The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition

by Robert E. Howard

  NOTES ON VARIOUS PEOPLES OF THE HYBORIAN AGE

  Aquilonians

  This was a more or less pure-blooded race, though modified by contact with the Zingarans in the south and, much less extensively, with the Bossonians of the west and north. Aquilonia, as the westernmost of the Hyborian kingdoms, retained frontier traditions equalled only by the more ancient kingdom of Hyperborea and the Border Kingdom. Its most important provinces were Poitain in the south, Gunderland in the north, and Attalus in the southeast. The Aquilonians were a tall race, averaging five feet, ten and three-fourths inches in height, and were generally inclined to be rangy, though in the last generations the city dwellers inclined towards portliness. They varied in complexion largely according to locality. Thus the people of Gunderland were uniformly tawny-haired and gray-eyed, while the people of Poitain were almost uniformly dark as their neighbors the Zingarans. All were inclined to be dolichocephalic, except a sprinkling of peasantry along the Bossonian border, whose type had been modified by admixture with the latter race, and here and there in the more primitive parts of the kingdom where remnants of unclassified aboriginal races still existed, absorbed into the surrounding population. The people of Attalus boasted the greatest advances in commerce and culture, though the whole level of Aquilonian civilization was enviable. Their language was much like the other Hyborian tongues and their chief god was Mitra. At the height of their power their religion was of a refined and imaginative type, and they did not practise human sacrifice. In war they relied largely upon their cavalry, heavily armed knights. Their pikemen and spearmen were mainly Gundermen, while their archers were supplied from the Bossonian Marches.

  Gundermen

  Gunderland was once a separate kingdom, but was brought into the larger kingdom, less by conquest than agreement. Its people never considered themselves exactly Aquilonians, and after the fall of the great kingdom, Gunderland existed for several generations in its former state as a separate principality. Their ways were ruder and more primitively Hyborian than those of the Aquilonians, and their main concession to the ways of their more civilized southern neighbors was the adoption of the god Mitra in place of the primitive Bori – a worship to which they returned, however, upon the fall of Aquilonia. They were, next to the Hyperboreans, the tallest of the Hyborian races. They were fine soldiers, and inclined to wander far. Gunderland mercenaries were to be found in all the armies of the Hyborian kingdoms, and in Zamora and the more powerful kingdoms of Shem.

  Cimmerians

  These people were descendants of the ancient Atlanteans, though they themselves were unaware of their descent, having evolved by their own efforts from the ape-men to which their ancient ancestors had sunk. They were a tall, powerful race, averaging six feet in height. They were black-haired, and gray- or blue-eyed. They were dolichocephalic, and dark-skinned, though not so dark as either the Zingarans, Zamorians or Picts. They were barbaric and warlike, and were never conquered, although, at the end of the Hyborian Age, the southward-drifting Nordics drove them from their country. They were a moody, brooding race, whose gods were Crom and his brood. They did not practise human sacrifice, for it was their belief that their gods were indifferent to the fate of men. They fought on foot, mainly, and made savage raids on their neighbors to the east, north, and south.

  The Westermarck

  Located between the Bossonian Marches and the Pictish Wilderness. Provinces: Thandara, Conawaga, Oriskonie, Schohira. Political situation: Oriskonie, Conawaga, and Schohira were ruled by royal patent. Each was under the jurisdiction of a baron of the western marches, which lie just east of the Bossonian Marches. These barons were accountable only to the king of Aquilonia. Theoretically they owned the land, and received a certain percentage of the gain. In return they supplied troops to protect the frontier against the Picts, built fortresses and towns, and appointed judges and other officials. Actually their power was not nearly so absolute as it seemed. There was a sort of supreme court located in the largest town of Conawaga, Scanaga, presided over by a judge appointed directly by the king of Aquilonia, and it was a defendant’s privilege, under certain circumstances, to appeal to this court. Thandara was the southernmost province, Oriskonie the northernmost and the most thinly settled. Conawaga lay south of Oriskonie, and south of Conawaga lay Schohira, the smallest of the provinces. Conawaga was the largest, richest and most thickly settled, and the only one in which landed patricians had settled to any extent. Thandara was the most purely pioneer province. Originally it had only been a fortress by that name, on Warhorse River, built by direct order of the king of Aquilonia, and commanded by royal troops. After the conquest of the province of Conajohara by the Picts, the settlers from that province moved southward and settled the country in the vicinity of the fortress. They held their land by force of arms, and neither received nor needed any patent. They acknowledged no baron as overlord. Their governor was merely a military commander, elected from among themselves, their choice being always submitted to and approved by the king of Aquilonia as a matter of form. No troops were ever sent to Thandara. They built forts, or rather blockhouses, and manned them themselves, and formed companies of military bodies called Rangers. They were incessantly at war with the Picts. When the word came that Aquilonia was being torn by civil war, and that the Cimmerian Conan was striking for the crown, Thandara instantly declared for Conan, renounced their allegiance to King Namedides and sent word asking Conan to endorse their elected governor, which the Cimmerian instantly did. This enraged the commander of a fort in the Bossonian Marches, and he marched with his host to ravage Thandara. But the frontiersmen met him at their borders and gave him a savage defeat, after which there was no attempt to meddle with Thandara. But the province was isolated, separated from Schohira by a stretch of uninhabited wilderness, and behind them lay the Bossonian country, where most of the people were loyalists. The baron of Schohira declared for Conan, and marched to join his army, but asked no levies of Schohira where indeed every man was needed to guard the frontier. But in Conawaga were many loyalists, and the baron of Conawaga rode in person into Scandaga and demanded that the people supply him with a force to ride and aid King Namedides. There was civil war in Conawaga, and the baron planned to crush all other provinces and make himself governor of them all. Meantime, in Oriskonie, the people had driven out the governor appointed by their baron and were savagely fighting such loyalists as skulked among them.

  AFTERWORD: ROBERT E. HOWARD AND CONAN

  By Stephen Jones

  ROBERT ERVIN HOWARD was born in the fading ex-cowtown of Peaster, Texas, about forty-five miles west of Fort Worth, on January 22, 1906. He was the only son of Dr Isaac Mordecai Howard and Hester Jane (Ervin) Howard. The couple met while living in Mineral Wells, in Palo Pinto County, and were married on January 24, 1904.

  Named after his great-grandfather, Robert Ervin, Howard later revealed in a 1931 biographical sketch: ‘I come of old pioneer American stock. By nationality I am predominantly Gaelic, in spite of my English name – some three-fourths Irish, while the rest is a mixture of English, Highland Scotch [sic], and Danish … Practically all my life has been spent in the country and small towns, outside of a few brief sojourns in New Orleans and some of the Texas cities.’

  After moving around the state and living briefly in a number of different locales, in September 1919 the family finally settled in the small oil boom town of Cross Plains, in Callahan County, Texas, where Howard would spend the rest of his life.

  ‘As my father had his practice and did not attempt to run a farm, I had more leisure time that the average country kid,’ Howard later recalled. ‘I lived pretty much the average life of the time and place. Then (as now) I had more enemies than friends, but I did not lack companionship of my own age. I played the rough and savage games popular in those parts then, wrestled, hunted a little, fished a little, trapped a little, stole watermelons, went swimming, and spent more time than all in wandering about over the countryside on foot or on horseback.’

>   Suffering from poor health (probably rheumatic fever) as a child, he once told his father, ‘Dad, when I was in school, I had to take a lot because I was alone and no one to take my part, so I intend to build my body until when anyone crosses me up, I can with my bare hands tear him to pieces, double him up, and break his back with my hands alone.’

  Although he started attending school when he was eight, Howard was mostly self-educated and read voraciously, revealing in one letter: ‘In my passionate quest for reading material, nothing could have halted me but a bullet through the head.’

  Despite hating ‘the clock-like regularity’ of school, in 1923 he graduated at the age of seventeen from Brownwood High School and, not being able to afford college, attended the Commercial School at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, where he studied non-credit courses in shorthand, typing, book-keeping and commercial law.

  In her 1986 memoir about Howard, One Who Walked Alone, former Cross Plains high school teacher Novalyne Price Ellis described her first meeting with the author, in the late spring of 1933: ‘He was not dressed as I thought a writer should dress. His cap was pulled down low on his forehead. He had on a dingy white shirt and some loose-fitting brown pants that only came to his ankles and the top of his high-buttoned shoes. He took off his cap and I saw that his hair was dark brown, short, almost clipped. He ran his hand over his head.’

  E. Hoffman Price was one of the few writers and fellow correspondents who actually visited Howard. In 1934 he drove down to Cross Plains and recalled years later meeting a ‘broad, towering man with a bluff, tanned face and a big, hearty hand, and a voice which was surprisingly soft and easy, instead of the bull-bellow one would expect of the creator of Conan and those other swashbucklers … Robert Howard was packed with whimsy and poetry which rang out in his letters, and blazed up in much of his published fiction but, as is usually the case with writers, his appearance belied him. His face was boyish, not yet having squared off into angles; his blue eyes, slightly prominent, had a wide-openness which did not suggest anything of the man’s keen wit and agile fancy. That first picture persists – a powerful, solid, round-faced fellow, kindly and somewhat stolid.’

  However, Price also discovered that there was a darker side to Howard while his host was driving Price and his new wife, Wanda, to the nearby town of Brownwood for a shopping and sight-seeing trip: ‘Suddenly he took his foot off the throttle, cocked his head, idled down. We were approaching a clump of vegetation which was near the roadside. He reached across us, to the side pocket. He took out a pistol, sized up the terrain, put the weapon back again, and resumed speed. He explained, in a matter-of-fact tone, “I have a lot of enemies, everyone has around here. Wasn’t that I figured we were running into anything but I had to make sure.”’

  Some time later Howard confided to Novalyne Price Ellis that a man with as many enemies as he had needed to be careful. ‘Anybody who is not your friend is your enemy,’ he explained pleasantly to her.

  Howard had written his first story – a historical adventure about a Viking named Boealf – at the age of nine or ten, and he was fifteen when he began writing professionally. ‘I took up writing simply because it seemed to promise an easier mode of work, more money, and more freedom than any job I’d tried. I wouldn’t write otherwise.’ He sent off his first effort to Adventure, but it was rejected, and it was another three years before Howard made his professional début in the pulp magazine Weird Tales.

  Originally selling for just twenty-five cents on newsstands, and printed on low-grade ‘pulp’ paper, Weird Tales was the first magazine devoted exclusively to weird and fantastic fiction. It ran for 279 issues, starting in March 1923 and finally giving up the ghost in September 1954. Although just one title amongst many hundreds being published at that time, it carried the subtitle ‘The Unique Magazine’, and during its original thirty-two-year-run (the title has been revived – unsuccessfully – on several occasions since) it presented all types of fantasy fiction, from supernatural stories to Gothic horror, sword and sorcery to science fiction. Among some of its most famous contributors were H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Seabury Quinn, C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman, Jack Williamson, Henry S. Whitehead, and even Tennessee Williams.

  At the time Howard began submitting manuscripts, Farnsworth Wright had replaced Edwin F. Baird as editor of the Chicago-based magazine, after founder and owner J.C. Henneberger was forced to reorganise the title because of debts. From the November 1924 issue onwards, Weird Tales began to flourish under Wright’s guidance, and he edited 179 copies before retiring after the March 1940 edition. He died as a result of Parkinson’s disease in June that same year.

  Written when Howard was just eighteen, ‘Spear and Fang’ was a story about the struggles faced by prehistoric man. Wright published it in the July 1925 issue and paid its teenage author a fee of $16.00, or half a cent a word. Even in pre-Depression Texas that didn’t go far, and Howard quickly realised that he would have to work at a variety of jobs to supplement his meagre income from writing. These included picking cotton, branding cattle, hauling garbage, working in a grocery store and a law office, jerking soda in a drug store, trying to be a public stenographer, packing a surveyor’s rod and working up oil field news for some Texas and Oklahoma papers. However, by his own admission, he ‘wasn’t a success at any of them’.

  In his 1931 biographical sketch he told Wright: ‘Pounding out a living at the writing game is no snap – but the average man’s life is no snap, whatever he does. I’m merely one of a huge army, all of whom are bucking the line one way or another for meat for their bellies – which is the main basic principle and reason and eventual goal of Life. Every now and then one of us finds the going too hard and blows his brains out, but it’s all in the game, I reckon.’

  Thanks to Wright and Weird Tales, things soon began to change for Howard. In just three years his income from writing jumped from $772.50 to $1,500.26. The prolific author also began to sell other types of fiction – Westerns, sports stories, horror tales, true confessions, historical adventures and detective thrillers – to pulp markets besides Weird Tales, while at the same time he began to develop a series of characters with whom he would forever be identified with: the English Puritan swordsman Solomon Kane (actually created while he was still in high school); the king of fabled Valusia, King Kull; Pictish chieftain Bran Mak Morn; prize-fighter Sailor Steve Costigan; Celtic warrior Turlogh O’Brien; soldier of fortune Francis X. Gordon, also known as ‘El Borak’; humorous hillbilly Breckenridge Elkins; and of course the mighty barbarian, Conan.

  Conan quickly became Howard’s most popular character. Howard set his savage exploits in the Hyborian Age, a fictional period of pre-history ‘which men have forgotten, but which remains in classical names, and distorted myths.’ He detailed Conan’s world in a pseudo-historical essay entitled ‘The Hyborian Age’, which ran as a serial in Donald A. Wollheim’s amateur magazine The Phantagraph in the issues dated February, August and October-November 1936. However, the fanzine only published the first half of the essay, and it finally appeared in its complete form as a mimeographed booklet in 1938.

  According to his creator, Conan ‘was born on a battle field, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding Vanir. The country claimed by and roved over by his clan lay in the northwest of Cimmeria, but Conan was of mixed blood, although a pure-bred Cimmerian. His grandfather was a member of a southern tribe who had fled from his own people because of a blood-feud and after long wanderings, eventually taken refuge with the people of the north. He had taken part in many raids into the Hyborian nations in his youth, before his flight, and perhaps it was the tales he told of those softer countries which roused in Conan, as a child, a desire to see them.

  ‘There are many things concerning Conan’s life of which I am not certain myself. I do not know, for instance, when he got his first sight of civilised people. It might have been at Vanarium, or he might have made a peaceable visit
to some frontier town before that. At Vanarium he was already a formidable antagonist, though only fifteen. He stood six feet and weighed 180 pounds, though he lacked much of having his full growth.’

  However, despite what Howard would claim later, the mighty-thewed barbarian did not leap fully-formed into his creator’s mind. The June 1932 issue of Strange Stories contained Howard’s story ‘People of the Dark’, whose hero was a warrior named Conan the reaver, who was physically similar to the later Conan; he too swore ‘by Crom’.

  The first published Conan story, ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’, is one of the final adventures in Conan’s chronology, set after he had become king of Aquilonia. Wright conditionally accepted it in a letter dated March 10, 1932, describing it as having ‘points of real excellence. I hope you will see your way clear to touch it up and resubmit it.’ It eventually appeared in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales and was an instant hit, as indicated in the February 1933 edition of the letters column, ‘The Eyrie’, where readers and writers alike were invited to air their comments and opinions about the magazine: ‘“The Phoenix on the Sword” fairly took my breath away with its fine intrigue and excellent action and description,’ exclaimed a reader from Denver, Colorado, adding: ‘It was a magnificent story. Mr Howard never writes but that he produces a masterpiece.’ In fact, the story was a reworking of an unsold King Kull tale entitled ‘By This Axe I Rule!’, which finally saw print in its original form in the 1967 collection King Kull.

  Still king of Aquilonia, Conan was ambushed and shackled in a dungeon, where he encountered an enormous serpent in ‘The Scarlet Citadel’, published in the January 1933 Weird Tales. Although Howard had already been awarded the coveted cover spot on previous issues of the magazine (his first had been for ‘Wolfshead’ back in April 1926), the covers for the December and January issues were two out of the four which J. Allen St John produced consecutively for Otis Adelbert Kline’s serial ‘Buccaneers of Venus’.