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.