Conan Compilation - The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian Part 1

The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian.

Robert E. Howard.

Foreword.

The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 n.o.bleness of cause a.s.sociated with the epic.

Howard took the nominal elements of heroic fiction, but he did not write them with the genteel sensibilities typically a.s.sociated with the form. h.e.l.l no he took those elements as sheep's skin under which to fit his own agenda, which included railing at his personal circ.u.mstances; 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 cla.s.sic 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 att.i.tude 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 ent.i.ties that darkly reflected his deeply felt personal beliefs; his view of life as unending struggle and ultimate futility. But providing one h.e.l.l of a ride along the way, if you were lucky.

The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian 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 h.e.l.l 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 cla.s.sic ill.u.s.tration. 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 multidimensional character, and I've done my best to reflect that, depicting him in a variety of moods and att.i.tudes.

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 circ.u.mstances.

Even so, even such minor efforts as The Vale of Lost Women offer pa.s.sages 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 ma.s.sacre 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 cla.s.sics 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 role- playing 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 a.s.sessment 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 s.p.a.ce 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 protege 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 cliche-ridden pulp magazines, Weird Tales often lived up to its subt.i.tle, "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 antic.i.p.ating 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 I10.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."11.

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 a.s.sociations." 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 aesir 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 a.s.syria 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 as12.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 pa.s.sage 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 circ.u.mstances." 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 conquering13.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 "n.o.ble Savage": "I have no idyllic view of barbarism as near as I can learn it's a grim, b.l.o.o.d.y, ferocious and loveless condition. I have no patience with the depiction of the barbarian of any race as a stately, G.o.d-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 circ.u.mstance. 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 succ.u.mb 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 ill.u.s.tration.

With the tales of Conan of Cimmeria, Howard was out for more than pulpish fare. While he14.could have turned out story after story of the adventures of a Cimmerian killing monsters and l.u.s.ting after scantily-clad damsels in distress, a.s.suring 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 a.s.sured 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 2002.15.Cimmeria Written in Mission, Texas, February, 1932; suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredericksburg seen in a mist of winter rain.

Robert E. Howard

Cimmeria.

I remember.

The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills; The grey clouds' leaden everlasting arch; The dusky streams that flowed without a sound, And the lone winds that whispered down the pa.s.ses.Vista on vista marching, hills on hills, Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees, Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye Saw but the endless vista hill on hill, Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,16.

With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds, And the dark woodlands brooding over all, Not even lightened by the rare dim sun Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.It was so long ago and far away I have forgot the very name men called me.

The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream, And hunts and wars are shadows. I recall Only the stillness of that sombre land; The clouds that piled forever on the hills, The dimness of the everlasting woods.

Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills, To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun, How many deaths shall serve to break at last This heritage which wraps me in the grey Apparel of ghosts? I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.17.

The Phoenix on the Sword