Part 1 (1/2)

Conan The Avenger

by Robert E Howard, Bjorn Nyberg and L Sprague deCamp

Introduction

Conan the Cimmerian is the hero of over thirty stories by Robert E

Howard (1906-36 of Cross Plains, Texas), byand Lin Carter, and by , Carter, and I have completed a number of unfinished Howard manuscripts and have written several pastiches, based upon hints in Howard's notes and letters, to fill the gaps in the saga

The Conan stories are of a kind called ”heroic fantasy” or ”sword-and-sorcery fiction” Such a story is a tale of swashbuckling adventure with a strong supernatural eleinary world-perhaps this planet as it is once supposed to have been, or as it will be soic works and y are unknown Here all hty, all women beautiful, all probleenre was developed by William Morris in the late nineteenth century and by Lord Dunsany and Eric R Edison in the early twentieth Notable recent exas; Fletcher Pratt's The Well of the Unicorn; and Fritz Leiber's stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

During the last decade of his short life (1927-36), Howard turned out a large volume of as then called ”pulp fiction”-sport, detective, western, historical, adventure, weird, and ghost stories, besides his poetry and hisliterary career by suicide

Horote several series of heroic fantasies, most of them published in Weird Tales Of these, the le series has been the Conan stories

Hoas a natural storyteller, whose narratives are unsurpassed for vivid, gripping, headlong action His heroes-King Kull, Conan Bran Mak Morn, Solohty thews, hot passions, and indoh which they stride Withal, as I have learned fro his works, Howard had an excellent prose style: precise, straightforward, sihly readable He had the rare knack of giving the i hteen Conan stories were published during Howard's lifeti his papers since 1950 Late in 1951, I discovered a cache of Howard ent for Howard's estate These included a few unpublished Conan stories, which I edited for publication

The incoa presented an irresistible teht in ti the unpublished Conan stories, I undertook, in the early 1950s, to rewrite the manuscripts of four other unpublished Howard adventure stories to convert them into Conan stories This did not prove difficult, since the heroes were much like Conan, and I had merely to delete anachronisms and introduce a supernatural element

Meanwhile a citizen and resident of Sweden, Bjorn Nyberg, took a further step Introduced to Conan by his friends Ostlund and Chapman, he had been hooked, as so hty Cie to sit down and write a whole novel about Conan, in a language that was not his ue This endeavor resulted in a collaboration between Nyberg and myself, the outcome of which was ”The Return of Conan” herein

Howard's Conan stories are laid about twelve thousand years ago in the i of Atlantis and seven thousand years before the beginnings of recorded history A gigantic barbarian adventurer from the backward northern land of Cidom of Za there and in neighboring lands as a thief After a gore-spattered career as mercenary soldier, pirate, treasure hunter, and chief of various barbarian tribes, he beca the savage Picts After rising to co a Pictish invasion, Conan was lured back to Tarantia, the capital, and i, he was chosen to lead a revolution against the degenerate king Conan slew Numedides and took the throne for his own, to becodo was no bed of houris A cabal of discontented nobles als of Koth and Ophir trapped and imprisoned him, but he escaped in time to turn the tables on these would-be conquerors of Aquilonia

Other enerave and, with the help of this living-dead sorcerer, broke Aquilonia's arain he returned to confound and destroy his fees

In the process, Conan acquired a queen, ho his haren was athered his forces to strike

And here the present story begins At this time, Conan was about forty-six or forty-seven years old, showing few signs of age save the scars that crisscrossed his hty frame and a more cautious, deliberate approach to adventure and revelry than had been the case in his riotous youth

When Howard began writing the Conan stories in 1932, he gave serious thought to the setting-his ”Hyborian Age” civilization To fix it firmly in his own mind, he wrote an essay in which he set forth the pseudo-history of prehistoric tiround for the stories In the last year of his life, he subazine, The Phantagraph, with an apologetic note explaining that this was purely a fictional device to enable him to make the Conan stories internally consistent It was not to be taken seriously as setting forth his true beliefs about the prehistory of e was published in The Phantagraph before that periodical ceased publication The whole essay was then published in 1938 in a roup of science-fiction fans The first half, which carries this pseudo-history down to the tiically the first voluins after Conan's tis of recorded history, is reproduced here

L Sprague de Caue de Camp

For two months after the battle of Tanasul, which destroyed the Nemedian conquerors of Aquilonia and their sorcerous ally Xaltotun, Conan is kept furiously busy by the tasks of reorganizing his kingdo the promised indemnity from Nemedia

Then Conan prepares to visit Ne Tarascus to his hoirl Zenobia, who saved his life when he was ieons of the palace at the Nemedian capital of Belverus Before his departure, he tactfully dismisses his harem of shapely concubines With his usual chivalry towards wo the them farewell