover artist in 1933.

Of these three routine Conan stories, Xuthal of the Dusk is the most interesting. Commenting on it to Clark Ashton Smith, Howard wrote: “It really isn’t as exclusively devoted to sword-slashing as the announcement might seem to imply.” The basic plot of the tale—Conan and a woman finding an isolated city peopled by decadent inhabitants and a wicked woman—would indeed be considerably enriched and developed in the future Red Nails (July 1935). The theme had profound psychological resonance in Howard’s psyche. In late 1932, however, Howard was not ready to give it the treatment it deserved, and Xuthal of the Dusk pales in comparison with the future Conan tale.

If it had taken only two drafts for Howard to complete his last few Conan tales, Rogues in the House—very probably written in January 1933—went one step further. In January 1934, Howard wrote Clark Ashton Smith:

“Glad you liked ‘Rogues in the House.’ That was one of those yarns which seemed to write itself. I didn’t rewrite it even once. As I remember I only erased and changed one word in it, and then sent it in just as it was written. I had a splitting sick headache, too, when I wrote the first half, but that didn’t seem to affect my work any. I wish to thunder I could write with equal ease all the time. Ordinarily I revise even my Conan yarns once or twice, and the other stuff I hammer out by main strength.”

Rogues in the House was the last Conan story to draw from Howard’s interest in things Assyrian. By this time he was increasingly interested in the history and legendry of the American Southwest. Bran Mak Morn, Turlogh O’Brien, Cormac Mac Art, and Kull now belonged to Howard’s literary past. In a few short months he would inaugurate his most successful series—commercially-speaking—the western-burlesque Breckinridge Elkins tales. In April 1932, Howard was already telling Lovecraft: “I’m trying to invest my native regions with spectral atmosphere, etched against a realistic setting; ‘The Horror from the Mound’ in the current Weird Tales was a feeble effort of the sort.” Other efforts in a similar vein were The Man on the Ground and Old Garfield’s Heart, in both of which are mixed a Western background and a weird element.

In December 1932, Howard began corresponding with August W. Derleth, a writer of both weird stories and regionalist fiction, and the two men were soon exchanging tales and lore of their respective regions. In a letter postmarked December 29, 1932, Howard asked Derleth: “You’ve heard perhaps of Quanah Parker, the great Comanche war chief, son of Petah Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker?” Derleth probably hadn’t, and requested Howard to recount the story. Howard, like most Texans, was familiar with the story; still, he apparently did further research before replying. His lengthy letter to Derleth reads in part:

“In 1836, when the Texans were fighting for their freedom, the Comanches were particularly bold in raiding the scattered settlements, and it was in one of those raids that Fort Parker fell. Seven hundred Comanches and Kiowas literally wiped it off the earth, with most of its inhabitants. . . . Fort Parker passed into oblivion, and among the women and children taken captive were Cynthia Anne Parker, nine years old, and her brother John, a child of six.

“They were not held by the same clans. John came to manhood as an Indian, but he never forgot his white blood. The sight of a young Mexican girl, Donna Juanity Espinosa, in captivity among the red men, wakened the slumbering heritage of his blood. He escaped from the tribe, carrying her with him, and they were married. . . .”

It was probably in the story of Cynthia Anne and John that Howard found the inspiration for his next Conan story, The Vale of Lost Women (written circa February 1933). In the story, Conan is said to have dwelt for several months among the Hyborian Age equivalent of African tribes. In the village of Bajujh he discovers a white captive, Livia. Just like Cynthia Anne Parker, Livia had a brother—“This morning my brother was mutilated and butchered before me”—and she and her brother had been captured by a hostile tribe. And just as the sight of Donna Espinosa “wakened the slumbering heritage” in John’s blood, Livia wakens similar ethnocentric considerations in Conan: “I am not such a dog as to leave a white woman in the clutches of a black man.” From that moment on the stories diverge. Conan successfully vanquishes the unconvincing devil from the “Outer Dark,” then promises to send Lydia back to her people without, of course, marrying her.

Not surprisingly, the story failed to sell. If Howard was trying to discreetly infuse some of his growing interest in Western lore into the Conan stories, he was perhaps too subtle: it is impossible to detect the source without having access to peripheral documents. The powerful story of Cynthia Anne and John Parker was lost between the unconvincing supernatural threat and Livia’s penchant for nakedness. As to the racial overtones of the story, while the violent ethnocentricism of the tale is understandable when we recognize its origin in the nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon settler viewpoint, with the blacks standing in for Indians, it makes for unsettling reading for the modern audience. At any rate, Howard’s first foray into the American Southwest version of the Hyborian Age was a failure, and it would be another year before he made another attempt.

The Vale of Lost Women was probably rejected by Wright, though no records survive regarding its submission. This rejection marked the end of Howard’s first Conan period. He would not return to the character until late in 1933. In a little over a year, he had completed twelve Conan stories, selling nine. While the first tales had been, on the whole, well above average, the later stories showed a definite trend toward the formulaic. They were becoming the kind of stories Robert Bloch would condemn in the letter-pages of Weird Tales.

Of the nine accepted stories, only three had been published by the spring of 1933, and it would take more than a year for Wright to publish the others. It was time for Howard to concentrate on other markets. The Depression was hitting the pulp magazine industry hard, and it was becoming imperative for Howard to seek out new markets.

In May 1933, British publisher Denis Archer contacted Howard about a possible book publication in England. Howard chose a batch of his better stories and submitted the collection on June 15. Of the eight stories included, two were Conan tales: The Tower of the Elephant and The Scarlet Citadel. The meager number of Conan stories doesn’t reflect Howard’s poor opinion of them, but simply the fact that Weird Tales owned First Serial Rights to the Conan stories. Consequently, most of the Conan stories could not be included among those Howard submitted to another publisher. Since Weird Tales did not return typescripts after publication, Howard retyped The Scarlet Citadel from the Weird Tales appearance, slightly correcting his text in the process, and sent loose Weird Tales pages for The Tower of the Elephant. Not until January 1934 did he hear from Archer, rejecting the collection but suggesting that he submit a novel instead.

It is difficult to assign a precise date to the Conan fragments that appear in this volume (pp. 405 and 407).

Both were written in 1933, the second after April 1933. It is tempting to see them as false starts toward resuming the Conan series after a lapse of several months. In October 1933, Howard wrote to Clark Ashton Smith: “Wright has three more Conan yarns yet unpublished: ‘Iron Shadows in the Moon,’ ‘The Queen of the Black Coast,’ and ‘Rogues in the House.’ I’m at present working on another which I haven’t yet titled.” A few weeks later he wrote Smith: “Wright recently accepted another Conan yarn, ‘The Devil in Iron.’ ”

The Devil in Iron, the first Conan story completed since The Vale of Lost Women, was not an entirely original effort, borrowing many elements from Iron Shadows in the Moon, written a year earlier. It was apparently taking Howard some time to re-immerse himself in the Cimmerian’s world after a long absence. As he once wrote to Clark Ashton Smith, concerning his characters: “suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away, leaving me to search for another character.”

In the spring of 1933, recognizing his need to expand his markets, Howard had retained Otis Adelbert Kline as his agent. Kline immediately asked him to try his hand at different genres to augment the chances for sales.

By the end of 1933, Howard was writing detective, boxing, historical, and western stories, and was also experimenting with longer lengths in his adventure stories. The routine Conan stories were several months behind him, and after a few half-hearted efforts to pick up the series anew, Howard was once again ready to write convincingly about the Cimmerian.

I am particularly indebted to Glenn Lord for his continued help and support, and for providing me with so many copies of Howard’s typescripts. Special thanks to Rusty Burke and Leo Grin for their comments and criticism.

(Click here to go directly to the second part.)

Vol. 2, The Bloody Crown of Conan

Foreword

When I was a kid, I watched a man knock down a house with a sledge hammer. It wasn’t a house exactly—a shack would be a more apt description. I can recall the afternoon vividly, the neighbourhood boys assembled in my friend Joe’s yard because his father was about to demolish an old shack which stood at the end of their property. What eight year old wouldn’t want to witness that?

When I arrived, Mr. Lill was already sizing up the job with the large sledge hammer perched over his broad shoulders. The structure leant towards him in a show of defiance. Perhaps the man sensed the mockery for he exploded into action. He was an engine of destruction. With arms spinning like a windmill he delivered crashing blows to insure maximum damage to his teetering opponent. The clouds of dust combined with the groaning timbers created an illusion of a fantastic battle taking place. I, for one, was enthralled by the spectacle and I wonder now how many of those kids vicariously waged the fight with gritted teeth and clenched fists.

When the last perpendicular post was hurled onto the pile of wreckage, the man climbed atop the heap, leaned on his sledge hammer and grimly surveyed his handiwork.

In retrospect it was a transcendent moment, a real life brush with the embodiment of John Henry, Hercules and Samson. We have all had experiences similar to this in one form or another and these memories can best be described as “Heroic Realism,” a term coined by the writer Louis Menand. The fantasy elements aside, this is the quality I am chiefly interested in with my work with Conan—the sense of real danger, romance and intrigue grounded in a tangible reality.

As a teenager, years after that shack came crashing down, I came upon a paperback book with a cover painting of a man leaning on a broadsword standing atop a pile of vanquished opponents. Somehow in the deep recesses of my memories this picture had a familiar feel to it.

I thought of that afternoon and the thrill came rushing over me. The power of images.

The book, of course, was Conan the Adventurer by Robert E. Howard and the cover was painted by Frank Frazetta. It was my introduction to Howard’s fictional barbarian.

That was a long time ago and many talented artists have portrayed Conan’s adventures. I was content to stand aside and enjoy their work but the opportunity presented itself after I had illustrated two of the other great Robert E. Howard heroes—Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn. How could I resist?

I feel privileged in depicting these characters and I now join the list of eminent illustrators who have had a crack at depicting Conan. It is a fitting tribute to the writing ability of Robert E. Howard that regardless of how many artists add to the mythos of Conan in books, comics and movies, it is the original stories themselves and the powerful imagery they evoke that will ultimately thrill the reader.

Gary Gianni
2003

Introduction

“There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction,” wrote Robert E. Howard to his friend H.P. Lovecraft. This certainly helps to explain some of the zest to be found in his tales of the indomitable Conan of Cimmeria, for here is history as vivid, dramatic fiction.

What? Conan as history? Surely this is fantasy, isn’t it? This world, “the Hyborian Age,” is merely a figment of Howard’s imagination, right? Well, yes and no. Certainly it is Howard’s unique literary creation—but into its creation he has poured all his love of history and legend and romance.

Robert E. Howard was an extraordinarily gifted but emphatically commercial writer. Storytelling apparently came naturally to him: friends of his youth attest that he was directing their play as early as age ten, and friends of his young manhood tell us that he was a spellbinding storyteller. Of course, we have the testament of his fiction to tell us that, too. And while he himself disavowed any particular artistic motives, there is in his best work genuine artistry. As Lovecraft noted, “He was greater than any profit-making policy that he could adopt.”

But Howard put his natural storytelling talent to work in wresting a living for himself, so it was important to him that his work find a market. In the early 1930s, with the Great Depression settling upon the land, his markets, the pulp magazines, were struggling. Those that survived sometimes did so by cutting rates, or reducing their frequency (and thus demand for new material). As much as he loved the historical tales he had been writing for Oriental Stories, mostly set during the Crusades or the eras of Mongol or Islamic conquests, and the stories of ancient Irish warriors for which he had not found a market, they required a lot of research, and that was time he could ill afford. “Every page of history teems with dramas that should be put on paper,” he wrote. “A single paragraph may be packed with action and drama enough to fill a whole volume of fiction work. I could never make a living writing such things, though; the markets are too scanty, with requirements too narrow, and it takes me so long to complete one.”

Howard’s interest in history, as strong as it was, did not extend to “civilized” peoples. “When a race—almost any race—is emerging from barbarism, or not yet emerged, they hold my interest. I can seem to understand them, and to write intelligently of them. But as they progress toward civilization, my grip on them begins to weaken, until at last it vanishes entirely, and I find their ways and thoughts and ambitions perfectly alien and baffling. Thus the first Mongol conquerors of China and India inspire in me the most intense interest and appreciation; but a few generations later when they have adopted the civilization of their subjects, they stir not a hint of interest in my mind. My study of history has been a continual search for newer barbarians, from age to age.”

During the early months of 1932, on a trip to Mission, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, the answer came to him: the Hyborian Age, a period lying between the sinking of Atlantis and the cataclysms that shaped our modern world, populated by the forebears—the veritable archetypes—of all the barbarians he so loved to study. The character Conan “stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.” These exploits took place in a world populated by Elizabethan pirates, Irish reavers, and Barbary corsairs; American frontiersmen and Cossack raiders; Egyptian sorcerers and followers of Roman mystery cults; medieval knights and Assyrian armies. All were given disguises, but with no attempt to actually hide their identities. In fact, Howard tried to give them names that would allow the reader to guess their identities without too much effort—he wanted us to recognize them instantly, but with the wink that says, “We know this is a story, right? On with it!” Can any reader fail to recognize that Afghulistan is Afghanistan, or that Vendhya is India? Surely not!

With his creation of the Hyborian Age, Howard had created a world in which his beloved historical barbarians could run riot, and he could weave those tales packed with action and drama that he loved to tell. It’s a brilliant concept, and one I believe may have been suggested to him by G.K. Chesterton, whose epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse was one of Howard’s favorites, to judge not only from his effusive comments in two different letters to his friend Clyde Smith in 1927, but from his frequent use of quotations from the poem as epigrams or verse headings for his stories, and the fact that he was still quoting from it in letters as late as 1935. The Ballad of the White Horse tells of King Alfred and the Battle of Ethandune, but Chesterton admits that “All of it that is not frankly fictitious, as in any prose romance about the past, is meant to emphasize tradition rather than history.” Because the work he wants to celebrate, the fight “for the Christian civilization against the heathen nihilism,” was “really done by generation after generation,” he created fictitious Roman, Celtic, and Saxon heroes to share in the glory of victory with Alfred. “It is the chief value of legend,” he wrote, “to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history.”

Chesterton, of course, was hardly the first to create such a literary work: the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Sir Thomas Malory come to mind, and earlier still the Norse sagas and the ancient legend of Beowulf. But Chesterton’s statement of rationale may have wormed its way into Howard’s consciousness to emerge years later as the Hyborian Age. Howard did write an epic poem, The Ballad of King Geraint, that was an echo of Chesterton’s: he depicted a valiant last stand of the Celtic tribes of Britain and Ireland against the invading Anglo-Saxons. But it wasn’t until his creation of the Hyborian Age in 1932 that he was able to put this telescoping idea to really effective use, turning history into what Lovecraft termed “vivid artificial legendry.”

Because Howard wrote a lengthy history of the Hyborian Age, and took pains to make it a self-consistent world, some critics have placed him within what is termed the “imaginary worlds” tradition of fantasy, exemplified by such inventive writers as George Macdonald, William Morris, Lord Dunsany, and J.R.R. Tolkien. But the Hyborian Age is historical, not imaginary: it is simply a nexus where elements from different historical eras may come together for the sake of the story. Part of the appeal of the Conan stories is that they seem so real, because we recognize the world in which Conan moves. And Howard was not a literary stylist in the manner of these “imaginary worlds” writers: he was a storyteller, who preferred clear, direct, simple language with a minimum of description. There is, to be sure, considerable poetry in his best prose, as the opening chapter of The Hour of the Dragon amply demonstrates. Howard was raised on poetry, which his mother read to him, and was himself perhaps the best poet among writers of the fantastic. As Steve Eng says, “Howard may have sensed that poetry suited his imagination better than did prose. His fictional Sword-and-Sorcery heroes and foes would seem to be more naturally chanted or sung about than portrayed in paragraphs.”

But there was another element to Howard’s fiction: “every urge in me,” he told E. Hoffmann Price, “is to write realism.” This may seem incongruous coming from an author best known for his fantasies, but in surveying the corpus of his work, we find a “realistic” novel, a great number of boxing stories, many historical and western stories—in other words, a good deal of realism. Jack London was perhaps his favorite writer: best known today for his outdoor adventures, London was a noted socialist as well, whose semi-autobiographical Martin Eden, the model for Howard’s own Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, has been suggested as the first existentialist novel. Another writer Howard thought highly of was Jim Tully, whose fictionalizations of his life as hobo, circus roustabout, boxer and journalist find echoes in Howard’s work. Both London and Tully were “road kids,” and Howard frequently wrote of characters, including Conan, who had left home to roam the world as youngsters.

In his seminal essay, ‘Robert E. Howard: Hard-Boiled Heroic Fantasist,’ George Knight suggests that Howard was bringing to fantasy something of the same sensibility that his contemporary Dashiell Hammett and others were bringing to the detective story: a gritty, tough attitude toward life, expressed in simple, vigorously direct prose (not without poetry), with violence as the dark heart of the tale. Conan in his Hyborian Age has much in common with the Continental Op on the mean streets of San Francisco: he is a freelance operator, with a cynical, worldly-wise attitude tempered by his own strict moral code. He feels no loyalty to rules imposed by authority or tradition, choosing to live by rules that help him “maintain order in a world tilting into insanity.” He can be hired, but he cannot be bought. He is, as Charles Hoffman has noted, ‘Conan the Existentialist’: “The consummate self-determining man, alone in a hostile universe.” Conan, says Hoffman, knows that life is meaningless: “There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people,” he says in Queen of the Black Coast. “In this world men struggle and suffer vainly. . . .” Yet this knowledge of the ultimate meaninglessness of man’s actions does not cause Conan despair: he “demonstrates how a strong-willed man can create goals, values, and meaning for himself.”

Herein, I think, lies a good part of Conan’s appeal. Our destiny, he says, does not lie in the stars, or in our noble blood, but in our willingness to create ourselves. The stories in the present volume are all excellent illustrations: in each, Conan is confronted with choices, and he makes his decisions not on the basis of some “noble destiny” to be fulfilled but on what seems, to him, the right course of action at the time. He seizes opportunities to get what he wants, and turns down opportunities that other men would unhesitatingly grasp. He is his own man, and he does things his own way, guided by little more than his whim of the moment and his sense of right and wrong.

But of course, above all the appeal of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories lies in his gifts as a storyteller. He is unsurpassed in his ability to sweep the reader up and bring him into the story. So turn the page, and get ready for an exhilarating journey through the historical wonderland of the Hyborian Age.

Rusty Burke
2003

Hyborian Genesis Part II

Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories
by Patrice Louinet

The year 1933 ended on a much more positive note than it had begun for Robert E. Howard. It had promised to be catastrophic. In 1932, Fiction House had ceased publication of Fight Stories and Action Stories, two magazines which had paid modestly but regularly, ensuring Howard of a meager yet regular income. The arrival of Strange Tales—a direct competitor to Weird Tales—which paid well, and on acceptance rather than publication, had been a compensation, but late in 1932 Howard had learned that this magazine was also going out of circulation. As 1933 began, he was left with only one regular market: Farnsworth Wright’s magazines Magic Carpet Magazine, a fledgling quarterly, and Weird Tales. There was but one thing to do, and for a few weeks Howard literally deluged Weird Tales with submissions, with one clear aim: to sell as much as possible. Among the stories submitted were most of the inferior Conan stories, written with a visible need for a quick sale. It was only in the spring of 1933, with an impressive number of Conan stories awaiting publication in Wright’s magazine (Xuthal of the Dusk, Queen of the Black Coast, The Pool of the Black One, Iron Shadows in the Moon and Black Colossus), that Howard began to devote his attentions to building other markets. Hiring Otis Adelbert Kline as his agent, the Texan spent most of the next few weeks trying to sell some more of his boxing yarns and dabbling in genres that were new to him: detective stories and westerns. He also began to seriously consider the question of the rights to his stories, and looked into the possibility of having short-story collections published in England.

October 1933 found Howard returning to Conan. Weird Tales had already published three of the five Conan stories in their backlog, as it was becoming evident that the character was a popular success. The Devil in Iron, completed circa October 1933, was a somewhat half-baked effort from a Howard who had not written a Conan story in six months, drawing heavily from the earlier Conan story, Iron Shadows in the Moon. Both tales showed Howard’s debt to Harold Lamb, a pillar of Adventure, a publication whose influence on Howard was probably greater than that of Weird Tales.

If Howard was an early devotee of Weird Tales—we know he was already aware of the magazine’s existence less than six months after it first appeared on the newsstands—his first love was clearly adventure fiction, much more than the tales of the weird. The Texan’s discovery of Adventure was a cherished memory: “. . . Magazines were even more scarce than books. It was after I moved into ‘town’ (speaking comparatively) that I began to buy magazines. I well remember the first I ever bought. I was fifteen years old. I bought it one summer night when a wild restlessness in me would not let me keep still, and I had exhausted all the reading material on the place. I’ll never forget the thrill it gave me. Somehow it had never occurred to me before that I could buy a magazine. It was an Adventure. I still have the copy. After that I bought Adventure for many years, though at times it cramped my resources to pay the price. It came out three times a month, then. . . . I skimped and saved from one magazine to the next; I’d buy one copy and have it charged, and when the next issue was out, I’d pay for the one for which I owed, and have the other one charged, and so on.”

By 1921, when Howard discovered it, Adventure was a well-established magazine, one of the leading if not the leading fiction magazine of its times, hosting the talents of Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb on a regular basis. Arthur D. Howden-Smith delivered tales of Viking adventures and Rafael Sabatini graced the magazine’s pages for the first time in that summer of 1921. These authors would influence Robert E. Howard much more than any of the Weird Tales writers. Howard’s interest in Adventure went beyond the mere reading of the stories: he had two letters published in the magazine in 1924 and corresponded semi-regularly with R.W. Gordon, who was in charge of its folk-song department. It was apparently Adventure which gave Howard the desire to become a writer: “I wrote my first story when I was fifteen, and sent it—to Adventure, I believe. Three years later I managed to break into Weird Tales. Three years of writing without selling a blasted line. (I never have been able to sell to Adventure; guess my first attempt cooked me with them for ever!)” These lines were written in the summer of 1933, a few weeks before the Texan was to start writing adventure fiction. Beyond the half-amused, half-exasperated tone Howard uses, one can feel his frustration at not having ever been published in the magazine. The entirety of Howard’s surviving early output from 1922 and 1923 can be best described as a teenager’s sincere attempts at emulating what he was reading in Adventure: he thus began—but never completed—a dozen stories featuring Frank Gordon, whose adventures were derived from Talbot Mundy and whose nickname—“El Borak, the Swift”—was borrowed from Sabatini.

Significantly enough, when Howard resumed writing adventure stories in October 1933, the process started with a resurrection as improbable as Xaltotun’s in The Hour of the Dragon: the protagonist of his first mature adventure stories was Francis X. Gordon, “El Borak,” a revamped version of his teen-age creation. He thus wasn’t exploring new ground but bridging a gap of ten years. In the second Gordon story, The Daughter of Erlik Khan, Gordon explores the city of Yolgan, niched in a mysterious Oriental mountain, where the beautiful Yasmeena is held prisoner. In the Texan’s next tale, the Conan story The People of the Black Circle, the mysterious Oriental mountain is called Yimsha and it is there that Conan rescues another beautiful Yasmina. As Howard had exclaimed just after reading his first Mundy novels in 1923: “. . . Yasmini? She’s some character, isn’t she?”

Much has been written about the influence of Talbot Mundy on this particular Conan tale, but while Howard’s source material for this story has yet to be identified, Mundy was very probably not part of it. It very much seems that Howard’s background research for his “Eastern adventure” stories also furnished the background for the new Conan tales. In The Devil in Iron, for instance, Howard had changed the name of the king of Turan from Yildiz (in Iron Shadows in the Moon) to Yezdigerd. Much of the action of that story taking place on the isle of Xapur, it is quite probable that the names were derived from the historical Yezdigerd—a Persian king and a conqueror, just as Howard’s character—and Shapur, his father. Yezdigerd returned in The People of the Black Circle, and with him several new elements of geography which Howard added to his Hyborian world with this story, such as the Himelian Mountains, Afghulistan and Vendhya.

The People of the Black Circle was Howard’s longest Conan effort to date; it is a true, and successful, novella and not merely a “long short story.” A tale of that length could not stand on Conan’s shoulders alone, and Yasmina is a welcome change from some of the earlier stories’ cringing women. However, it was in Khemsa that Howard created a memorable secondary character, torn between his loyalty to his masters and his love for Gitara, between his spiritual and his earthly cravings. For, as befits a story exploring the East and the West, The People of the Black Circle is a study on duality: a brother and a sister, one dead, the other alive; two antithetic couples, Conan and Yasmina versus Khemsa and Gitara (two couples in which rivalry for power is a significant factor in the relationship). But where the former are masters (hill chief and queen respectively), the latter are but servants of chiefs. The opposition between the primitive hillmen and the Seers of Yimsha, that is to say between the physical and the mental, was evidently nourished by the year-long debate on the subject which had occupied Howard and H. P. Lovecraft for most of the year 1933.

If the tale at times evokes Mundy’s penchant for mysticism, Howard’s treatment is entirely his own. In fact, there was probably little need for the Texan to look to Mundy to find inspiration for mysticism: he had bathed in it for years. More: once one has scratched away the Oriental trappings of the tale, what is revealed is a story that strangely touches on many points on Howard’s family history. His father, Dr. Isaac M. Howard, was all his life interested in mysticism, yoga and hypnotism. He regularly practiced hypnotism on his patients, sometimes with a young Robert E. Howard present, and had annotated his copies of The Hindu Science of Breath and Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy by Yogi Ramacharaka. If Howard needed documentation on Eastern mysticism, he needn’t reread Mundy, as he had a much better source of information under his own roof. The opening scene—recounting Yasmina’s brother’s death at her own hands—is another striking autobiographical example. On a literary plane, it invites comparison with several other tales, notably Dermod’s Bane, in which a man is afflicted beyond reason by the death of his twin sister. In Howard’s fiction, brothers and sisters often have to separate, and usually in painful conditions. The reasons for such an obsession may very well originate from a reported (though undocumented) miscarriage suffered by Howard’s mother in 1908, when Howard was aged two. This would invite us to draw a parallel between Yasmina and Howard, both having experienced the loss of a sibling. However, and as usual in Howard’s fiction, these biographical elements were soon diluted and distorted in the story the Texan had to tell in order to sell it to Farnsworth Wright. The People of the Black Circle is a particularly satisfying Conan story for all these reasons. The tale functions very well on an escapist level and is leagues ahead of standard pulp-fare plotting, but there is a definite depth and texture to all its aspects, which ranks it among the three or four best Conan stories Howard had written to date.

Farnsworth Wright must have been rather impressed with it since less than five months elapsed between its acceptance and the publication of the first part of the serialization. He was, however, not so pleased with the increasing liberties Howard was taking with his dialogue and the explicitness of certain situations, and in several instances severely toned down some of the Cimmerian’s oaths and sexual allusions.

In early January 1934, as Howard was writing The People of the Black Circle, he at last received news of the story collection he had submitted to Denis Archer in England in June of the past year. The answer wasn’t a positive one. If the editor had found the stories “exceedingly interesting,” it was not enough: “The difficulty that arises about publication in book form, is the prejudice that is very strong over here just now against collections of short stories, and I find myself very reluctantly forced to return the stories to you. With this suggestion, however, that any time you find yourself able to produce a full-length novel of about 70,000-75,000 words along the lines of the stories, my allied company, Pawling and Ness Ltd., who deal with the lending libraries, and are able to sell a first edition of 5,000 copies, will be very willing to publish it.”

With the exception of his partly autobiographical Post Oaks and Sand Roughs (1928), Howard had never completed a novel, though he was demonstrating he was learning the craft with The People of the Black Circle, whose final version runs 31,000 words. Many other writers would have stopped their efforts here, confronted with a publisher who took six months to answer, negatively at that, refusing a collection of stories which he had asked for in the first place. Later that month, however, Howard reported to August Derleth: “An English firm, after keeping a collection of my short stories for months, finally sent them back, saying that there was a prejudice over there just now against such collections—of short stories, I mean—and suggested that I write a full length novel for them. But I’m not overly enthusiastic about it, for I’ve been disappointed so much. Of course, I’ll do my best.”

Howard probably began working on the novel in February 1934, but he was to abandon the story a few weeks later.

Almuric—for this is very probably the novel Howard began to write for the British publisher—was abandoned midway, as he had written a first draft and the first half of the second one. This was to have to been Howard’s third—and last—Yasmina/Yasmeena tale, after The Daughter of Erlik Khan and The Devil in Iron. Like her namesakes, this Yasmeena also lived in a strange mount: Yuthla. Why Howard insisted that his Yasmeenas/Yasminas dwell in “y” mountains will probably remain a mystery. The novel cannibalized several key scenes from the stories which had been initially submitted to the publisher. The winged Yagas of Almuric, for instance, definitely owed something to the winged creatures of the Solomon Kane story Wings in the Night. Howard was indeed making sure that his novel would be “along the lines of the stories” he had previously submitted. Nevertheless, Howard left Almuric incomplete for reasons that remain mysterious. (The novel would linger for several years, until it was eventually published in the pages of Weird Tales after Howard’s death, completed by another writer).

After abandoning Almuric, Howard probably realized that it was only logical to make Conan the central character of his novel: the sale of The People of the Black Circle in late February or March 1934 showed him that he could write successfully at length about the character. Much more importantly the setting—the Hyborian Age—and the protagonist were very much in Howard’s mind, and little if any work was needed to build a background for the intended novel. Lastly, Conan tales had also been included in the first batch of stories sent to Archer: he would, once again, be submitting material “along the lines” of what he had already proposed to the British publisher.

The surviving synopsis and 29-page draft of that first Conan effort are intriguing to say the least, a sharp departure from the other Conan stories. This “Tombalku” draft was begun and abandoned after Howard had finished The People of the Black Circle and abandoned Almuric, in all probability in mid-March 1934. Conan is not the protagonist of the story; that role falls to one Amalric (whose name evokes Almuric). Reading the synopsis and first draft, it is easy enough to see that there wasn’t enough good material here to make a novel; there was in fact scant good material at all. The connection between the first part of the story and what would have been the Tombalku chapters is unconvincing, and clearly the story wasn’t going anywhere. Howard soon realized it and abandoned this tale, too, to begin work on his third—final and successful—attempt at writing his novel: The Hour of the Dragon.

There was very little to salvage from Howard’s two previous efforts. On the surface, there is indeed very little to show that the three stories were penned at about the same time: in The Hour of the Dragon, Conan briefly mentions a Ghanata knife, a tribe otherwise mentioned only in the unfinished Tombalku draft; in an early draft of the novel we are informed that Conan was once called “Iron Hand,” the same nickname given Esau Cairn on the planet Almuric. There is also the mention of a “Prince Almuric” in The Hour of the Dragon, but this may have been derived more from his namesake in Xuthal of the Dusk—another prince who met his doom at the hands of Stygians—than from the novel of the same title.

One passage from the Tombalku story, however, may have inspired the Texan for the subject of his novel:

One of the men, his face smooth and unlined, but his hair silver, was saying: “Aquilonia? There was an invasion—we heard—King Bragorus of Nemedia—how went the war?”

“He was driven back,” answered Amalric briefly, resisting a shudder. Nine hundred years had passed since Bragorus led his spearmen across the marches of Aquilonia.

Here was the springboard for the plot of The Hour of the Dragon: an invasion of Aquilonia by its neighbor Nemedia. The seven mysterious horsemen were also probably transformed into The Hour of the Dragon’s four sorcerors from Khitai. Amra, Conan’s alias when he was a pirate among the black corsairs, also made the jump from the draft to the novel, and the theme of the rival kings is obviously an essential ingredient to the novel. Much of this material had already furnished the background to an early Conan story, The Scarlet Citadel, part of the initial lot of stories sent to England, which featured Conan as Amra and an invasion (from Koth and Ophir in this case). Xaltotun’s resurrection is highly reminiscent of Thugra Khotan’s, in Black Colossus, though this particular tale had not been among the lot sent to England in mid-1933.

Howard knew what he should do with The Hour of the Dragon and how he should be doing it: he was at the same time recycling several elements from his past Conan stories and trying to conquer a new readership. He had thus to present as much as possible of his Hyborian Age and its possibilities to his intended new readers, and also should have no compunction about recycling several elements from former Conan stories, since the British market was averse to publishing short stories. The reader would thus have hints of Stygia, of the Hyborian Age equivalents to the African kingdoms, would even get a glimpse—by way of the mysterious sorcerors—of the countries east of Vilayet, in a tale which remained, however, centered on the Hyborian countries he would be familiar with: the kingdoms corresponding to modern occidental Europe.

It had been a long time since Howard had written of Conan as a king and one could wonder why he chose to return to a theme which had long disappeared from his stories. The answer probably resides once again in the novel’s intended market. The British public had always been keenly interested in the subject of mythical kings and so had been Howard himself: hadn’t he, in The Phoenix on the Sword, written about a king who wins his battle aided by a magic sword quite similar to Excalibur? Hadn’t he, in The Scarlet Citadel, written that the king is one with his kingdom, and that he who slays the king cuts the cords of the kingdom? Was King Conan ready to acknowledge his kinship with the most famous Celtic King of all, Arthur?

In The Scarlet Citadel, Conan’s capture was achieved through treachery and his eventual victory was mostly a matter of superior military strategy. In the novel, Conan’s paralysis has a distinctive supernatural origin and Howard insists on what has really transpired when Xaltotun prevented Conan from taking part in the battle. With Conan’s paralysis, an essential link has been broken by magic: Conan has been severed from his army and it was this which led to its defeat. As Pallantides declares shortly thereafter: “Only [Conan] could have led us to victory this day.” With the apparent death of Conan, king of Aquilonia, the unity and strength of Aquilonia disappears. As a partisan will later tell Conan, in words closely echoing the proverb from The Scarlet Citadel: “You were the cord that held the fagots together. When the cord was cut, the fagots fell apart.” It is only Conan’s presumed death that enables Valerius to get on the throne: “So long as Conan lives, he is a threat, a unifying factor for Aquilonia” declares Tarascus. “Only in unity is there strength,” later echoes Conan. Valerius, in spite of his military victory, doesn’t succeed in restoring the lost unity of the kingdom and obtaining the allegiance of the people. Echoes Conan: “It’s one thing to seize a throne with the aid of its subjects and rule them with their consent. It’s another to subjugate a foreign realm and rule it by fear.” Conan appears to have been the rightful king to Aquilonia and only magic could defeat the unity that existed between him and his people.

It was not the Heart of Ahriman that brought about the defeat of Conan. The Heart is not an instrument of evil. Hadrathus, priest of Asura, later confirms that “against it the powers of darkness cannot stand, when it is in the hands of an adept. . . . It restores life, and can destroy life. [Xaltotun] has stolen it, not to use it against his enemies, but to keep them from using it against him,” and concluding with: “[The Heart] holds the destiny of Aquilonia.” Why does the Heart hold the destiny of Aquilonia? At the beginning of the novel, we learn that the jewel “was hidden in a cavern below the temple of Mitra, in Tarantia.” The symbolism is obvious: the Heart, as its name would suggest, was placed at the heart, in the center, of the kingdom. Furthermore, Mitraism is the Hyborian Age’s closest equivalent to an organized religion, the official religion of Aquilonia, as well as the better structured of the Hyborian cults; hence its “central” position. Tarantia requires some discussing. In The Scarlet Citadel, the capital of Aquilonia is called Tamar; it is called Tarantia in the novel. Howard’s changing of the name was no “egregious blunder” as certain editors would have it, but the result of a careful choice: Tarantia is derived from Tara, mystical and political capital of Ireland, seen as the heart of their kingdom by the Celts of Ireland: “You will not press the throne again unless you find the heart of your kingdom,” says Zelata to Conan, to which he replies: “Do you mean the city of Tarantia?” The Heart is thus the mystical stone that symbolizes the exact center of the country, the symbol of the link that unites the people and the land to the king. Once this link is severed “the heart is gone from [the] kingdom.” The consequences are dire and immediate for the people and the country:

only embers and ashes showed where farm huts and villas had stood. . . . A vast swath of desolation had been cut through the country from the foothills westward. Conan cursed as he rode thorough blackened expanses that had been rich fields, and saw the gaunt gable-ends of burned houses jutting out the sky. He moved through an empty and deserted land.

All this is perfectly logical, for in tales of the Grail the country becomes a barren land, the wasteland, from the moment the king cannot properly govern his kingdom anymore: the consequences of Conan’s defeat at the hand of the conspirators go far beyond the capture and destitution of the Cimmerian. The problem in The Hour of the Dragon is that Conan seems at first unaware of the mystic bond which links him to his country. His will to get the throne back from his enemies is doomed from the start and even his most loyal subjects refuse to follow him in what they consider a suicidal enterprise. Only when Conan has understood everything can the quest begin: “What a fool I’ve been! The Heart of Ahriman! The heart of my kingdom! Find the heart of my kingdom, Zelata said.”

It is thus at about the central point of the story that Howard’s novel reveals itself as a quest, and more precisely as an Arthurian-like quest for the Grail. Behind the Arthurian legendry one finds the obsession of the Celts with the common king they historically never had, the one who was to unite the tribes against common foes. This king, a rex, as opposed to the Roman notion of imperator, permanent representative of a strong and centralized power, was most of the time a military leader. And what Howard is telling us is exactly that: Conan’s quest for the Heart is a quest for the perfect way to fulfill his duty as a rex and not as an imperator, as a tyrant. This is clearly demonstrated in the exchange between Conan and Trocero in the middle section of the book:

“Then let us unite Zingara with Poitain,” argued Trocero. “Half a dozen princes strive against each other, and the country is torn asunder by civil wars. We will conquer it, province by province, and add it to your dominions. Then with the aid of the Zingarans we will conquer Argos and Ophir. We will build an empire—”

Again Conan shook his head. “Let others dream imperial dreams. I but wish to hold what is mine. I have no desire to rule an empire welded together by blood and fire. It’s one thing to seize a throne with the aid of its subjects and rule them with their consent. It’s another to subjugate a foreign realm and rule it by fear. I don’t wish to be another Valerius. No, Trocero, I’ll rule all Aquilonia and no more, or I’ll rule nothing.” (pg. 168)

Whoever had the idea of retitling Howard’s novel Conan the Conqueror had evidently not understood its theme: Conan is anything but a conqueror by nature. If Conan’s kingship has to be envisioned as a conclusion of sorts to his life, then the lesson is one entirely different from what has been suggested for years: Conan the King has much less freedom and power (to act as he wants) than Conan the Cimmerian.

If Conan is an Arthur, we might wonder where his Guinevere is. The queen played a very special role in Celtic countries, and her absence in Howard’s novel could seem surprising, at least to a reader unfamiliar with the Cimmerian. Many Weird Tales readers must have experienced a jolt when reading that Conan vowed to marry Zenobia at the end of the novel. One wonders, and indeed several critics have wondered, if Conan would be true to his word. We have no way to answer such a question, though we can note that Zenobia’s crowning would bring the novel even closer to the Arthurian myth.

In fact each of the three women of the story—Zenobia, Zelata and Albiona—seem to embody part of the symbolic role assigned to the Arthurian queen. Zenobia (whose name was Sabina in the early drafts of the novel) is the one supposed to be married (soon) to the king. Zelata is in charge of the initiation aspects of the quest: she is the one who helps Conan understand the symbolism of the Heart of Ahriman, of the link between the king and his kingdom. Albiona was given a name and a rank which help us identify the three women of the novel as a composite picture of the Arthurian queen. She is of course a member of the nobility, but it is the etymology of her name which betrays her, for Albiona is derived from alba, latin for white. Arthur’s wife was of distinct Celtic origin: gwen, the radical behind all the variants of the name of King Arthur’s wife (Guinevere, Guenièvre, Gwenhwyfar, etc., Gaelic: finn) means white (and by extension: fair).

The Hyborian Age’s equivalent to the quest for the Grail is then found in the ensuing chapters of the novel, when Conan has discovered the importance and the role of the Heart of Ahriman. These various picaresque episodes offer a succession of adventures and battles also found in most of the Arthurian texts. This is the origin for the episodes of the castle of Valbroso and the ghouls in the forest, of Publio, of the ship’s mutiny, of Khemi and of Akivasha, which, strictly speaking, don’t add anything to the story, so much that Karl Wagner could suppose that one chapter may have been lost here in the transition between the English publisher and the pages of Weird Tales, a loss that no one would have noticed.

Conan’s return to his throne begins with his securing of the Heart of Ahriman. This is achieved at the end of chapter 19: “[Conan] whirled about his head the great jewel, which threw off splashes of light that spotted the deck with golden fire.” The next chapter opens: “Winter had passed from Aquilonia. Leaves sprang out on the limbs of trees, and the fresh grass smiled to the touch of the warm southern breezes.” With the heart once back in proper hands, life is restored, the wasteland once more becomes a land of plenty, of the Grail: “But in the full flood of spring a sudden whisper passed over the sinking kingdom that woke the land to eager life.” This image of the country returning to life with the riding back of the holders of the Grail irresistibly calls to mind a similar scene in John Boorman’s Excalibur. Xaltotun’s defeat is now but a matter of time. The conspirators are divided, while Conan’s forces unite again. The restoration of the king and the land is now inevitable.

Howard was definitely writing his novel with his public in mind and it is probably not a coincidence that the story contains homages to British writers. The beginning of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel very probably furnished the idea for the plague episode in Howard’s novel. More importantly, he was once more paying homage to one of his favorite playwrights, Shakespeare, whose Hamlet seems to have been very present with Howard at composition time: “There is method in his madness” in chapter 3 is a clear echo of the dramatist’s most famous play. (Howard definitely wanted this phrase to appear in his novel, as it appeared in three instances in the second draft of the novel!) In fact, many of Howard’s tales dealing with kingship invite comparison with the play. In the case of The Hour of the Dragon, the parallels are evident, with both tales centering on the exploits of a king (or would-be king) deposed by an usurper whom he would have thought an ally! Conan, dispossessed of his throne and dead (or believed so) had in fact all the qualities of the Danish ghost-king. Upon seeing Conan, whom he believes dead, a Poitanian soldier waxes Shakespearean and we could for a space believe ourselves on the battlements of Elsinore: “His breath hissed inward and his ruddy face paled. ‘Avaunt!’ he ejaculated. ‘Why have you come back from the gray lands of death to terrify me? I was always your true liegeman in your lifetime—’ ”

The Hour of the Dragon is by far the Howard story for which we have the greatest number of draft pages. In addition to the 241 pages of the published version, 620 pages of drafts survive, while several hundred others (a carbon of the definitive version and at least one complete draft) were lost over the years. Howard wrote five versions of his story, with several parts of these rewritten two or three times. While he would tell others that the stories came easily to him, he was working at it much harder than he would care to admit. The story’s synopsis provides an excellent sample of Howard’s working method: running three dense single-spaced pages, it covers the first five chapters in minute detail with only a few variations from the published version, while the subsequent chapters are much less detailed and the second part of the novel not covered at all. Howard built his first drafts from this, testing his scenes and dialogues. Xaltotun’s motivations for sparing Conan thus changed several times as Howard was writing his drafts and getting a better grasp of his characters and how they would act and interact when confronted with certain situations. The passage in which Tiberias sacrifices himself by leading Valerius and five thousand men to a deathly trap in the gorges was added in the last stages of writing, offering the reader some memorable moments and infusing the end of the novel with a sense of suspense and incertitude which it would otherwise be lacking.

The study of the typescripts shows that Howard didn’t begin work on his Conan novel until after he had finished both The People of the Black Circle and a detective story received by his agent on March 10. Chances are that he didn’t actually begin it until after he had sent another story to his agent circa March 17. It was only apt that such a novel was begun at the time of Saint Patrick’s Day. Records show that Howard’s agent didn’t receive anything from him between March 19 and June 20. If we accept March 17, give or take a couple of days, as the beginning date of the writing of the novel, then The Hour of the Dragon was written in less than two months: on May 20, 1934, Howard wrote Denis Archer in England: “As you doubtless remember, in your letter of Jan. 9th, 1934, you suggested that I submit a full length novel, on the order of the weird short stories formerly submitted, to your allied company of Pawling & Ness Ltd. Under separate cover I am sending you a 75,000 word novel, entitled, The Hour of the Dragon, written according to your suggestions. Hoping it will prove acceptable. . . .”

During those two months, Howard apparently didn’t write any other story, concentrating all his efforts on his novel, with an estimated output of 5,000 words per day, seven days a week. On May 20, the day he sent the novel to England, Howard wrote four short letters. The Hour of the Dragon had occupied almost all of his time for those two months. Edgar Hoffmann Price’s brief visit in April seems to have been the sole distraction during those two months. For someone who was not expecting much from the British market, two full months of work seems an awful lot. One suspects that Howard had much more faith and hope in his novel than he was ready to admit. He knew that if the novel was to be accepted—and published—it could be a major, perhaps the major, break for him.

As could be expected, Howard took a few days off in June: “Having completed several weeks of steady work, I’m knocking off a few hours for relaxation and to try to catch up with my correspondence which I’ve allowed to stack up outrageously.” Howard took a short vacation and visited the Carlsbad caverns, which were to inspire him for one of his next Conan stories, but he soon found himself back to work and back to Conan. Only a few days had elapsed between the completion of The People of the Black Circle and the beginning of The Hour of the Dragon. The delay was very probably the same between The Hour of the Dragon and his next Conan story.

A Witch Shall Be Born was written in late May or early June 1934, probably in a matter of days. The tale was evidently intended to replenish Farnsworth Wright’s stock of Conan stories. In April 1934, Wright had published Iron Shadows in the Moon, Queen of the Black Coast had followed in May, and Howard knew that The Devil in Iron and The People of the Black Circle were scheduled for the August 1934 and subsequent issues, leaving him with no new Conan stories awaiting publication in the pages of Weird Tales. This was a new situation for the Texan, since Iron Shadows in the Moon and Queen of the Black Coast had been written and sold in 1932. Wright was accepting Conan stories as fast as he could get them, and was now almost systematically granting them the privileges of the cover (Queen of the Black Coast, The Devil in Iron, The People of the Black Circle, and A Witch Shall Be Born, published in a seven-month span, were all cover-featured). Conan’s popularity was growing, and the character was very probably attracting new readers to Weird Tales. Women wrote to the magazine, asking for more Conan, whom they envisioned, thanks in part to Wright’s censoring hands, as a romantic barbarian. A Witch Shall Be Born required only two drafts before Howard was satisfied with it. That it matched Wright’s expectations exactly there can be no doubt. In a letter to Robert H. Barlow dated July 5, 1934, Howard wrote: “Here, at last, is the ms. I promised you some time ago. A Witch Shall Be Born. It is my latest Conan story, and Mr. Wright says my best.”

A Witch is hardly Howard’s best, but it is a special Conan tale in the sense that it is at the same time a rather forgettable Conan story yet contains the most famous, or rather the most memorable scene of the entire series. Reading the story, one gets the impression that Howard was simply borrowing from that year’s production to craft the tale. The monster at the end of the story seems to be a cousin to that in the last chapter of Almuric. Taramis and Salome remind us that Howard was fascinated with brothers and sisters (with another occurrence of painful separation at birth) and also remind us of Howard’s interest in duality. Paranoia, a theme in Howard’s work as early as the Kull story The Shadow Kingdom (1926-27), runs rampant through this tale, and Howard repeats that people aren’t always what they seem to be. It is a frequent occurrence in Howard that evil lurks behind seemingly innocent features. In A Witch Shall Be Born, only Conan—and Howard?—seems to have all the facts. All other characters are as blind as Olgerd Vladislav to what has been taking place under their very eyes.

Conan, in A Witch Shall Be Born, is becoming a superhuman character. Howard was growing extremely confident with his creation as testifies the structure of the tale. We are here miles away from pulp formula: Conan—the protagonist—gives life to the entire story by being present in only two chapters. It is tempting to draw a parallel between Conan and what Howard thought he was achieving with the Conan series: The Texan knew he had a winner and that he could get away with almost everything, even not having the lead character in the story except in the central chapters. Conan dominates the whole story and this is made plain in the crucifixion scene. How can anybody kill a character—literarily or literally—who can survive such a scene as that one? For to write a crucifixion scene will automatically invite a Christic comparison. Conan probably became “immortal” with this scene and one wonders to what extent Howard wished it to be so. The story—average as it is—exudes Howard’s confidence in his creation. It was accepted with relish by Farnsworth Wright, published on the heels of four consecutive issues of Weird Tales starring the Cimmerian, and once again won the cover. Howard had every reason to be confident.

At the beginning of 1933, Howard only had one regular market. In mid-1934, he was appearing in almost every issue of Weird Tales, had succeeded in making Action Stories a regular market, with a Howard story in each issue, thought he had another regular market in Jack Dempsey’s Fight Magazine, was having stories published in several new and different magazines thanks to his agent Otis Adelbert Kline; furthermore, he thought he had just sold a novel to the British market.

It was an idyllic situation.

It wasn’t to last long.

(Click here to go directly to the third part.)

Vol. 3, The Conquering Sword of Conan

Foreword

I never knew Conan. Oh, I saw the movies and studied the paintings and thought I knew all about Conan’s character. Then I read the stories presented here.

I knew next to nothing until then. And neither does anyone else who hasn’t read Howard. Because locked within these flights of fury, these vaults of untamed male fantasy, is the actual persona of the character so many have captured on canvas.

And now it was my turn and I leapt at the chance. I believed that the real character would come to life in my mind’s eye in a different way than what I had been exposed to. Intuitively, I knew I was not understanding the full picture.

I began reading with the daunting task before me of trying to capture a view of Conan that was entirely my own approach. As I read I was struck by Howard’s wordsmithing. The words with which he chose to describe certain passages were themselves descriptive and visual. It sent me running for the dictionary.

The farther I read, the more I realized that these stories were becoming classic in a broader sense than the pulp genre. I viewed them in a way that N. C. Wyeth may have absorbed Treasure Island or Mead Schaeffer visualized Lorna Doone. A grand adventure scale with all the seriousness that the Golden Age illustrators embued their pictures. A classic illustrated adventure book. I wanted to own Conan the way those guys owned their presentations of beloved characters.

There was so much to choose from. The images were cascading and overlapping in waves of postures, lighting, and movement. As I sketched away into many nights, out came the Conan bouldering through a creek bed, on his way to or from so many of the actions in this collection. It became the slipcase, presenting Conan’s essential portrait. Alert, confident, and solitary.

I wanted a range of his emotions. The next painting to appear stemmed from my desire to portray the stealthy, panther-like side of the Cimmerian. And so he strides atop the wall at night in The Man-Eaters of Zamboula, on a mission to educate someone about the way the world works. I added another night scene because I wanted to see those streets in Zamboula and find Conan rescuing Nafertari, sneaking about, ever watchful for dangerous cannibals.

Then the pirate story. As adventurous and mythical as Sabatini’s Captain Blood, Conan steps into the story of The Black Stranger in full-on pirate gear. I had to show him as no one is likely to have seen him portrayed. Finest pirate regalia, as if Howard had just discovered an old trunk of his grandfather’s in the dusty attic. The portrait of Black Sarono is in the Golden Age mode of limited colors: red, black, and white, and executed with the same spirit. Each black-and-white chapter painting was an excuse to capture my chance of illustrating an old pirate tale. And I reveled in it.

I also knew that I had to present Conan as the flat out, berserker warrior that instantly comes to mind at the mention of the stories. I wasn’t against showing him this way, indeed, I had to find my particular point of view for the battle madness. It came as two pieces. One was Conan one on one with an equally corded Pict. This became the dustjacket. I wanted to show a bit of tension in the exchange, not a clear view of Conan conquering. And I needed to present his dynamic physique. This led to the second battle scene with Conan surrounded and exploding into a killing machine. The bodies work as a swirling, upward element toward Conan, captured in mid-flash of some offstage lightning. I added the background bolt to charge the scene and the sharpness of the melee. Another chance to capture Conan’s great musculature came in The Servants of Bit-Yakin. I could see him rushing up those stairs for Muriela, light glistening off his sweaty back, so many archways to race over.

Beyond the Black River was especially visual in a classic Conan way, but again I chose a night scene of warriors in a stealth assault mode. I was there on the hillside as those malevolent mercenaries, like black ops of today, climbed the embankment on their mission of mayhem. In contrast, I chose a bright and sunny day to see the Picts getting pelted with anything that would fit in a catapult. It seemed ironic tragedy to be killed on such a beautiful day.

Red Nails could be painted over and over again. (And I hope it will be by many others!) But even though I steered away from showing too many monsters for fear of taking away from the readers’ own exaggerated manifestation, I just had to see that decrepit old man and his bizarre instrument of death. Besides, it was an excuse to paint that babe, Tascela.

I saved the final piece for the title page. I wanted it to be an icon of the character of Conan the Cimmerian: adventurer, warrior, and explorer of the weird ways of Hyperboria. Several influences of mine cried out, but I listened to a particular voice from Leyendecker and proceeded to design with his efficiency in mind. It was a fun and fitting way for me to indulge my heroes and end my own adventure into Howard’s world.

Gregory Manchess
2005

Introduction

This volume completes the Wandering Star collection of Robert E. Howard’s tales of Conan of Cimmeria. Every story, fragment, synopsis, and note that Robert E. Howard ever committed to paper about the Cimmerian (even including some of the drafts)—and only those written by Howard himself—can now be found in the pages of the three volumes comprising this collection. Incredible as it may seem, it is a world premiere: Howard’s complete Conan stories had never before appeared in a uniform collection free from revision, rearrangement, and interpolations by others. For the first time, Howard’s Conan series can be judged on its own merits.

It is also the first time the stories are published, not arranged according to the character’s “biography,” but in the order Howard wrote them, as seems to have been his intention: “That’s why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.”

Previously, any conclusion one was tempted to draw regarding Howard’s achievement with his Conan series could only be based upon a presentation which not only didn’t show Howard’s growth as a writer, but presented the stories according to Conan’s “career,” in a manner which, I would argue, was meant to bolster an interpretation of that career alien to Howard’s original conception. The interpolation of non-Howard Conan stories into the series, the altering and rewriting of certain passages in Howard’s texts (notably in The Black Stranger), the adding of introductory paragraphs before every story, and even the retitling of Howard’s novel from the original The Hour of the Dragon to Conan the Conqueror, all worked toward presenting the whole series not as the life of “the average adventurer,” as Howard would have it, but as a cohesive saga, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, a kind of Tolkienesque quest in which each story represented yet another step up a ladder from penniless thief (as depicted in Tower of the Elephant) to mighty monarch of a civilized empire (The Hour of the Dragon).

Conan’s haphazard and carefree life was artificially transformed into a “career.” What made the series so wonderful—that intense sentiment of freedom resulting from the complete independence of each story from its predecessor and successor (almost no recurring character other than Conan in these tales!)—was undone, and Conan’s adventurous life became a “manifest destiny,” so to speak. It then became easy enough to see in Conan nothing more than a superman who would rise from poverty to kingship through his physical might (as exemplified in the Hollywood version of the Cimmerian).

That Conan eventually became king of Aquilonia is not in question, of course: he was king in the very first story Howard wrote about him. But nowhere in the stories as Howard wrote them do we detect a hint of a plan to become king one day. In Beyond the Black River, Conan comments: “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.” In Red Nails, he is no more precise: “I’ve never been king of an Hyborian kingdom. . . . But I’ve dreamed of being even that. I may be too, some day. Why shouldn’t I?” Conan became a king simply because the situation presented itself to him at a particular moment of his life, not because of any predetermined plan.

As to Howard’s conception of kingship, it was not an imperialistic one, but rather an Arthurian one, in which the king is first and foremost at the service of his people and not the reverse, so much so that in fact King Conan’s only ambition at times would be not to be a king anymore: “Prospero . . . these matters of statecraft weary me as all the fighting I have done never did. . . . I wish I might ride with you to Nemedia. . . . It seems ages since I had a horse between my knees—but Publius says that affairs in the city require my presence. Curse him! . . . I did not dream far enough, Prospero. When King Numedides lay dead at my feet and I tore the crown from his gory head and set it on my own, I had reached the ultimate border of my dreams. I had prepared myself to take the crown, not to hold it. In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless.” When his supporters propose that he conquer another kingdom after having been dispossessed of Aquilonia, in The Hour of the Dragon, Conan’s answer is unequivocal: “Let others dream imperial dreams. I but wish to hold what is mine. I have no desire to rule an empire welded together by blood and fire. It’s one thing to seize a throne with the aid of its subjects and rule them with their consent. It’s another to subjugate a foreign realm and rule it by fear. I don’t wish to be another Valerius. No, Trocero, I’ll rule all Aquilonia and no more, or I’ll rule nothing.”

We are here very far from the perception the general public has of Conan, that of a fur-clad, semi-illiterate brute (for Conan in the media suffered the same fate as Burroughs’ Tarzan: both mysteriously lost their ability for articulate speech), bent only on raping, slaying, and conquering. The tales of Conan as a king, the last ones chronologically speaking, should thus in no way be considered as the culmination of a lifelong saga that leads to becoming the most powerful ruler of the Hyborian Age. After all, these tales of King Conan were penned rather early in the history of the series (The Phoenix on the Sword and The Scarlet Citadel were among the very first Conan stories written by Howard in 1932, and The Hour of the Dragon, written in 1934, was essentially a cannibalization of earlier efforts).

All the tales in this third volume were written well after The Hour of the Dragon. It is therefore in these that we will find Howard’s final words on Conan, the conclusion to his four-year stint with the character that brought him fame. They do not represent any sort of conclusion whatsoever to the character’s life (how could they when Howard himself pleaded ignorance: “As for Conan’s eventual fate—frankly I can’t predict it. In writing these yarns I’ve always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me.”), but they are the conclusion to the series: Red Nails was completed in July 1935, eleven months before Howard’s suicide. No evidence exists that Howard ever wrote anything about the character after that date.

Weird Tales’ inability to pay Howard regularly probably played a great part in this, and it could be said that Howard was forced by circumstances to abandon the character. The fact that he submitted only one story to Weird Tales after Red Nails supports the idea. However, by late 1934, Howard was clearly branching out from fantasy fiction, and was more and more interested in the history and lore of his own country, the American Southwest, and in its potential as a subject for fiction. It is this growing passion which colored the last Conan tales: for the first time, Howard’s interest was something with which he was in touch in his everyday life. His knowledge of the Celts, which had permeated many of the early Conan stories, was gained from books only. The last Conan stories—those contained in this volume—were tales in which Howard would continue, as he had in all the stories to date, to explore his theme of “barbarism versus civilization,” but for the first time he was in a position to add much more sincerity and firsthand knowledge of his subject.

Three of the tales contained in this volume are among Howard’s best Conan stories: Beyond the Black River, Red Nails, and The Black Stranger. The first two are overwhelmingly considered by Howard scholars and connoisseurs alike to be among the best tales of the entirety of Howard’s fiction. Here was a writer at the peak of his talent producing the tales which would eventually propel him beyond the status of exceptional storyteller, to that of an author who also had a message to deliver. With these last Conan tales, Howard proved that he was indeed worthy of critical attention.

It is in that sense that we can consider the last Conan stories as a conclusion to the series, but also as a form of literary testament. The events depicted in Beyond the Black River were nothing especially new in Howard’s fiction, replete with tales depicting successful forays of savages against civilized settlements and cities that had grown too weak to defend themselves. In Beyond the Black River, as in those other tales, it is the inevitable division of the civilized people and the weakening that goes with it which brings about their defeat. What sets Beyond the Black River apart, however, is that the background and characters ring true, because all were drawn from sources that were so much closer to Howard than his usual pseudo-Celtic or pseudo-Assyrian settings. The settlers, farmers, and workers that people this particular story are not cardboard characters, but are as alive and vibrant as Conan himself. Few are the writers of fantasy stories who have succeeded in mingling fantasy with realism with such mastery. The story is a masterpiece because Howard didn’t let any damsel in distress get in the way, because he subdued the more fantastic elements of the tale, and refused to resort to pulp magazine conventions: he carried his grim opening predicament through to its bitter end, and didn’t let melodrama get in the way. The last Conan stories are much more realistic than fantastic, and it is that realism which sets them apart. Howard was very much aware of this. Just after he had sold Red Nails he commented to Clark Ashton Smith: “Too much raw meat, maybe, but I merely portrayed what I honestly believe would be the reactions of certain types of people in the situations on which the plot of the story hung. It may sound fantastic to link the term ‘realism’ with Conan; but as a matter of fact—his supernatural adventures aside—he is the most realistic character I ever evolved.”

If Beyond the Black River represents Howard’s definitive statement of his views concerning barbarism, he chose, in Red Nails, the other Conan masterpiece, to explore the other side of the coin: decaying civilizations. Once again, it was definitely not a new theme for the Texan. For example, Conan’s predecessor, Kull of Atlantis, was the king of the decadent empire of Valusia, and countless Howard stories are set in locales that usually were somewhere between decadent and decayed. The situation inevitably led to a final destruction, usually at the hands of the barbarians who were always, conveniently, at the gates, waiting for such a moment. In Red Nails, however, Howard dispensed with the barbarians and made sure his city was utterly isolated. Red Nails would thus be the story of a decaying process that would be carried to its logical conclusion. Written at a time when Howard’s mother’s health was declining at an alarming rate, her body slowly decaying under her son’s eyes toward a conclusion that was as inevitable as it was obvious, the last Conan story is a tale which is particularly rich in resonance with the terrible events that were happening in Howard’s life and mind at the time he was composing the story. (For a fuller explanation of the background to each story, see “Hyborian Genesis Part III” at the end of this volume.)

With the Conan stories, Howard ensured his literary legacy. His suicide at age thirty cut short a career that had promised to be an exceptional one. Less than a month before his death, he wrote Lovecraft: “I find it more and more difficult to write anything but western yarns. . . . I have always felt that if I ever accomplished anything worthwhile in the literary field, it would be with stories dealing of the central and western frontier.” Howard would probably have become an important writer in that field, but fate decided otherwise. However, the Conan stories transcend by their very nature the genre they are derived from, whether it be western, history, or high-adventure. By displacing them from their historical context and cloaking them in a Hyborian guise, Howard gave those stories a universality they would not have had in another form. They became timeless, as truthful today as they were seventy years ago.

“Scratch the veneer at your own risk,” I wrote concerning the stories found in the first volume. You are about to discover that the veneer is almost nonexistent in most of the tales of this last opus.

This is Howard at his rawest.

At his best.

Patrice Louinet
2005

Map of the Hyborian Age

Click for (slightly) larger maps; the originals were sadly too large for me to capture.

Hyborian Genesis Part III

Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories
by Patrice Louinet

As he was completing A Witch Shall Be Born, Robert E. Howard probably felt that he could sell almost any Conan story he submitted to Weird Tales. By 1934, after several years of hardship, including two years early in his career during which he did not sell a single story, Howard had become one of the stars of the magazine. Witch was, according to editor Farnsworth Wright, the “best” of the Conan stories submitted to date; praise for Howard and his Conan stories could be found in the letter column of almost every issue of Weird Tales, and, by far the most revealing factor, the Texan was present in ten of the twelve issues published in 1934, eight of these featuring Conan, with the last four winning cover privilege, an impressive record.

Howard had been immersed in Conan for months: People of the Black Circle had been written in February and March; The Hour of the Dragon was begun just afterward and sent to its intended British publisher on May 20; and A Witch Shall Be Born had been completed by early June. Howard’s sole respite during those months was the short visit of his colleague E. Hoffmann Price in April. Early in June, then, Howard took his first vacation in a long time. He later informed his correspondent August Derleth that he had “completed several weeks of steady work,” and told him that “a friend and I took a brief trip into southern New Mexico and extreme western Texas; saw the Carlsbad Caverns, a spectacle not to [be] duplicated on this planet, and spent a short time in El Paso. First time I’d ever been there. . . .”

The friend in question was Truett Vinson, one of Howard’s best friends since high school, about whom more later. The two men left Cross Plains, Howard’s hometown, in early June and were gone for a week. That the trip proved enjoyable is attested by mentions of it in almost all of Howard’s letters of the following weeks, with the visit to the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico as the high point of the short holidays. Howard was particularly impressed by these natural wonders and waxed at length about them to his correspondents, notably H. P. Lovecraft:

I can not describe the fantastic wonders of that great cavern. You must see it yourself to appreciate it. It lies high up among the mountains, and I never saw skies so blue and clear as those that arch titanically above those winding trails up which the traveller must labor to reach the entrance of the Cavern. They are of a peculiarly deep hue beggaring attempts at description. The entrance of the Cavern is gigantic, but it is dwarfed by the dimensions of the interior. One descends seemingly endlessly by winding ramps, for some seven hundred feet. We entered at ten thirty o’clock, and emerged about four. The English language is too weak to describe the Cavern. The pictures do not give a good idea; for one thing they exaggerate the colors; the coloring is really subdued, somber rather than sparkling. But they do not give a proper idea of the size, of the intricate patterns carved in the limestone throughout the millenniums. . . . In the Cavern natural laws seem suspended; it is Nature gone mad in a riot of fantasy. Hundreds of feet above arched the great stone roof, smoky in the mist that eternally rises. Huge stalactites hung from the roof in every conceivable shape, in shafts, in domes, in translucent sheets, like tapestries of ice. Water dripped, building gigantic columns through the ages, pools of water gleamed green and weird here and there. . . . We moved through a wonderland of fantastic giants whose immemorial antiquity was appalling to contemplate.

Shortly upon his return to Cross Plains, Howard set out to write yet another Conan story, The Servants of Bit-Yakin. The story is not a particularly memorable one, with a rather unconvincing plot and insipid heroine, but it has a setting markedly different from the other Conan tales, taking place entirely in a vast natural wonder, filled with caves and subterranean rivers, which was evidently greatly inspired by Howard’s visit to the Carlsbad Caverns. As he concluded to Lovecraft: “God, what a story you could write after such an exploration! . . . Anything seemed possible in that monstrous twilight underworld, seven hundred and fifty feet below the earth. If some animate monster had risen horrifically from among the dimness of the columns and spread his taloned anthropomorphic hands above the throng, I do not believe that anyone would have been particularly surprized.” Howard probably decided he could write the tale himself, after all.

The result is not quite satisfying, but it was paving the way for greater things to come: for the first time in the series, Howard was weaving elements of his own country into his Conan tales. It was a timid first step to be sure, but an important one nonetheless. The story is not mentioned in any of the extant Howard letters and no record of submission survives. It was accepted by Farnsworth Wright for $155, payable on publication, and published in the March 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Some confusion exists as to Howard’s original title for the tale. The story first appeared in Weird Tales under the title Jewels of Gwahlur. Howard wrote three drafts: the first is untitled, while the second and third are titled The Servants of Bit-Yakin. The third draft has come to us as a carbon of the version sent to Weird Tales, hence the definitive one. A third title, Teeth of Gwahlur, appears in a listing found among Howard’s papers long after his death (from which the information on the price paid by the magazine comes). This listing was not prepared by Howard himself, though evidently derived from either an original Howard document or series of documents. From internal evidence, it appears that this page was prepared well after the story was published and was very probably intended as a listing of stories sold to Weird Tales to establish what was owed to Howard’s estate by the magazine, following his death. In his listings of sales, Howard, as a general rule, would always give the published version’s title rather than his own, which is the case in this document (The Slithering Shadow over Xuthal of the Dusk, Shadows in the Moonlight over Iron Shadows in the Moon). It seems quite probable, then, that Teeth was simply an error: perhaps Howard himself, in giving the title, was remembering the name of the necklace in the story, and the later transcription carried forward the error.

In the weeks that followed, Howard once again decided to experiment with his Conan stories. The attempt itself did not result in a complete story, but it led to a major evolution in the series. If The Servants of Bit-Yakin timidly borrowed from a place Howard had visited, this time the Texan opted for a definitely American setting, at the price of an eviction of the Cimmerian himself from his Hyborian world.

In the second part of 1934, it was possible to detect a growing distancing of Howard from his Cimmerian creation, notably in the conversations he had with Novalyne Price, whom he began dating in August. In October, he confided to her that he was “getting a little tired of Conan. . . . This country needs to be written about. There are all kinds of stories around here.”

The author to whom Howard looked when it came to finding inspiration for this new tale was one of his favorites: Robert W. Chambers. Howard’s library included three of this author’s novels dealing with the American Revolution: The Maid-at-Arms (1902), The Little Red Foot (1921) and America, or the Sacrifice (1924). These novels were to provide the background and inspiration for Howard’s next tale of the Hyborian Age, Wolves Beyond the Border. A lot of confusing and erroneous information on Howard’s use of the Chambers material had appeared over the years until Howard scholar Rusty Burke set the record straight. All the conclusions on the exact degree of that influence originate with Burke’s research or are derived from his pioneering efforts.

As he had done in 1932 when he made the decision to write The Hyborian Age to give more coherence to his Hyborian world, Howard first proceeded to jot down a series of notes that would help him feel more at ease with the events and locale he was to write about (see page 285). There can be no doubt at all that Chambers’ novels were very much in Howard’s mind when he wrote this. Almost all the names are taken nearly verbatim from the novels: Schohira for Schoharie, Oriskany for Oriskonie, Caughnawaga for Conawaga, etc. The situation and events Howard describes in his document also clearly evoke Chambers’ dramatization of the American Revolution. More names derived from Chambers would find their way into Wolves Beyond the Border.

Wolves is one of the most intriguing Conan fragments precisely because it is not, strictly speaking, a Conan story. It was not the first time Howard had attempted to do something different with Conan and, as we are about to see, not the first time he experimented with another character because he was starting to feel “out of contact” with one of his creations.

Shortly before he wrote his novel The Hour of the Dragon, Howard had attempted another story in which Conan is only an off-stage presence for a significant part of the tale. In that case, however, Conan’s absence was confined to the first chapters of a story which was envisioned as a novel; as the synopsis for the complete story attests, the Cimmerian was intended as a prominent character, if not actually the protagonist of the story. The situation can be seen as a parallel to that of A Witch Shall Be Born, in which the Cimmerian acts mostly off-stage. But in the case of Wolves Beyond the Border, the situation is markedly different, most notably due to the fact that this is a first-person narrative, in which Conan makes no appearance, though he is mentioned several times in the course of the story.

A very similar situation had arisen a few years earlier in Howard’s career, and makes for an interesting comparison. In 1926, Howard created Kull the Atlantean, his first epic fantasy character, about whom the Texan wrote or began a dozen tales. In 1928, however, Howard apparently started to lose interest in his character. He then began—but never completed—a very intriguing fragment in which the major character was not Kull, who was relegated to a minor role, but his friend Brule, the Pictish warrior, whose characteristics were markedly different in that tale than in his previous appearances. Kull was apparently becoming merely a supporting character in his own series, in quite the same fashion Conan seems to be in Wolves Beyond the Border. Howard never completed the fragment, but from that moment on the character of Kull underwent a drastic evolution. It is quite striking to see that in those two fragments, the off-stage characters are barbarians who have become or are becoming kings of civilized countries. And in both fragments, the sentiments of the new protagonists when it comes to politics are about the same. Compare the following:

The people of Conajohara scattered throughout the Westermarck, in Schohira, Conawaga, or Oriskawny, but many of them went southward and settled near Fort Thandara. . . . There they were later joined by other settlers for whom the older provinces were too thickly inhabited, and presently there grew up the district known as the Free Province of Thandara, because it was not like the other provinces, royal grants to great lords east of the marches and settled by them, but cut out of the wilderness by the pioneers themselves without aid of the Aquilonian nobility. We paid no taxes to any baron. Our governor was not appointed by any lord, but we elected him ourselves, from our own people, and he was responsible only to the king. We manned and built our forts ourselves, and sustained ourselves in war as in peace. And Mitra knows war was a constant state of affairs, for there was never peace between us and our savage neighbors, the wild Panther, Alligator and Otter tribes of Picts. (from Wolves Beyond the Border)

“We of The Islands are all one blood, but of many tribes, and each tribe has customs and traditions peculiar to itself alone. We all acknowledge Nial of the Tatheli as over-king but his rule is loose. He does not interfere with our affairs among ourselves, nor does he levy tribute or taxes. . . . [H]e takes no toll of my tribe, the Borni, nor of any other tribe. Neither does he interfere when two tribes go to war—unless some tribe encroaches on the three who pay tribute. . . . And when the Lemurians or the Celts or any foreign nation or band of reavers come against us, he sends forth for all tribes to put aside their quarrels and fight side by side. Which is a good thing. He might be a supreme tyrant if he liked, for his own tribe is very strong, and with the aid of Valusia he might do as he liked—but he knows that though he might, with his tribes and their allies, crush all the other tribes, there would never be peace again. . . .” (from the untitled Kull fragment)

Here are more than passing resemblances. In both instances, the peculiar political turmoil can also be read as a mirror of a similar turmoil taking place in Howard’s psyche, connected to the social situation of his regular protagonists: Kull the king of Valusia and Conan the soon-to-be king of Aquilonia. In both instances, the Picts—only mentioned once so far in the Conan series (in The Phoenix on the Sword)—appear as the necessary catalysts for the change: Brule is a Pict, and the threat they pose to the Aquilonian settlement triggers the events of Wolves Beyond the Border. The Picts—the savages forever present in Howard’s universe—force the Howardian characters to reveal their true nature.

As was the case with the Kull fragment then, Howard did not complete Wolves Beyond the Border. His first draft diminished to part-story, part synopsis, while the second was simply abandoned. The tale was probably at the same time too derivative of Chambers and too much a necessary exercise before Howard could fully tackle this new phase of his character’s evolution. To say that Beyond the Black River was born on the ashes of Wolves Beyond the Border would be belaboring the obvious. This time, however, Howard got rid almost entirely of the Chambers influence. There is no plot element in Black River which can be traced back to Chambers, and only a few names still show the initial connection (for instance, Conajohara was carried on from Wolves and “Balthus” was derived from the “Baltus” of The Little Red Foot). Beyond the Black River is pure Howard.

The tale was particularly dear to Howard. To August Derleth he remarked that he “wanted to see if [he] could write an interesting Conan yarn without sex interest.” He was a little more explicit with Lovecraft, writing that his latest sale to Weird Tales was “a two-part Conan serial: ‘Beyond the Black River’—a frontier story. . . . In the Conan story I’ve attempted a new style and setting entirely—abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, etc., and thrown my story against a back-ground of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen.”

It was to Novalyne Price that Howard fully bared his sentiments toward that story:

Bob began to talk. But he was not berating civilization; instead, he was praising the simple things that civilization had to offer: standing on street corners, talking with friends; walking with the warmth of the sun on your back, a faithful dog by your side; hunting cactus with your best girl.

[. . .]

“I sold Wright a yarn like that a few months ago.” He turned and looked at me, his eyes turbulent. “I’m damned surprised he took it. It’s different from my other Conan yarns . . . no sex . . . only men fighting against the savagery and bestiality about to engulf them. I want you to read it when it comes out. It’s filled with the important little things of civilization, little things that make men think civilization’s worth living and dying for.”

[. . .]

He was excited about it because it was about this country and it sold! He had a honing to write more about this country, not an ordinary cowboy yarn, or a wild west shoot ’em up, though God knew this country was alive with yarns like that waiting to be written. But in his heart, he wanted to say more than that. He wanted to tell the simple story of this country and the hardships the settlers had suffered, pitted against a frightened, semi-barbaric people—the Indians, who were trying to hold on to a way of life and a country they loved. . . . But a novel depicting the settlers’ fear as they tried to carve out a new life, and the Indians’ fear as they tried to hold on to a doomed country; why, girl, all that would make the best damn novel ever written about frontier life in the Southwest.

[. . .]

“I tried that yarn out to see what Wright would do about it. I was afraid he wouldn’t take it, but he did! By God, he took it! ”

Beyond the Black River is considered by many Howard scholars to be his best story, encapsulating the essence of his philosophy: “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. . . . Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”

Indeed, all the characters who are not barbarians meet their doom in the tale: Tiberias the merchant, presented as the epitome of civilized decadence, is of course the first example, portrayed with evident scorn as a man unwilling or unable to adjust his civilized ways to life on the Frontier. But even the woodsmen, born to civilization but having lived their lives on the frontier, can not hope to prevail: “They were sons of civilization, reverted to a semi-barbarism. [Conan] was a barbarian of a thousand generations of barbarians. They had acquired stealth and craft, but he had been born to these things. He excelled them even in lithe economy of motion. They were wolves, but he was a tiger.” The frontiersmen, Balthus, and Valannus all died because of this, and Howard’s genius was not to sacrifice his story for the sake of the usual conventions of the genre.

Much has been written about the exact signification of the last paragraph of the story. Many erroneously credit the statement to Conan, as if it were his sentiment, but it is not Conan but an unnamed forester who utters these words. That the barbarians always ultimately triumph is a simple report of what has just transpired: only Conan and the Picts have survived the ordeal, because it was their nature to survive. That Conan had in fact more in common with the Picts he was fighting than with the Aquilonians had been made clear by Howard earlier in the story:

“But some day a man will rise and unite thirty or forty clans [of the Picts], just as was done among the Cimmerians, when the Gundermen tried to push the border northward, years ago. They tried to colonize the southern marches of Cimmeria: destroyed a few small clans, built a fort-town, Venarium,—you’ve heard the tale.”

“So I have indeed,” replied Balthus, wincing. . . . “My uncle was at Venarium when the Cimmerians swarmed over the walls. . . . The barbarians swept out of the hills in a ravening horde, without warning, and stormed Venarium with such fury none could stand before them. Men, women and children were butchered. Venarium was reduced to a mass of charred ruins, as it is to this day. The Aquilonians were driven back across the marches, and have never since tried to colonize the Cimmerian country. But you speak of Venarium familiarly. Perhaps you were there?”

“I was,” grunted the other. “I was one of the horde that swarmed over the walls. . . .”

[. . .]

“Then you, too, are a barbarian!” he exclaimed involuntarily.

The other nodded, without taking offense.

“I am Conan, a Cimmerian.”

The import of this passage was not merely to give some additional biographical information on the Cimmerian, but rather to make explicit the connection between Conan and the Picts. Conan is a barbarian “as ferocious as the Picts, and much more intelligent” and this is why he will survive. The insistence on Conan’s elemental nature, much more marked than in any of the previous tales of the Cimmerian, very probably provoked the emergence of Balthus as the character readers—and Howard himself—could relate to. Critic George Scithers once noted that Howard had undoubtedly projected himself and his dog Patches into this story under the guise of Balthus and Slasher. As a civilized man himself, Howard could no more hope to prevail in the Hyborian Age than his civilized characters.

It was a rare thing indeed in pulp fiction to see a tale concluding with so bleak an ending, in which most of the characters die and the situation is worse at the end of the story than it was at its beginning. Howard was here trying to deliver a message much more than to simply add another Conan story to his bibliography.

Beyond the Black River was bought by Farnsworth Wright in early October 1934. It was published as a serial in the May and June 1935 issues of Weird Tales, but without the honors of the cover. Either Wright wanted to add some variety to his covers (he hadn’t granted The Servants of Bit-Yakin cover privilege either), or the lack of a semi-naked heroine prevented him from doing that. The cover for the May 1935 issue did not feature an undressed woman, though, so that question must remain unanswered.

In the months of October and November 1934 Howard was apparently too much occupied with his romance with Novalyne Price to devote any time to writing new Conan tales. At about the time Beyond the Black River was accepted, though, Howard received bad news from England: “Just got a letter informing me that the English company which had promised to bring out my book [the Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon] had gone into the hands of the receiver. Just my luck. The yarn’s in the hands of the company which bought up the assets, but I haven’t heard from them.” The novel was, however, soon returned. Howard very probably touched it up very slightly, sent it to Weird Tales later in the year, and soon received news that it was accepted, probably in early January 1935. Wright was apparently satisfied that Howard was returning to less experimental tales: “Wright says it’s my best Conan story so far.”

In December, as he was informing Lovecraft of the sale of Beyond the Black River and commenting on its unusual tone, he added: “Some day I’m going to try my hand at a longer yarn of the same style, a serial of four or five parts.”

It appears that Howard didn’t wait very long before writing this serial. The Black Stranger is one of those Howard stories for which we have no information regarding composition, but the writing date can be estimated around January and/or February 1935 thanks to the partial drafts of other stories found on the backs of the pages of several drafts. On the back of The Black Stranger are found several pages for stories composed in December 1934 and early 1935. It seems reasonable enough to suppose that Howard began work on that serial after his revision—and the acceptance—of The Hour of the Dragon.

The Black Stranger was evidently conceived as a follow-up of sorts to Beyond the Black River featuring once again Conan opposed to the Picts, and once again it was a very experimental tale, as the Cimmerian isn’t introduced until halfway through the novelette-length story. (He is, of course, featured in the first chapter, but his identity is not revealed to the reader.)

The Black Stranger has never received the critical attention it is due, primarily because it was not published in its original form until 1987, when Karl Edward Wagner included it in an anthology. In all its previous appearances, the story had been mercilessly butchered. The tale is simple enough on its surface, mixing elements of piratical adventure and Indian warfare, but should definitely not be dismissed in a cavalier way, as has been done sometimes. The Black Stranger is an extremely complex tale once one has understood that it is replete, consciously or unconsciously, with autobiographical elements, much more so than any of the stories Howard had written to date.

The story is set on the coasts of the Hyborian Age’s equivalent of the United States, at a time which would roughly correspond to our seventeenth century. It is the tale of early settlers—of a sort—on a continent that is still largely dominated by wild tribes, the Hyborian Age equivalent of Native Americans. A child is prominently featured, a rare occurrence in a Howard tale. Tina is quite a mystery to the reader: she is presented as a “pitiful waif . . . taken away from a brutal master encountered on that long voyage up from the southern coasts.” What few children appear in Howard’s fiction all share an unhappy youth; all are orphans or have been abandoned by their parents, and Tina is no exception. In this case, however, Belesa has apparently adopted the child as her own. A mysterious Black Man is hiding in the forest around the settlers’ stockade.

“Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us?” asks the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter of her husband, Roger Chillingworth. Hawthorne’s novel, published in 1850, presents points of remarkable resemblance to Howard’s tale. Both stories are centered around a woman and her child (real or adopted), forced to live in a hostile environment, victims of the scorn of the men around them. The time frame and settings are remarkably similar, and Pearl, the young heroine of Hawthorne’s novel, is a child as strange and fey as Tina. In both stories, the child is frightened by a mysterious Black Man almost always offstage. There is too much similarity to consider this a simple matter of coincidence. Hawthorne was not represented in Howard’s library, and he is never mentioned by Howard in any of the surviving papers. That he had read Hawthorne, perhaps as part of his schooling, seems more than probable, though: The Scarlet Letter seems to have furnished a lot of background for The Black Stranger, even though the events themselves have nothing in common.

All this invites a different reading of the tale, in which Tina may be seen as a fatherless child, particularly sensitive to the presence of the Black Man. Readers familiar with Howard’s biography will be even more startled, for in Hawthorne’s novel Pearl’s mother is named Hester, and the father she does not know, counterpart to Tina’s Black Man, is the blue-eyed physician Roger Chillingworth. Howard’s mother’s name was Hester, and she was married to a blue-eyed physician.

The Black Stranger apparently failed to sell to Weird Tales, though no record for this survives. Wright was perhaps irritated by Howard’s experimental forays, and, probably around February or March 1935, for the first time in many months rejected a Conan tale. Howard decided to salvage what he could, and rewrote the story. He invented a new character—Terence Vulmea, an Irish pirate—to replace Conan, got rid of all the Hyborian references, and submitted the new story, rechristened Swords of the Red Brotherhood, to his agent Otis Adelbert Kline in late May 1935. The new version was circulated for several years, and was sold in 1938, but the magazine which was to publish it folded, so this version didn’t see print until 1976.

The next Conan tale would be anything but experimental. The Man-Eaters of Zamboula was apparently written around March 1935, judging from the stories found on the back of the draft pages. It is a routine Conan story, similar in quality to those Howard had been forced to write when he was in dire need of money. Surrounded by such masterpieces as Beyond the Black River, The Black Stranger and the future Red Nails, it more than pales in comparison. It seems that Howard borrowed the settings from the various Middle Eastern adventures he was writing at the same time (featuring his characters Kirby O’Donnell and Francis Xavier Gordon), while borrowing some of the premises of an unsold detective story, Guests of the Hoodoo Room, which very likely preceded the Conan story by a few months. Guests also featured cannibals capturing poor wretches by way of a rigged hotel room. The plot is rather unconvincing, but Howard probably knew this wouldn’t prevent Wright from accepting the story. The scene in which Zabibi/Nafertari dances naked amid the snakes seems to have been written with only one goal to mind: to win the cover spot. Brundage’s cover illustration for that story is indeed a remarkable one. That it does not feature the Cimmerian was something Howard was growing accustomed to: of the nine Weird Tales covers illustrating a Conan story, the Cimmerian himself was portrayed in only three.

On December 22, 1934, Howard presented Novalyne Price with a most surprising Christmas present: expecting a history book, she was presented instead with a copy of The Complete Works of Pierre Louÿs:

“A history?” I asked bewildered.

He shifted his weight in his chair and grinned. “Well, . . . Yeah. It’s a kind of history.”

[. . .]

Then Bob said the book described very vividly our “rotting civilization.”

[. . .]

After Bob left, I sat down, unwrapped the book, and began to look at it very carefully. I read the inscription again, trying to make sense out of it : “The French have one gift—the ability to guild decay and change the maggots of corruption to the humming birds of poetry—as demonstrated by this volume.”

Some time later, Novalyne was questioning Howard about this very peculiar present:

“Bob, why did you give me that book by Pierre Louÿs?”

He whirled and looked at me. “Didn’t you like it?”

“It was a little too strong for my blood,” I said defensively. “I didn’t read too much of it.”

“Read it. . . . You lead a sheltered life. You don’t know what’s going on in the world.”

That irritated me. “I don’t care to know things like that,” I said hotly. “It seems to me knowing about them doesn’t make the world a better place; it only makes you a silent partner.”

“You’re a silent partner, whether you like it or not.” He was getting warmed up now. “You see, girl, when a civilization begins to decay and die, the only thing men or women think about is the gratification of their body’s desires. They become preoccupied with sex. It colors their thinking, their laws, their religion—every aspect of their lives.

[. . .]

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you girl. Men quit reading fiction, because they only want true stories of men’s sexual exploits. . . . A few years ago, I had a hard time selling yarns . . . about sex. Now, I’m going to have to work to catch up with the market. . . . Damn it to hell, girl, sex will be in everything you see and hear. It’s the way it was when Rome fell.”

[. . .]

“Girl, I’m working on a yarn like that now—a Conan yarn. Listen to me. When you have a dying civilization, the normal, accepted life style ain’t strong enough to satisfy the damned insatiable appetites of the courtesans and, finally, of all the people. They turn to Lesbianism and things like that to satisfy their desires. . . . I am going to call it ‘The Red Flame of Passion.’ ”

The Red Flame of Passion was quite evidently the story that was to become Red Nails, but Howard wasn’t yet ready to commit his idea to paper. A few months later, around late April or May 1935, Howard had another conversation on the subject with Novalyne:

Bob volunteered that he wasn’t through writing Conan stories. I was sorry about that, for I don’t care much for Conan, what little I’ve scanned through.

Bob said he had an idea for a Conan yarn that was about to jell. Hadn’t got to the place where he was ready to write it. All he’d done so far was make a few notes, put it aside to let it lie there in his subconsciousness till it was fully built up.

“What’s this one about?” I asked.

“I think this time I’m going to make it one of the sexiest, goriest yarns I’ve ever written. I don’t think you’d care for it.”

“Not if it’s gory.” I looked at him a little puzzled. “What do you mean ‘sexy stories’?”

“My God. My Conan yarns are filled with sex.”

[. . .]

I couldn’t see that the Conan yarns Bob had brought me to read had any sex in them. Gore, yes. Sex, no.

“You have sex in the Conan yarns?” I said unbelievingly.

“Hell, yes. That’s what he did—drinking, whoring, fighting. What else was there in life?”

Red Nails was still not to be written for another few weeks, though.

One reason was Weird Tales’ shaky financial situation. On May 6, 1935, Howard wrote to Farnsworth Wright: “I always hate to write a letter like this, but dire necessity forces me to. It is, in short, an urgent plea for money. . . . As you know it has been six months since The People of the Black Circle (the story the check for which is now due me) appeared in Weird Tales. Weird Tales owes me over eight hundred dollars for stories already published and supposed to be paid for on publication—enough to pay all my debts and get me back on my feet again if I could receive it all at once. Perhaps this is impossible. I have no wish to be unreasonable; I know times are hard for everybody. But I don’t believe I am being unreasonable in asking you to pay me a check each month until the accounts are squared. Honestly, at the rate we’re going now, I’ll be an old man before I get paid up! And my need for money now is urgent.”

Howard’s need for money was real, as his mother’s health was declining at an alarming rate and the medical expenses to care for her were soaring.

It took yet another serious incident in Howard’s life to make the story jell: early in the summer, Novalyne Price began dating one of Howard’s best friends, Truett Vinson, without telling him. Howard discovered this a few weeks later, just as he and Truett were about to take a trip together to New Mexico. Vinson and Howard were gone a week, and we can only imagine Howard’s state of mind during those few days.

The high-point of the visit was Lincoln, home of the famous “Bloody Lincoln County War.” It was during this visit that Howard found the last elements he needed to write Red Nails: for all their pseudo-Aztec names, Xuchotl and its inhabitants found their origin not in Lake Zuad, but in the little New Mexican town. The following passage from Howard’s July 23,1935, letter to Lovecraft is a lengthy one, but it is indispensable to understanding what Howard was trying to do in Red Nails.

[Vinson and I] came to the ancient village of Lincoln, dreaming amidst its gaunt mountains like the ghost of a blood-stained past. Of Lincoln Walter Noble Burns, author of The Saga of Billy the Kid has said: “The village went to sleep at the close of Lincoln County war and has never awakened again. If a railroad never comes to link it with the far-away world, it may slumber on for a thousand years. You will find Lincoln now just as it was when Murphy and McSween and Billy the Kid knew it. The village is an anachronism, a sort of mummy town. . . .”

I can offer no better description. A mummy town. Nowhere have I ever come face to face with the past more vividly; nowhere has that past become so realistic, so understandable. It was like stepping out of my own age, into the fragment of an elder age, that has somehow survived. . . . Lincoln is a haunted place; it is a dead town; yet it lives with a life that died fifty years ago. . . . The descendants of old enemies live peacefully side by side in the little village; yet I found myself wondering if the old feud were really dead, or if the embers only smoldered, and might be blown to flame by a careless breath.

[. . .]

I have never felt anywhere the exact sensations Lincoln aroused in me—a sort of horror predominating. If there is a haunted spot on this hemisphere, then Lincoln is haunted. I felt that if I slept the night there, the ghosts of the slain would stalk through my dreams. The town itself seemed like a bleached, grinning skull. There was a feel of skeletons in the earth underfoot. And that, I understand, is no flight of fancy. Every now and then somebody ploughs up a human skull. So many men died in Lincoln.

[. . .]

Lincoln is a haunted town—yet it is not merely the fact of knowing so many men died there that makes it haunted, to me. I have visited many spots where death was dealt whole-sale. . . . But none of these places ever affected me just as Lincoln did. My conception of them was not tinged with a definite horror as in Lincoln. I think I know why. Burns, in his splendid book that narrates the feud, missed one dominant element entirely; and this is the geographical, or perhaps I should say topographical effect on the inhabitants. I think geography is the reason for the unusually savage and bloodthirsty manner in which the feud was fought out, a savagery that has impressed everyone who has ever made an intelligent study of the feud and the psychology behind it. The valley in which Lincoln lies is isolated from the rest of the world. Vast expanses of desert and mountains separate it from the rest of humanity—deserts too barren to support human life. The people in Lincoln lost touch with the world. Isolated as they were, their own affairs, their relationship with one another, took on an importance and significance out of proportion to their actual meaning. Thrown together too much, jealousies and resentments rankled and grew, feeding upon themselves, until they reached monstrous proportions and culminated in those bloody atrocities which startled even the tough West of that day. Visualize that narrow valley, hidden away among the barren hills, isolated from the world, where its inhabitants inescapably dwelt side by side, hated and being hated, and at last killing and being killed. In such restricted, isolated spots, human passions smolder and burn, feeding on the impulses which give them birth, until they reached a point that can hardly be conceived by dwellers in more fortunate spots. It was with a horror I frankly confess that I visualized the reign of terror that stalked that blood-drenched valley; day and night was a tense waiting, waiting until the thunder of the sudden guns broke the tension for a moment and men died like flies—and then silence followed, and the tension shut down again. No man who valued his life dared speak; when a shot rang out at night and a human being cried out in agony, no one dared open the door and see who had fallen. I visualized people caught together like rats, fighting in terror and agony and bloodshed; going about their work by day with a shut mouth and an averted eye, momentarily expecting a bullet in the back; and at night lying shuddering behind locked doors, trembling in expectation of the stealthy footstep, the hand on the bolt, the sudden blast of lead through the windows. Feuds in Texas were generally fought out in the open, over wide expanses of country. But the nature of the Bonito Valley determined the nature of the feud—narrow, concentrated, horrible. I have heard of people going mad in isolated places; I believe the Lincoln County War was tinged with madness.

Upon returning to Cross Plains, in late June 1935, Howard at last sat down to write the story which had been germinating in his mind for so many months. If the Bloody Lincoln County War, his handling of sex in the Conan stories, the particularly strained situation between Novalyne, Vinson and himself, and his mother’s rapidly deteriorating health furnished the immediate background to the new Conan story, several prototypes also helped give form to the tale.

More than two years earlier, he had completed the Conan story Xuthal of the Dusk, which has justly been considered a precursor of sorts to Red Nails. The arrival of Conan and a woman in a city cut off from the rest of the Hyborian world, in which they have to face an evil woman and decadent inhabitants, is the basic framework common to both stories. Xuthal of the Dusk is a rather inferior Conan tale, probably because Howard was not yet an accomplished enough writer to give it the treatment he felt it deserved. The heroine was insipid and the story was clearly exploitative. However, Howard commented to Clark Ashton Smith that “it really isn’t as exclusively devoted to sword-slashing as the announcement might seem to imply.”

Among Howard’s papers was also found a synopsis for a Steve Harrison detective story that bears strong similarities to the Conan tale. The synopsis is undated, but was probably written only a few months before the Conan story: “[T]here had been an old feud between the Wiltshaws and the Richardsons, of which the present sets were the last of each line. Another family, the Barwells, had been mixed up in the feud until, harried by both Richardsons and Wiltshaws, the last of that line, a grim, gaunt woman, had gone away with her infant son, thirty-five years before, swearing vengeance on both clans. . . . Eventually [Harrison] discovered that Doctor Ellis was really Joe Barwell, who had returned and lived in the town ten years to consummate his vengeance. . . .”

Howard had no problem amalgamating the two Barwells of the Harrison synopsis into Tolkemec. Another character in the Harrison synopsis, Esau, “a tall, gangling man of great awkward strength . . . a neurotic, really strong as a bull,” was a probable inspiration for Olmec, “a giant, with an enormous sweep of breast and the shoulders of a bull,” with the Biblical association of Esau’s name reinforcing the connection to the hairy Olmec.

Red Nails is the counterpart to Beyond the Black River. With the latter, Howard wrote his ultimate “Barbarism versus Civilization” tale, with the conclusion that “barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” He also stated that “Civilization is unnatural.” Red Nails was the story in which he would expand on that theme. In all the stories he had written on the subject, the decadent and decaying phase of his civilizations, kingdoms, countries, or cities was never allowed to be carried out in its entirety: once divided and thus weakened, the civilized people were systematically wiped out by hordes of barbarians waiting at the gates. In Beyond the Black River, the Picts played that part; in The Gods of Bal-Sagoth, a 1930 tale whose construction is quite similar to that of Red Nails, the “red people” carried out the destruction. Red Nails would be different in the sense that no tribe of barbarians would be lurking at the gates of Xuchotl. For the first time in Howard’s fiction, the civilizing process, with its decadent and decaying phases, is carried out to its inevitable end. Xuchotl is an “unnatural” city, in the sense implied in Beyond the Black River. To be civilized is to be entirely removed from nature and its forces. This is the reason why the city is not only cut off from the rest of the Hyborian world and its barbarian tribes, it is also, and equally importantly, cut off from nature itself: Xuchotl is completely paved, walled and roofed; the light is artificial and so is the food: the Xutchotlans eat “fruit which is not planted in soil, but obtains its nourishment out of the air.” As to the Xutchotlans themselves, all—save Tascela—were born in the city. Xuchotl is the epitome of a decayed civilization as Howard conceived it. It is the place where, as he had it, “the abnormal becomes normal.” Given these premises, the outcome of the story is not a surprise. As had been the case with Beyond the Black River, Howard had a message to deliver and he was ready to follow his assigned course right to the end.

Red Nails is so rich a story that we can’t hope to explore it in detail within the scope of this essay; a lot could be said about the relationship between Conan and Valeria, for instance, in which it is quite tempting to see a parallel with that of Howard and Novalyne Price, who had quite a temper; Valeria of the Red Brotherhood is indeed a welcome change from some of Howard’s more passive female characters. (He had, however, portrayed strong and interesting women characters before Valeria, and his meeting with Novalyne, such as Bêlit [in Queen of the Black Coast] and Sonya of Rogatino [in the historical adventure The Shadow of the Vulture].) In Tascela, the female vampire who refuses to die, feeding on younger women, fighting for the attentions of Conan, and thus jealous of Valeria, it is more than tempting to see a fictional representation of Howard’s mother, who always was hostile toward Novalyne Price. Olmec could then be seen as Howard’s father, and the whole story an allegorical tale, in which Howard and Novalyne set foot in the decayed universe that has become the Howard house. . . .

Howard sent Red Nails to Farnsworth Wright on July 22, 1935. The next day he wrote Clark Ashton Smith: “Sent a three-part serial to Wright yesterday: ‘Red Nails,’ which I devoutly hope he’ll like. A Conan yarn, and the grimmest, bloodiest and most merciless story of the series so far. Too much raw meat, maybe, but I merely portrayed what I honestly believe would be the reactions of certain types of people in the situations on which the plot of the story hung.” To Lovecraft, he later commented: “The last yarn I sold to Weird Tales—and it well may be the last fantasy I’ll ever write—was a three-part Conan serial which was the bloodiest and most sexy weird story I ever wrote. I have been dissatisfied with my handling of decaying races in stories, for the reason that degeneracy is so prevalent in such races that even in fiction it can not be ignored as a motive and as a fact if the fiction is to have any claim to realism. I have ignored it in all other stories, as one of the taboos, but I did not ignore it in this story. When, or if, you ever read it, I’d like to know how you like my handling of the subject of lesbianism.” (One wonders if “lesbianism” was indeed the central theme of Red Nails to Howard. The story only touches on the subject because of the vampiric nature of Tascela, but this was nothing new after Le Fanu’s Carmilla.)

As Howard mentions, the story was accepted by Weird Tales, which began its serialization a few days after Howard’s suicide and ended it as news of his death was announced in the magazine. It was the last Conan story.

Howard’s interests—and output—in the last year of his life were increasingly western-oriented, and he didn’t write a fantasy story in that period. A few short weeks before his death, he wrote that he was contemplating writing a fantasy. Two drafts for that unfinished weird story—set in sixteenth-century America—were found among his papers after his death, proof that he had not entirely abandoned the idea of writing fantasy tales. Whether he would have eventually returned to Conan after some time is a question that must remain unanswered.

In 1935, Howard sent several stories to England via his agent Otis Adelbert Kline. The stories, sent to Weird Tales’ representative in the United Kingdom, included several Conan tales, which were sent on 25 September: Beyond the Black River, A Witch Shall Be Born, and The Servants of Bit-Yakin. It seems probable Howard had no real hopes for these, as he had tear-sheets of Weird Tales pages sent, not actual typescripts. Anyway, nothing ever came out of this.

Howard’s last work on Conan occurred in March 1936, when two fans, John D. Clark and P. Schuyler Miller, sent him a letter in which they attempted to establish the chronology of the Conan tales. Howard’s letter, reproduced in this volume, is essential to the reader interested in Conan’s “biography,” though Howard was perhaps having some fun with the two fans. For instance, he wrote that Conan “made his first journey beyond the boundaries of Cimmeria. This, strange to say, was north instead of south. Why or how, I am not certain, but he spent some months among a tribe of the Æsir, fighting with the Vanir and the Hyperboreans.” Clark and Miller couldn’t possibly know that Howard was referring here to The Frost-Giant’s Daughter, the second-written Conan tale, which had been rejected by Wright and was still unpublished in its original form. With his reply, Howard included a map, expanded from the very rough ones he had prepared in 1932; it was to be the last work he would do on Conan.

Robert E. Howard committed suicide on June 11, 1936. Conan the Cimmerian, however, is still with us. In spite of some difficult years, he has managed to survive, and shows no signs of weakness.

The barbarian’s longevity wouldn’t have surprised Howard.

The barbarian must always ultimately triumph.

Index