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