Part 1 (1/2)

The bloody Crown of Conan

Robert E Howard

Foreword

When I was a kid, I watched a e hammer It wasn't a house exactly a shack would be a more apt description I can recall the afternoon vividly, the neighbourhood boys assembled in my friend Joe's yard because his father was about to demolish an old shack which stood at the end of their property What eight year old wouldn't want to witness that?

When I arrived, Mr Lill was already sizing up the job with the large sledge hammer perched over his broad shoulders The structure leant towards him in a show of defiance Perhaps the man sensed the ine of destruction With ar blows to insureopponent The clouds of dust co ti place I, for one, was enthralled by the spectacle and I wonder no ritted teeth and clenched fists

When the last perpendicular post was hurled onto the pile of wreckage, the rimly surveyed his handiwork

In retrospect it was a transcendent moment, a real life brush with the embodiment of John Henry, Hercules and Samson We have all had experiences similar to this in one form or another and these memories can best be described as ”Heroic Realism,” a term coined by the writer Louis Menand The fantasy elements aside, this is the quality I am chiefly interested in with er, roible reality

As a teenager, years after that shack ca down, I ca of aatop a pile of vanquished opponents Somehow in the deep recesses of my ht of that afternoon and the thrill caes

The book, of course, was Conan the Adventurer by Robert E Howard and the cover was painted by Frank Frazetta It was my introduction to Howard's fictional barbarian

That was a long tio and many talented artists have portrayed Conan's adventures I was content to stand aside and enjoy their work but the opportunity presented itself after I had illustrated two of the other great Robert E Howard heroes Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn How could I resist?

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I feel privileged in depicting these characters and I now join the list of e Conan It is a fitting tribute to the writing ability of Robert E

Howard that regardless of how many artists add to the inal stories theery they evoke that will ultimately thrill the reader

Gary Gianni 2003

Introduction

”There is no literary work, to uise of fiction,”

wrote Robert E Howard to his friend HP 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 ht? 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 roifted but e apparently came naturally to hi their play as early as age ten, and friends of his youngstoryteller Of course, we have the testament of his fiction to tell us that, too And while he himself disavowed any particular artistic enuine artistry As Lovecraft noted, ”He was greater than any profit- 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 aupon the land, hisThose that survived so their frequency (and thus demand for new material) Asfor Oriental Stories, ol 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 tie of history teele paragraph h to fill a whole volu such things, though; the markets are too scanty, with require to co as it was, did not extend to ”civilized” peoples ”When a race aled, they hold my interest I can seeently of therip on theins to weaken, until at last it vanishes entirely, and I find their ways and thoughts and aol conquerors of China and India inspire in enerations 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, fro the early months of 1932, on a trip to Mission, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, the answer ca 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 a of his adventures” These exploits took place in a world populated by Elizabethan pirates, Irish reavers, and Barbary corsairs; Ayptian sorcerers and followers of Rohts and assyrian aruises, but with no attempt to actually hide their identities In fact, Howard tried to give theuess their identities without too nize 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 ested to him by GK 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 froras 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 nihiliseneration,” he created fictitious Rolory of victory with Alfred ”It is the chief value of legend,” he wrote, ”tothe senti

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 Chretien de Troyes and Sir Thoas and the ancient legend of Beowulf But Chesterton's statement of rationale e years later as the Hyborian Age

Howard did write an epic poe 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 terendry”

Because Horote a lengthy history of the Hyborian Age, and took pains to make it a self- consistent world, soinary worlds”

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tradition of fantasy, exee Macdonald, William Morris, Lord Dunsany, and JRR Tolkien But the Hyborian Age is historical, not iinary: it is simply a nexus where eleether for the sake of the story Part of the appeal of the Conan stories is that they seenize the world in which Conan moves And Hoas not a literary stylist in the inary worlds” writers: he was a storyteller, who preferred clear, direct, sie 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 Hoas raised on poetry, which his mother read to hi writers of the fantastic As Steve Eng says, ”Howard ination better than did prose His fictional Sword-and-Sorcery heroes and foes would see about than portrayed in paragraphs”

But there was another elee in me,” he told E Hoffruous co fro the corpus of his work, we find a ”realistic” novel, a great nu stories, ood 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 seraphical Martin Eden, the gested 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 hosters

In his seminal essay, 'Robert E Howard: Hard-Boiled Heroic Fantasist,' George Knight suggests that Hoas bringing to fantasy so of the same sensibility that his conte to the detective story: a gritty, tough attitude toward life, expressed in siorously 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 i to live by rules that help hi into insanity” He can be hired, but he cannot be bought He is, as Charles Hoffman has noted, 'Conan the Existentialist': ”The consu man, alone in a hostile universe” Conan, says Hoffless: ”There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people,” he says in Queen of the Black Coast ”In this world e of the ultilessness of man's actions does not cause Conan despair: he ”deoals, values, and ood part of Conan's appeal Our destiny, he says, does not lie in the 10

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 seeht course of action at the tiet what he wants, and turns down opportunities that other rasp He is his own uided by little ht 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 hiet ready for an exhilarating journey through the historical wonderland of the Hyborian Age

Rusty Burke 2003

11

The People of the Black Circle