by Unknown
The Conan stories make use of many situations and many concepts that Howard had developed in earlier tales. Moreover, people familiar with the contents of Howard's library and with early twentieth-century literature can often pick out the very page from which an idea came—a time-consuming but fascinating exercise in literary sleuthing. Thus, a brief look at each of the Howard Conan stories will introduce new readers to the Conan saga and enable longtime fans of Robert E. Howard to explore the working of his mind.
"The Phoenix on the Sword," the first published Conan story, appeared in Weird Tales for December 1932. It was not an original tale, but a complete rewrite of a rejected Kull story, "By This Axe I Rule." The story, which ranks among the best of the series, takes place in the latter part of Conan's career, when in his forties he has become king of Aquilonia. Conan is fighting for his life against conspirators who plot to murder him when he receives assistance from an unusual source. This work introduces the reader to Thoth-Amon, the once-powerful Stygian sorcerer who reappears in several other books of the Conan saga.
After the successful sale of "The Phoenix on the Sword," Howard rushed three more Conan stories to Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales. "The God in the Bowl" tries, not very skillfully, to combine adventure-fantasy with a detective story. While in this tale Conan, a mere youth, makes his living as a thief, in "The Vale of Lost Women" a somewhat older Conan is the war chief of a black tribe in the jungles of Kush, when he seeks to save a white woman from her dark-skinned captors and, later, from a supernatural entity. The third piece was a plotless little sketch, "The Frost-Giant's Daughter." Wright rejected all three.
It is not hard to see why these early Conan stories failed to sell in Howard's lifetime. "The God in the Bowl" mixes the slightly archaic English so characteristic of these tales with the modern jargon of the detective story. "The Vale of Lost Women" shows Conan behaving in a flagrantly treacherous manner. In "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," Conan tries to rape a demigoddess, although in later stories he prides himself on never forcing a woman. Evidently Conan's character had not entirely formed in Howard's mind.
Undaunted by the rejections, Howard changed the name of "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" to "Gods of the North" and the name of the hero to Amra. Then he authorized its appearance in a fan magazine and went to work again.
Probably the next tale to be written was "The Scarlet Citadel." Here Conan, king of Aquilonia, is led into ambush by two neighboring mon-archs. Shackled to a dungeon wall, with a murderous slave ready to sword him, Conan is saved by the fortuitous arrival of an enormous serpent. The idea that large snakes use their heads as battering rams undoubtedly came from Kipling's story "Kaa's Hunting," in which a python, quite unrealistically, batters down a wall. Conan's subsequent adventures in the gloomy tunnels adjacent to the dungeon form one of Howard's best pieces of suspense writing.
Of all the monsters dredged up from Robert Howard's fervid subconscious, none appear so frequently, nor with such telling effect, as enormous reptiles. Serpents up to eighty feet long slither through the Conan stories, their mammoth coils gleaming, their python heads erect in beady-eyed menace. In fact, so much a trademark of the saga are these writhing creatures that they take part, not only in the Conan stories written after the demise of Robert Howard, but also in the motion picture Conan the Barbarian.
While psychologists, seeking to plumb the depths of Howard's psyche, like to assign Freudian explanations to these monsters, we think that their presence may be attributed to the fact that the average person has a deep horror of reptiles and that Howard was trying to evoke the crawling chill of disgust and fear in his readers. Moreover, he himself lived in an area in which snakes, particularly rattlesnakes, were an ever-present danger to people walking in meadows and uplands. Unquestionably, as a child, he was warned to watch out for these venomous rattlers, and in his letters he tells of several encounters with them. It is little wonder, then, that giant serpents became one of life's hazards in the Hyborian Age.
In April of 1932, Howard sold "The Tower of the Elephant." The events in this tale take place very early in Conan's career, when the adolescent barbarian is making a precarious living as a thief in the shabby thieves' quarter of a Zamorian city. This underworld of filth and evil
Howard borrowed from the setting of one of his favorite motion pictures, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Other aspects of this unsavory milieu came from Herbert Asbury's book The Gangs of New York (1927).
The tale begins when Conan invades the jewel-encrusted tower of the magician Yara in search of loot but finds instead deadly peril. It is interesting to note that many of the elements in one story are repeated In another—or in several others. Towers were the favorite lurking places of monsters, warlocks, and other sinister beings. When the authors of the present work were developing the novelization for the motion picture Conan the Barbarian from the screenplay by John Milius, they introduced numerous concepts that were dear to Howard's heart: a jewel-encrusted tower, a great gem with magic properties, unearthly grotesque creatures with slavering jaws, magicians, powerful spirits of the dead, and—of course—a gigantic snake.
"Black Colossus," which was published in June of 1933, finds Conan, in his late twenties, in command of the army of Yasmela, the Princess Regent of the small kingdom of Khoraja. Conan's troops are pitted against those of a sorcerer who was inadvertently raised from a three-thousand-year sleep in a ruined city.
A second story, generally considered inferior to the rest of the leries, is titled "The Slithering Shadow." The tale, originally named "Xuthal of the Dusk," tells how Conan, now in his mid-thirties, and the girl Natala wander in the desert as survivors of a defeated army. They discover the city of Xuthal, which is inhabited by a people living on synthetic foods and dreaming their days away in the drugged sleep of the black lotus. Thog, their toadlike god, prowls the streets from time to time to devour some unfortunate citizen.
A Stygian woman, who has great power in the city, casts a lustful eye on the burly barbarian and plans to do away with his young companion. When, after much difficulty, Conan and Natala manage to escape from the city, we find one of the few gleams of humor in the whole Conan series:
"It's all your fault," she interrupted. "If you had not looked so long and admiringly at that Stygian cat—"
"Crom and his devils!" he swore. "When the oceans drown the world, women will take time for jealousy. Devil take their conceit! Did I tell the Stygian woman to fall in love with me? After all, she was only human!"11
Rated as one of the better stories of the saga is "The Pool of the Black One." Here Conan joins a shipload of buccaneers whose captain is sailing far into the western waters in search of a treasure isle. On the island Conan challenges the captain and kills him, only to get into trouble with a race of inhuman black giants who worship a magical pool.
Conan continued to stand at Robert Howard's shoulder and relate his remarkable experiences. Although after a time he allowed his creator enough leisure to write in other fields, he kept the Texan's small writing room filled with his pervasive presence and images of the Hyborian Age. Of the thirty-one issues of Weird Tales published between October 1933 and April 1936, eighteen contained short Conan stories or installments of longer tales about the great barbarian.
For the next Conan story, published in January 1934, Howard delved into Conan's youth. He set "Rogues in the House" in a period when Conan was still a thief, albeit an older and more experienced thief than he was in "The Tower of the Elephant." As the story opens, Conan's girl friend betrays him to the police while he is drugged with wine. He wakens, chained, in jail. Fortunately a young nobleman procures his release in return for a promise to kill the noble's enemy. Returning unexpectedly to his room, Conan finds his girl in bed, having just dismissed her secret lover. He slays the offending male and drops thr faithless woman into a cesspool. Only then does he go about fulfilling his promise.
In the spring of 1934, Weird Tales published "Shadows in the Moonlight," a story How
ard originally called "Iron Shadows in the Moon." Conan, this time in his late twenties, leads a band of outlaws across the Turanian steppe until the Turanian army traps and destroys them. Conan and a girl escape the slaughter and flee to an island in the Vilayet Sea, where they are beset by a platoon of iron statues that spring to life in the full of the moon. The story also contains a parrot that flies about repeating a human sentence in an unknown tongue. Howard clearly derived this idea from Alfred Noyes's poem The Parrot, about u bird whose original owners were killed by barbarians and who in a later age continued to cry out sentences in a language long dead and forgotten.
Howard began to find stories of greater length congenial. Many writers find novelettes advantageous for imaginative tales, especially those laid on distant planets or unreal worlds, where the author must set his stage with greater care than in a story of the here-and-now. Howard's six longer stories marked a significant improvement in the Conan saga. "Queen of the Black Coast," published in May 1934, has become one of the more admired of the series and Belit one of the most beguiling of Howard's heroines.
Conan, now a mercenary soldier, gets in trouble with the law and flees aboard a merchant galley. The galley is captured in a bloody battle With the Black Corsairs, a crew of piratical Negroes captained by the Bfilit. Although Howard wrote disdainfully: "The Shemite soul finds a bright drunkenness in riches and material splendor," Howard made this black-haired pirate a Shemite and wrote of her:
She was slender, yet formed like a goddess: at once lithe and voluptuous. Her only garment was a broad silken girdle. Her white ivory limbs and the ivory globes of her breasts drove a beat of fierce passion through the Cimmerian's pulse, even in the panting fury of battle ... Her dark eyes burned on the Cimmerian.12
Conan and Belit mate and form a partnership in piracy, which thrives until they row up the river Zarkheba in search of a ruined city housing a fabulous treasure. Then their troubles begin.
Whereas sex was discreetly handled in the pulps, nudity was permissible. For this reason many mentors of the young were horrified by the covers of such magazines as Weird Tales and regularly confiscated them when they came into the hands of young readers. Yet these covers, though maligned, were curiously innocent. From 1933 to 1936, Mrs. Margaret Brundage had a near-monopoly on the cover paintings for Weird Tales, and it became a matter of routine for the magazine to run a Brundage cover illustrating a Conan story whenever one appeared. The cover usually showed a slender, virginal, naked heroine whose neatly Combed hair was waved in the style of the thirties and whose uncertain fate lay in the hands of fiends or the hairy paws of monsters. The propriety of Mrs. Brundage's nudes formed a subject for hot dispute in the letters section of the magazine.
"The Devil in Iron," published in August 1934, is one of the lesser Conan tales. The plot is reminiscent of "Shadows in the Moonlight." In both stories Conan is the leader of a band of outlaws or kozaki on the eastern steppes, who are in conflict with the mighty kingdom of Turan.
This time the Turanian generals set a trap for the barbarian on an island in the Vilayet Sea, baiting it with the captive daughter of a Nemedian lord. Meanwhile another would-be thief accidentally revives the island's devil-god, a giant of living iron. This tale, which was plainly inspired by Harold Lamb's stories of warfare among Cossacks, Turks, and Tatars along the shores of the Black Sea in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has been described as "Lamb-and-water."
In the fall of 1934, one of the best of all the Conan stories appeared as a three-part serial. "The People of the Black Circle" begins in the Oriental kingdom of Vendhya, Howard's fictional prototype of India, in the same way that Stygia is the prototype of Egypt and Zingara of Spain. Vendhya derives from the Vindhya Hills, a low range in north-central India. From the real Himalayan Mountains came Howard's Himelias; from the Khyber Pass came the Zhaibar Pass.
Howard probably borrowed his word-picture of this forbidding clef t in the high mountains from Lowell Thomas's book Beyond the Khyber Pass (1925). He took the names of his Himelian tribes from Thomas, too. Thomas's Waziris and Orakzai became Howard's Wazulis and Irakzai. Even the heroine, the Devi (or goddess) Yasmina, is derived. This time Howard's source is the writer Talbot Mundy, a mainstay of Adventure Magazine almost from that periodical's beginning. Mundy's heroine in King—of the Khyber Rifles (1916) is Yasmini.
Talbot Mundy (1879-1940) was born William Lancaster Gribbon in London. In his teens he went to India to take a job organizing famine relief. For the next dozen years he was just the sort of footloose, rascally, irresponsible, womanizing adventurer, in India, Africa, and Australia, that Howard liked to imagine himself. "Talbot Mundy," one of several pseudonyms Gribbon used, was an alias he adopted when the authorities in German East Africa were after him for ivory poaching. In 1909 he came to the United States, became an American citizen, and adopted Talbot Mundy as his legal name. In 1911 he began writing and in a few years became one of the best-paid adventure-story writers of his day. Most of the fortunes he made from his stories, however, he lost in speculative business ventures. He was married five times.
Howard—who so far as we know knew nothing of Mundy's raffish background—blended the ideas from Thomas and Mundy into his own original tale. Whereas Mundy, a mystic influenced by Theosophy, postulates a Himalayan Brotherhood of occult Masters, Howard more effec-lively turns these saintly brothers into sorcerers of the deepest dye. Howard understood that if the Masters were benign, they would rescue the hero from each predicament, spoiling the tension proper to an adventure story.
Howard's story begins when the King of Vendhya lies dying of lorcery. With his last breath he commands his sister, the Devi Yasmina, to kill him because he has been ensorceled by the wizards of the mountains, who plan to keep his soul forever. Only by death can he escape this fate.
Sobbing wildly, Yasmina plucked a jeweled dagger from her girdle and plunged it to the hilt in his breast. He stiffened and then went limp, a grim smile curving his dead lips. Yasmina hurled herself face down on the rush-covered floor, beating the reeds with her clenched hands. Outside, the gongs and conchs brayed and thundered and the priests gashed themselves with copper knives.13
This passage well illustrates Robert Howard's ability to compress into a short paragraph not only violent action, but also pulsing emotion and the exotic sights and sounds of a culture far removed from the daily life of twentieth-century America. Only someone who hurled himself into his stories could achieve so much color and passion in a few simple sentences.
Just before Christmas 1934, Weird Tales published another Conan story, "A Witch Shall Be Born." Conan, now a mercenary soldier in the employ of Queen Taramis of the frontier kingdom of Khauran, is confronted by Constantius, the leader of an army of the queen's wicked twin sister, the witch Salome. Overwhelmed by numbers, Conan is captured, the queen imprisoned, and the city taken.
In perhaps the most famous of all the scenes in the Conan saga, Conan is crucified by Constantius's order. As the barbarian hangs near death on the cross, a vulture flies down to peck out his eyes. Rallying his fading strength, the Cimmerian bites off the bird's head. Obviously, for a man with such fortitude, the end is not in sight. A group of nomads from eastern Shem rescue him and help him to defeat the enemy. When Constantius in his turn hangs on the cross, Conan watches with satisfaction.
"You are more fit to inflict torture than to endure it," said Conan tranquilly. "I hung there on a cross as you are hanging, and I lived, thanks to circumstances and a stamina peculiar to barbarians. But you civilized men are soft. . . . And so, Falcon of the desert, I leave you to the companionship of another bird of the desert."
He gestured toward the vultures whose shadows swept across the sands as they wheeled overhead. From the lips of Constantius came an inhuman cry of despair and horror.14
As we have already seen, one of Howard's most tenacious beliefs was that barbarians—as he perceived them—were men of enormous strength and endurance, while civilization weakened a man and stripp
ed his finer qualities from him. True, the barbarian was a vengeful, brutal man who lived in fear of abominable gods and who faced a bloody end, Howard wrote to Lovecraft, but
... he was lithe and strong as a panther, and the full joy of strenuous physical exertion was his. . . . The wind blew in his hair and he looked with naked eyes into the sun. Often he starved, but when he feasted, it was with a mighty gusto . . .1S
This picture of barbarian life tells more about Howard's yearning for happiness than about real barbarians. Forced to restrain his pent-up rage and hatred, yet chafing under the constraints imposed on him by his parents' demands and domination, Howard cherished a dream of a life of primitive violence and blood-dripping drama. And to achieve the dream, he had but two choices: to invent a violent world or to do violence. Howard, for some years, chose the first alternative.
"Jewels of Gwahlur," published in March of 1935, is considered one of the very best Conan stories. Hearing of the priceless Teeth of Gwahlur, a fortune of jewels hidden somewhere in Keshan, Conan sells his services as a fighting man to the king of that black realm. But before his services can be accepted by the irascible monarch and his court, the chief priest must consult the oracle of Alkmeenon, an uninhabited city that not even the priests had entered for a hundred years.
As the priest and his attendants ride toward the dead city, the wily Cimmerian climbs the cliffs that rim it and, descending into the haunted vale, strides down deserted thoroughfares and enters the palace. He finds a golden throne and a portal leading to a chamber of great richness; and there, on a dais, lies the Princess Yelaya, the ancient oracle, coldly beautiful even in death. Her body is perfectly preserved, as is her silken garment, her gem-studded girdle, and the "darkly piled foam" of her