Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian Is What Is Best in Life

J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings cut a wide swath through the culture of the 1960s, clearing the way through the crowded jungle of pop culture for other fantasy authors to emerge from the racks of pulp magazines—some of them decades after their deaths. Few of them made as lasting an impression as Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian.
Howard (1906-1936), who spent the entirety of his short life in Texas, was a prolific pulp fiction writer. He wrote westerns, “Oriental adventures,” detective stories, horror, boxing tales, historical fiction, even verse. But he is best remembered for his sword and sorcery tales—many consider Howard the father of that fantasy sub-genre. Sword and sorcery stories have a simple formula: sword wielding heroes happily hewing away at their enemies, until magic starts turning blades into serpents and otherwise complicating matters. Howard had other sword and sorcery heroes, like Solomon Kane, swashbuckling against supernatural evil in Puritan England, and King Kull of Atlantis.  But Conan was his most popular creation, and the one with the most fully developed background.

Conan lived 8,000 years ago, in the Hyborian Age, an era after the destruction of Atlantis but before the beginning of recorded history. Howard wrote a long, two-part essay outlining the history of the age (with an explicit disclaimer that it was all fiction). Cataclysms sunk continents, raised mountains, and created and filled inland seas. Kingdoms and empires rose and fell. Conan lived at the height of the Hypborian Age, when the kingdom of Aquilonia was the jewel of the western world. Born in the northern barbarian land of Cimmeria, he wandered as a young man to the more civilized lands to the south. By turns he was a thief, a mercenary, a buccaneer, a general, and, eventually, a king. Along the way, he slayed men, monsters, sorcerers, and even an ancient god or two.
SF/F writer and editor L. Sprague de Camp was at the helm when Lancer Books started republishing the Conan canon in the ’60s and ’70s, and that’s when I discovered Conan. At the time, the books I bought were touted as containing the “complete” Conan. But even as the series was being republished, it ballooned from a proposed eight volumes to 12. More confusingly, the stories were numbered in publication order, not the chronological order of Conan’s life—and the numbers changed when the series expanded.

All the previously published Conan stories were included, however, once copyright issues were settled. De Camp and Lin Carter also crafted stories from unfinished stories, fragments, and outlines Howard had left behind.  Some of them had not started as Conan stories, but many of Howard’s heroes were cut from the same loincloth—it did not take a lot to turn a story set in 11th century Egypt into a Hyborian tale starring Conan. Howard probably wouldn’t have minded, since he’d done the same thing, turning an unpublished Kull story in a Conan tale guaranteed to sell. De Camp, Carter, and Bjorn Nyberg also wrote a number of pastiches to fill holes in Conan’s life story.
Howard ended his telling of Conan’s tale with his only novel length story, Conan the Conqueror (aka The Hour of the Dragon), which ends with Conan, having foiled attempts to overthrow his rule of Aquilonia, announcing that he would make the slave girl who saved his life his queen. Three pastiche novels in the Lancer series continue the saga with stories of the royal marriage (Queen Zenobia kidnapped by a sorcerer), the young royal heir Conn (kidnapped by sorcerers), and finally, Conan’s retirement plan (abdicating the throne to Conn in order to cross the Western Sea to fight sorcerers).  A lot of sorcery, but Conan always preferred “a clean sword and a clean foe to flesh it in”.

This “complete” Conan series was, of course, not the end. Different paperbacks, hardbound editions, and digital editions have sprouted like sown dragon teeth in the years since. But none of them have what those eight books in the original Lancer series had: amazing cover art by fabled fantasy artist Frank Frazetta.
Then there were the movies (two with the iron thews of Arnold Schwarzenegger), comic books, and video games. One final measure of the significance of Howard’s creation: no less a luminary than Terry Pratchett parodied Conan in his Discworld character Cohen the Barbarian. It is a great parody. Since his earliest adventures as a thief in Zamora, Conan had a thing for jewels. I can imagine Conan, like Cohen, leading a horde of aging barbarians with a denture grin full of stolen diamond troll teeth.
Do you have a favorite sword and sorcery tale?