Part 68 (1/2)
”Good,” grunted the king, ”but kiss Nuirls for yourself only, lest you involve the states!”
His gusty laughter followed Prospero out of the chamber The carven door closed behind the
392Poitanian, and Conan turned back to his task He paused afootsteps, which fell hollowly on the tiles And as if the empty sound struck a kindred chord in his soul, a rush of revulsion swept over him His mirth fell away from him like a mask, and his face was suddenly old, his eyes worn The unreasoning melancholy of the Ci hi sense of the futility of hushi+p, his pleasures, his fears, his as were revealed to him suddenly as dust and broken toys The borders of life shrivelled and the lines of existence closed in about hihty hands, he groaned aloud
Then lifting his head, as a man looks for escape, his eyes fell on a crystal jar of yelloine
Quickly he rose and pouring a goblet full, quaffed it at a gulp Again he filled and eain When he set it down, a fine wars assumed new values The dark Ciood and real and vibrant after all not the dreaantic cat and seated hinitude and vital importance of himself and his task Contentedly, he nibbled his stylus and eyed his map (The Phoenix on the Sword, first submitted draft, see pp 360-361)
When Howard said that ”the row up in mythe truth What he did not realize was that this act of creation obeyed deep-seated antic melancholies” echo Howard's ”black moods,” as he called them, just as Cimmeria echoes Dark Valley And just as Dark Valley was a haunting loomier land” than Cimmeria never existed for Conan
Howard's Conan, at least in the early phases of his creation, was thus much more a projection of what Hoas, than what he wanted to be
The poe, part of the Conan canon, but it is the piece of writing that helped bring about the Conan stories: Conan or Howard can only ”remember”
Cimmeria; it is a terrible land, the s unhappy recollections and invites forgetfulness This is why no Conan story can take place in Cimmeria and why no other Cimmerian is or could be ever featured in any of the Conan tales In Queen of the Black Coast, Conan will explain to Belit that ”[i]n this worldpleasure only in the bright madness of battle Let me live deep while I live; letwine 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 a thus, the illusion is real to me I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content” This is what the Conan series is really about then, a
393wish to drown oneself in a turbulent life Conan's intense physical life appears as a desperate attehtful memory is associated with that country
Perhaps the sa activity, which could be seen as an atteet Dark Valley When Conan is inactive as is the case at the beginning of The Phoenix on the Sword and reminded of Ciloominess away Different solutions to the sa expressed the need to flee that country and to forget it as ically ready to compose the first of these action- filled Conan stories
When Howard returned to Cross Plains in February 1932, there still re as to become known as the ”Hyborian” world
The reasons behind the invention of the Hyborian Age were probably commercial Howard's sole market up to 1929 had been Weird Tales, but in the early thirties several new markets opened up to him, notably Oriental Stories and the short-lived Soldiers of Fortune Howard had an intense love for history and the stories he sold to Oriental Stories rank anized the difficulties and the ti historical accuracy By conceiving a universe that was not ours but thatnames that resembled our past history, Howard skirted the problethy explanatory chapters Lovecraft later criticized hi to do is to accept the noives it, wink at the weak spots, and be daendry” (Letter to Donald Wollheie, 1938)
Hoas perfectly able to coinary names when he wanted to: the Kull stories that Lovecraft soe Howard's endry,” Lovecraft had touched upon one of theover the creation of the Hyborian Age
Although he is not represented in Howard's library, nor alluded to in his papers and correspondence, there see likelihood that Howard's conception of the Hyborian Age originates in Tho as a catalyst that enabled him to coalesce into a coherent whole his literary aspirations and the strong psychological/autobiographical ele the creation of Conan
Bulfinch (1796-1867) had a keen interest in classical studies anda series of books popularizing classical legends and y coe of Fable (1855), The Age of Chivalry (1858) and Legends of Charlees (1863)
Between the covers of Bulfinch's books were heroic tales set in various places and epochs of history and legendry, that is to say, the very substance of the Hyborian Age It is thus not surprising to find that many of the nainary world are found in Bulfinch, beginning with Conan: ”the next event of note is the conquest and colonization of Areneral, and Conan, lord of Miniadoc or Denbigh-land, in Wales” (Bulfinch, The Outline of Mythology, p 388)
Of course, Hoas familiar with the name Conan before the inception of the Hyborian series, since he had already used the naonist in People of the Dark But perhaps this only indicates that Howard had already read or was reading Bulfinch by the time he wrote that story
As to the country of Conan's birth, Cimmeria, Bulfinch offers a description similar to Howard's:
”Near the Cimmerian country, a mountain cave is the abode of the dull God So, at round, and the light gli, with crested head, never there calls aloud to Aurora, nor watchful dog, nor oose disturbs the silence
No wild beast, nor cattle, nor branch moved with the wind, nor sound of huns there; but from the bottom of the rock the River Lethe flows, and by its murmur invites to sleep” (Bulfinch, pp 71-72)
Some commentators have noted the closeness of description between Howard's Cimmeria and Herodotus' description of this country; this could well have come from Bulfinch, who drew some of his material from Herodotus Bulfinch adds: ”The earliest inhabitants of Britain are supposed to have been a branch of that great fanation of Celts Caht to be derived frorant people who entered the island froht to be identical with those of Cimmerians and Cimbri, under which the Greek and Roman historians describe a barbarous people, who spread themselves from the north of the Euxine over the whole of Northwestern Europe” (p 529) In March 1932, precisely at the ti the first Conan tales, Howard echoed Bulfinch, writing to Lovecraft that ”Most authorities consider the Cimbri were Germans, of course, and they probably were, but there's a possibility that they were Celtic, or of ratifies my fancy to protray [sic] them as Celts, anyway”
395
These elements alone are far from conclusive, but are sufficient to show that Howard ends as a handy reference for his own Hyborian world Nowhere is this more evident than in the first Conan tale, The Phoenix on the Sword
Around May of 1929, Horote two drafts of a Kull story entitled By This Axe I Rule! The story was subosy and Adventure Nearly three years later, in March 1932, Howard salvaged this story from the unpublished files and rewrote it as The Phoenix on the Sword It is impossible to ascertain exactly as modified between the last draft of the Kull story and the first draft of the Conan one, since the final draft of By This Axe I Rule! has not come to us (the published text is that of the first and only extant draft) At any rate the physical description of Kull was carried over to Conan, with the notable exception of the color of his eyes: grey for the Atlantean, blue for the Cimmerian The Conan version of the story also dropped the love interest of the Kull tale and replaced it with a supernatural element; understandably so since the Conan story was aimed at a fantasy eneral fiction azines In the three years that had elapsed since the writing of the Kull story, Howard had begun corresponding with Howard Phillips Lovecraft