Conan.
by Robert E. Howard, Lin Carter and L. Sprague DeCamp.
Introduction.
Robert Ervin Howard (1906-36) was born in Peaster, Texas (not in Cross Plains, as has been written elsewhere), and spent most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of Texas between Abilene and Brownwood. His father was a local physician, and both his parents came of pioneer stock. Howard received his main education in Cross Plains and completed his high-school career in Brownwood, at Brownwood High School and Howard Payne Academy. After taking a few courses at Brownwood College, he plunged into free-lance writing.
As a boy, Howard"s precocious intellect made him something of a misfit, especially in Texas. For a time he suffered the bullying that is the usual lot of brilliant but puny boys. Partly as a result, he became a sport and exercise fanatic and an accomplished boxer and horseman. That soon ended the bullying, especially since in maturity he was six feet tall and weighed over 200 pounds, most of it muscle. His personality was introverted, unconventional, moody, and hot-tempered, given to emotional extremes and violent likes and dislikes. Like most young writers, he read voraciously. He was a pen pal of the fantasy writers H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.
During his last ten years (1927-36), Howard turned out a huge volume of general pulp-magazine fiction: sport, detective, Western, historical, oriental-adventure, weird, and ghost stories, besides his poetry and his many fantasies. In his late twenties he earned more money from his writings than any other man in Cross Plains, including the town banker-although that is not saying much, since during the Depression years magazine rates were low and payment often late.
Although moderately successful in his work and a big, powerful man like his heroes, Howard was maladjusted to the point of psychosis. For several years before his death, he talked of suicide. At thirty, learning that his aged mother-to whom he was excessively devoted-was on the point of death, he ended a promising literary career by shooting himself. His novella "Red Nails," a Conan story, and his interplanetary novel Almuric were published posthumously in Weird Tales.
Howard wrote several series of tales of heroic fantasy, most of them published in Weird Tales. Howard was a natural story-teller, whose narratives are unsurpa.s.sed for vivid, gripping, headlong action. His heroes-King Kull, Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Turlogh O"Brien, Solomon Kane -are larger than life: men of mighty thews, hot pa.s.sions, and indomitable will, who easily dominate the stories through which they stride. Howard thus explained his preference for heroes of ma.s.sive muscles but simple minds:
"They"re simpler. You get them in a jam, and no one expects you to rack your brains inventing clever ways for them to extricate themselves.
They are too stupid to do anything but cut, shoot, or slug themselves into the clear." (E. Hoffmann Price: "A Memory of R. E. Howard," in Skull-Face and Others, by Robert E. Howard, copyright () 1946 by August Derleth.)
Of all Howard"s fantasies, the most popular have been the Conan stories. These are laid in Howard"s imaginary Hyborian Age, about twelve thousand years ago, between the sinking of Atlantis and the beginning of recorded history. He wrote-or at least began-over two dozen Conan stories. Of these, eighteen were published during or just after his lifetime, one in a fan magazine and the rest in "Weird Tales.
Howard explained how he came to write about Conan thus:
"While I don"t go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existing spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present-or even the future-work through the thought and actions of living men. This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. 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 type-writer-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. I do not attempt to explain this by esoteric or occult means, but the facts remain. I still write of Conan more powerfully and with more understanding than any of my other characters.
But the time will probably come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write convincingly of him at all. This has happened in the past with nearly all my rather numerous characters; suddenly I 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." (Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, December 14, 1933; published in Amra, vol. II, no. 39; copyright (c) 1966 by the Terminus, & Ft Mudge Electrick Street Railway Gazette.)
"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 have ever evolved. He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known, and I think that"s why he seemed to step full-grown into my consciousness when I wrote the first yarn of the series. Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prizefighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian." (Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, July 23, 1935; published in The Howard Collector, vol. I, no. 5; copyright 1964 by Glenn Lord; reprinted in Amrd, vol. II, no. 39.)
During the last two decades, a large number of unpublished story ma.n.u.scripts have turned up in collections of Howard"s papers. These include eight Conan stories, some complete and some in the form of unfinished ma.n.u.scripts, outlines, or fragments. It has been my lot to prepare most of these stories for publication, completing those that were incomplete. I have also, in collaboration with my colleagues Lin Carter and Bjorn Nyberg, written several pastiches, based upon hints in Howard"s notes and letters, to fill gaps in the saga. Two of these are included in the present volume.
When the story "The G.o.d in the Bowl" appeared in ma.n.u.script in 1951, I revised it considerably for publication. For the present edition, however, I have gone back to the original ma.n.u.script and produced a version much closer to the original, with a bare minimum of editorial changes.
Some Conan stories have been reprinted many times; others appear for the first time in Lancer Books" paperback series of Conan tales. The present volume is chronologically the first volume of the complete Conan saga, although several of the later volumes have already been published. When complete, the series will comprise at least eight volumes and probably more, with all the stories in proper chronological order.
"Heroic fantasy" is the name I have given to a sub-genre of fiction, otherwise called the "sword-and-sorcery" story. It is a story of action and adventure laid in a more or less imaginary world, where magic works and where modern science and technology have not yet been discovered.
The setting may (as in the Conan stories) be this Earth as it is conceived to have been long ago, or as it will be in the remote future, or it may be another planet or another dimension.
Such a story combines the color and dash of the historical costume romance with the atavistic supernatural thrills of the weird, occult, or ghost story. When well done, it provides the purest fun of fiction of any kind. It is escape fiction wherein one escapes clear out of the real world into one where all men are strong, all women beautiful, all life adventurous, and all problems simple, and n.o.body even mentions the income tax or the dropout problem or socialized medicine.
William Morris pioneered the heroic fantasy in Great Britain in the 1880s. In the early years of this century, Lord Dunsany and Eric R.
Eddison developed the genre further. In the 1930s, the appearance of the magazines Weird Tales and, later, Unknown Worlds furnished outlets for stories of this type, and many memorable sword-and-sorcery narratives were written. These include Howard"s stories of Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane; Clark Aston Smith"s macabre tales of Hyperborea, Atlantis, Averoigne, and the future continent Zothique; Henry Kuttner"s Atlantean stories; C. L. Moore"s narratives of Jirel of Joiry; and Fritz Leiber"s Gray Mouser stories. (I might also mention Fletcher Pratt"s and my tales of Harold Shea.)
After the Second World War, the magazine market for stories of this kind shrank, and it looked for a while as if fantasy had become a casualty of the machine age. Then, with the publication of J. R. R.
Tolkien"s trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, and the reprinting of many earlier works in the field, the genre revived. Now it is flourishing again, and it is inevitable that one of its giants -Robert E. Howard-and his greatest imaginative effort- the Conan saga-should be made available.
For readers who want more Conan stories, or who like heroic fantasy, or who wish to know more about Howard and his works, many publications are available. First, as I have already explained, Lancer Books, Inc., is publishing the complete Conan cycle in eight or more volumes, of which this is chronologically the first. Four others have appeared; Conan the Adventurer, Conan the Warrior, Conan the Usurper, and Conan the Conqueror. Several more volumes are planned, to fill the gap between this volume and Conan the Adventurer and to recount Conan"s adventures in later life.
Lancer Books has also published a volume of Howard"s earlier stories, King Kull, about another barbarian hero, Kull of Atlantis. Glenn Lord, agent for the Howard estate, edited the volume, and Lin Carter completed the unfinished stories.
Of the seven clothbound volumes of Conan stories published in the early 1950s by Gnome Press, Inc. (Box 214, Hicksville, N.Y.), two are (or at last accounts were) still in print. These are Tales of Conan, by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp, and The Return of Conan, by Bjorn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp ($3.00 each).
George H. Scithers (Box 9120, Chicago, ID., 60690) publishes Amra, the organ of the Hyborian Legion, a loose group of admirers of heroic fantasy and of Howard"s Conan stories in particular. Glenn Lord (Box 775, Pasadena, Texas, 77501), in addition to handling Howard"s ma.n.u.scripts and the rights to his works, publishes The Howard Collector, a magazine devoted to Howard, containing articles, stories, poems, and letters by and about him and bibliographical materials on his writings.
August Derleth has published a collection of Howard"s less well-known fantasies, The Dark Man and Others (Arkham House, $5.00). Derleth"s anthologies Over the Edge (Arkham House, $5.00), Dark Mind, Dark Heart (London: Mayflower-Dell), and Sleep No More (London: Panther Books) each contain one Howard story. So do Leo Margulies"s paperbacked anthologies Weird Tales and Worlds of Weird (Pyramid Books), L. Sprague de Camp"s three anthologies of heroic fantasy: Swords and Sorcery, The Spell of Seven, and The Fantastic Swordsmen (Pyramid Books), Alden H.
Norton"s anthology Horror Times Ten (Berkeley Pub. Co.), and Donald A.
Wollheim"s anthology The Macabre Reader (Ace Books). Ace Books also publishes Howard"s interplanetary novel Almuric.
Donald M. Grant (West Kingston, R.I.) has published two volumes of Howard"s humorous Western stories, A Gent from Bear Creek and The Pride of Bear Creek ($4.00 each) with another promised. Grant will also soon publish Howard"s stories of Solomon Kane, the adventurous English Puritan of the early 1600s, under the t.i.tle Red Shadows.
Letter from R. E. Howard to P. S. Miller
Early in 1936, two fans of Howards Conan stories- P. Schuyler Miller, the educator and science-fiction writer and Dr. John D. Clark, the chemist-worked out, from the stories that had appeared up to then, an outline of Conan"s career and a map of the world in the Hyborian Age.
Miller wrote Howard about the results of this research. He received a reply, written just three months before Howard"s death, which sheds light on Howard"s concept of Conan and of the setting for the stories:
Lock Box 313 Cross Plains, Texas March 10, 1936
Dear Mr. Miller:
I feel indeed honored that you and Dr. Clark should be so interested in Conan as to work out an outline of his career and a map of his environs. Both are surprizingly accurate, considering the vagueness of the data you had to work with. I have the original map-that is the one I drew up when I first started writing about Conan- around here somewhere and I"ll see if I can"t find it and let you have a look at it. It includes only the countries west of Vilayet and north of Kush.
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.
Concerning Kush, however, it is one of the black kingdoms south of Stygia, the northern-most, in fact, and has given its name to the whole southern coast Thus, when an Hyborian speaks of Kush, he is generally speaking of not the kingdom itself, one of many such kingdoms, but of the Black Coast in general. And he is likely to speak of any black man as a Kus.h.i.te, whether he happens to be a Keshani, Darfari, Puntan, or Kus.h.i.te proper. This is natural, since the Kus.h.i.tes were the first black men with whom the Hyborians came in contact-Barachan pirates trafficking with and raiding them.
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. 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.
Your outline follows his career as I have visualized it pretty closely.
The differences are minor. As you deduct, Conan was about seventeen when he was introduced to the public in "The Tower of the Elephant."
While not fully matured, he was riper than the average civilized youth at that age. He was born on a battle field, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding Vanir. The country claimed by and roved over by his clan lay in the northwest of Cimmerian, but Conan was of mixed blood, although a pure-bred Cimmerian. His grandfather was a member of a southern tribe who had fled from his own people because of a blood-feud and after long wanderings, eventually taken refuge with the people of the north. He had taken part in many raids into the Hyborian nations in his youth, before his flight, and perhaps it was the tales he told of those softer countries which roused in Conan, as a child, a desire to see them. There are many things concerning Conan"s life of which I am not certain myself. I do not know, for instance, when he got his first sight of civilized people. It might have been at Vanarium, or he might have made a peaceable visit to some frontier town before that. At Vanarium he was already a formidable antagonist, though only fifteen. He stood six feet and weight 180 pounds, though he lacked much of having his full growth.
There was the s.p.a.ce of about a year between Vanarium and his entrance into the thief-city of Zamora. During this time he returned to the northern territories of his tribe, and 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 AEsir, fighting with the Vanir and the Hyperboreans, and developing a hate for the latter which lasted all his life and later affected his policies as king of Aquilonia. Captured by them, he escaped southward and came into Zamora in time to make his debut in print.
I am not sure that the adventure chronicled in "Rogues in the House"
occurred in Zamora. The presence of opposing factions of politics would seem to indicate otherwise, since Zamora was an absolute despotism where differing political opinions were not tolerated. I am of the opinion that the city was one of the small city-states lying just west of Zamora, and into which Conan had wandered after leaving Zamora.
Shortly after this he returned for a brief period to Cimmeria, and there were other returns to his native land from time to time. The chronological order of his adventures is about as you have worked it out, except that they covered a little more time. Conan was about forty when he seized the crown of Aquilonia, and was about forty-four or forty-five at the time of "The Hour of the Dragon." He had no male heir at that time, because he had never bothered to formally make some woman his queen, and the sons of concubines, of which he had a goodly number, were not recognized as heirs to the throne.
He was, I think, king of Aquilonia for many years, in a turbulent and unquiet reign, when the Hyborian civilization had reached its most magnificent high-tide, and every king had imperial ambitions. At first he fought on the defensive, but I am of the opinion that at last he was forced into wars of aggression as a matter of self-preservation.
Whether he succeeded in conquering a world-wide empire, or perished in the attempt, I do not know.
He travelled widely, not only before his kingship, but after he was king. He travelled to Khitai and Hyrkania, and to the even less known regions north of the latter and south of the former. He even visited a nameless continent in the western hemisphere, and roamed among the islands adjacent to it. How much of this roaming will get into print, I cannot foretell with any accuracy. I was much interested in your remarks concerning findings on the Yamal Peninsula, the first time I had heard anything about that. Doubtless Conan had first-hand acquaintance with the people who evolved the culture described, or their ancestors, at least.
Hope you find "The Hyborian Age" interesting. I"m enclosing a copy of the original map. Yes, Napoli"s done very well with Conan, though at times he seems to give him a sort of Latin cast of the countenance which isn"t according to type, as I conceive it. However, that isn"t enough to kick about.
Hope the enclosed data answers your questions satisfactorily; I"d be delighted to discuss any other phases you might wish, or go into more details about any point of Conan"s career or Hyborian history or geography you might desire. Thanks again for your interest, and best wishes, for yourself and Dr. Clark.
Cordially, Robert E. Howard
P.S. You didn"t mention whether you wanted the map and chronology returned, so I"m taking the liberty or retaining them to show to some friends, if you want them back, please let me know.
The Hyborian Age, Part One --------------------------.