The Chants of Old Heroes, Singing in our Ears by Steve Tompkins

…In these latter days it is to be feared that the various media mutations and pastiche reincarnations have so overwhelmed the original Conan that Robert E. Howard has been obscured, even among Conan fans, as lost as the Hyborian Age.

Robert M. Price, “Raven, Son of Morn” (Introduction to Nameless Cults: The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert E. Howard)

These assortments of exfoliating texts constitute a genuine assault upon the perception of the reader, and the original figure of Conan tends to become obscure; but he can be recovered from the original material.

An autarky on two legs, Conan the Cimmerian might not seem like someone who needs to be rescued, but now he has been. There exist more stories and more misconceptions about Conan than about any other Robert E. Howard character, and at long last he has been retrieved from decades of “media mutations” and “assortments of exfoliating texts.” He prowls the pages of Robert E. Howard’s Complete Conan of Cimmeria, Volume One (1932-1933) unhampered by an Austrian accent, a fur loincloth, or imitations that are not the sincerest but the most mercenary form of flattery, and we have the extraction team at Wandering Star to thank for it.

The U.K. publishing house’s Robert E. Howard Library of Classics is based on the premise that deathless tales deserve packaging that defies the aging process, editions that step out of time in a way that pulps and paperbacks never could. How can a temporal enterprise like publishing hope to attain timelessness in its products? By buttressing restored and unexpurgated texts with painstaking scholarship and by harking back to the golden age of book design and adventure illustration. But even as 1999’s The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, 2000’s The Ultimate Triumph, and 2001’s The Last King enshrined Howard’s Puritan wrong-righter, a Frazetta-adorned assortment of his best heroic fantasy and Bran Mak Morn respectively, in the middle of the room there still waited an 800-pound gorilla. Or rather a killer of 800-pound gorillas: Conan. Would Wandering Star succeed in getting the rights to the Cimmerian and would they succeed in getting him right?

Elsewhere in what has been dubbed the Anglosphere, there was recently an attempt to achieve a definitive Conan collection on a shoestringy budget: Millennium’s The Conan Chronicles: The People of the Black Circle and The Conan Chronicles: The Hour of the Dragon. Disappointingly, the former was marred by an insipid cover, a prevalence of typos that suggested nothing so much as Charlie Gordon’s early Progress Reports in Flowers for Algernon, and an afterword by the otherwise estimable Stephen Jones that reduced Howard’s life to a thirty-year suicide note. A protagonist as durable as any jungle lord, skywalker or Ringbearer, the Cimmerian deserves better, and in Volume One (1932-1933) he gets what he deserves. “In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies,” Conan tells Prospero in “The Phoenix on the Sword.” Wandering Star has restored the sharp edge of Howard’s creativity and given him a straight path to his readers.

As seemingly straightforward as a blade slicing through a succession of Gordian knots, Conan has often been understood too quickly, especially by his detractors. For he has had many foes off as well as on the printed page, most of whom have trouble differentiating between bastardly and dastardly. Conan is as merciless toward the divine right of kings in “The Scarlet Citadel” as he is merciful toward the “mangled, blinded, and broken” Yag-kosha in “The Tower of the Elephant.” When he is labeled brainless, it is an excuse to get the labeler out of having to exercise his or her own brain in studying the character. When first encountered by Weird Tales readers in Dec. 1932, Conan was grasping neither an axe nor a flagon of mead nor a concubine but rather a golden stylus with which he was busy improving upon his court’s cartography.¹ In “The Tower of the Elephant” Howard stresses not the barbarian’s ubiquity in dens of iniquity but rather the hours and hours he has invested trying to follow the disputations of Zamorian theologians and philosophers. In “Queen of the Black Coast” he is familiar with the claims of competing gods and the disclaimers of Nemedian skeptics. By “The Jewels of Gwahlur” he is a rough-and-ready linguist, able to “blunder” through a manuscript written in archaic Pelishtic. Conan may not be able to keep a civil tongue in his head, but he retains the grammars and vocabularies of many.

Patrice Louinet contributes an introduction, the essay “Hyborian Genesis: Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories,” notes on typescripts and compositional chronology, and an overarching editorial vision to Volume One (1932-1933). Within Howard studies, so often defined by disagreements, there is at least agreement that any new work by Louinet is automatically a major event. Discussing the artistic breakthrough brought about by the blood-dimmed tide of “Kings of the Night,” “The Dark Man,” and “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” in his essay “Waiting for the Barbarians” (in the Appendices to The Ultimate Triumph), Louinet offered more ideas and insights than can be found in most entire books about Howard: the distinction between savages, more entropic than anthropic, and barbarians; what lies behind blue eyes in Howard’s later fiction; the significance of “b/r characters” as secret sharers. “A Short History of the Kull Series” (The Dark Man #6 /Summer 2001) was immediately the most valuable examination of the Valusian cycle ever, although the article is regrettably ailurophobic in its dismissal of “Delcardes’ Cat.”

Louinet can be relied upon for command of the primary (and pre-primary) sources, research of an intensity more often associated with bookshelf-buckling biographies of Henry James, and a feel for both the extent to which Howard was in touch with each of his characters and the inevitable leavetaking when said characters, none of whom overstayed their welcome, would recede beyond recapturing (the contrast with one of Howard’s few peers, Fritz Leiber, who was able to return to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser at many different times during many different decades, is striking). Forays into supposition are informed and bodyguarded by scholarship, in much the same way as Dalgar abets the furor Atlanticus of Kull’s fighting style by serving as shield and helmet in the battle on the stair.

With Rusty Burke’s feat in compiling The Robert E. Howard Bookshelf as a point of departure, Louinet is also always aware of what Howard was reading and when he was reading it. The Texan lived such a short life, and spent so much of it at the typewriter, that what he read tended to be reflected in what he wrote fairly quickly. He was an attentive reader, a retentive reader, and also an inventive reader; as Louinet notes, “Howard’s readings were springboards from which he crafted tales that were entirely his.” Concepts in Sax Rohmer’s The Mask of Fu Manchu were heightened and Hyborified in “Black Colossus,” trace elements of The White Company can be detected in early drafts of “The Scarlet Citadel,” and that re-teller of tales Thomas Bulfinch (1796-1867), whose The Age of Fable, The Age of Chivalry, and Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages became the 1913 three-in-one The Outline of Mythology, was apparently something of a one-stop shopping center for Howard.

Louinet identifies a particularly fascinating instance of indebtedness when he states that “The basic plot of The Frost-Giant’s Daughter can be found in its entirety in Bulfinch.” Atali is not just the daughter of Ymir; Howard begat her upon the fleet-footed Atalanta and Daphne, the daughter of the river god hounded by the inflamed Apollo. This new linkage has extra-Howardian implications when we recall that in his seminal “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” J.R.R. Tolkien stressed the adamantine endurance of what he termed “the Northern theory of courage”:

The northern imagination has in fact revived its spirit past Tolkien’s times and into our own, and despite its brevity, “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” is as memorable an American contribution to “the Northern thing” in modern fantasy as Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword and Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. But now we know that beneath what is apparently boreal in the story, there lurks the austral-tales told by Greeklings. It is amusing to note that there is a hint of the residually Mediterranean in Howard’s text, as if he were doffing his horned helmet to his southern inspirations: “The girl in her gossamer veil ran as lightly and as gaily as if she danced through the palm and rose gardens of Poitain.”

Howard, like lightning, never strikes twice in the same place in the Conan adventures. The barbarian is a wanderlusty improvement upon even the traditional heroic mobility examined by Dean A. Miller in his The Epic Hero:

Indeed, in a very real sense, movement or the possibility of movement, especially minatory attack, is another part of the hero’s message; and unless he is somehow controlled, overruled, imprisoned, or rendered impotent by magic, his message is usually threatening. This threat stems in part from his original topos, which we know to be the Other: wilderness, exile, foreign parts, parts unknown. His precipitate appearance, crossing the limen or limina separating the known from the unknown, brings the dangerous potentiality of his Otherness into, and against, settlement, society, and order.

To this mastery of space Conan adds a supremely American refusal to be mastered by time, an effect that is intensified when we read the stories in the order in which they were written. We can only ever live our lives in one direction, no matter how much we strain against that narrative inexorability, but Conan’s original topos is what Miller calls the Other, and he crisscrosses years as freely as kingdoms.

The rearranged stories glance warily at their new neighbors, then grow accustomed to each other and begin to generate a great deal of infield chatter. In the past, even when we were careful to sequence the stories in the order they were published rather than the order in which Conan would have lived them, we were wont to regard “The Phoenix on the Sword” and “The Scarlet Citadel” as a twofer, a monolithic monarchical introduction to the character. Now the glacial succeeds the palatial; we are flung backward and northward from “Phoenix” to “The Frost Giant’s Daughter,” after which crime doesn’t pay in “The God in the Bowl” and “The Tower of the Elephant” before the erstwhile robber is robbed of a kingdom by Strabonus and Amalrus and Tsotha-lanti.

After Conan barely escapes becoming collateral damage when Thoth-amon sends horrific death to an enemy in “Phoenix,” the same thing happens, two stories later but decades earlier, in “The God in the Bowl.” And the transition from “The Pool of the Black One’ to “Rogues in the House” is an especially pronounced retrogression. Instead of the ambitious and acculturated player of power politics for whom being taken aboard Zaporavo’s Wastrel is the first step toward a takeover,² we have the younger, rawer barbarian only recently emerged from the mists and myths of his tribal homeland. The outlander of “Rogues” is given to outlandish utterances:

“Let me cut his throat; I want to see what color his blood is. They say in The Maze that his heart is black, so his blood must be black too—”

“Every one knows there are men who take the form of wolves at will. “

“I will count him among the chiefs whose souls I’ve sent into the dark, and my women will sing of him.”

Was Howard, who described his function as being like that of an amanuensis who recorded what Conan himself recollected, surprised when Conan addressed him one last time in the earlier thief’s voice of “Rogues”? That voice would seem to have been impelled by knowledge that time was short, for it spoke so authoritatively and assuredly that only one draft of the story was required. In any event, “Rogues” is enriched and inflected by our knowledge of what has gone before (or will come after, depending on how we look at it). Conan will travel many a highway, including a royal one, before walking the road that Nabonidus walks in “Rogues”; he will eventually be not an assassin but the target of assassins; hundreds of Murilos will be at his beck and call.

Patrice Louinet encapsulates all of this in the phrase “Yesterday a kozak, today a king, tomorrow a thief,” redefining the concept of escapism (so often and so superficially applied to Howard’s heroic fantasy) to mean escape from one story’s destination/destiny and escape to the fresh circumstances of the next story. Volume One illustrator Mark Schultz, on the other hand, takes a more linear approach to Conan’s curriculum vitae in his foreword to the new book:

In Conan we get that rarity in fantastic literature, a hero who actually changes and grows from story to story. The teenage, insecure Conan who kills a man for taunting him in The Tower of the Elephant is not the same headstrong bully who has his heart broken in The Queen of the Black Coast is not the same veteran mercenary who begins to understand that maybe he has it in him to go all the way in Black Colossus is not the same Conan who as king patronizes the arts (the arts, for Crom’s sake!), recognizing that poetry will live long after he is gone, in The Phoenix on the Sword.

It is to Wandering Star’s credit that this contradiction was allowed into the book’s preamble, and Conan himself bestrides the contradiction, as he does so much else, like a Colossus. Purists have long had every reason to charge that the Conan saga as it has been presented to us in paperback has a beginning, a meddle, and an end. But an extreme position (chronoloclasm as opposed to chronololatry?) that reduces the stories to random, Groo-some wanderings, haphazardous happenstance with no cumulative biographical momentum, is as misleading as the old rags-to-Aquilonian-riches, boy-from-the-wrong side-of-the-civilizational-tracks-makes-good twaddle that researchers like Louinet and Burke have finally induced to, well, decamp. There is some ulteriority to this series; even if we consider The Hour of the Dragon to be a special case, the fact remains that Howard sprinkled the stories after “The Scarlet Citadel” with regal reminders. Although he would get very restless if sequestered on Avalon, Conan is in his own way a once and future king:

“By Mitra,” said he slowly, “I never expected to see you cased in coat-armor, but you do not put it to shame. By my finger-bones, Conan, I have seen kings who wore their harness less regally than you!”

Conan was silent. A vague shadow crossed his mind like a prophecy. In years to come he was to remember Amalric’s words, when the dream became the reality. (“Black Colossus”)

For an instant the future fate of kingdoms that hinged on this gay-clad barbarian hung in the balance. (“The Devil in Iron”)

“What king has roamed the countries, fought the battles, loved the women, and won the plunder that I have?” (“The People of the Black Circle”)

“I’ve never been king of an Hyborian kingdom,” he grinned, taking an enormous mouthful of cactus. “But I’ve dreamed of being even that. I may be too, some day. Why shouldn’t I?” (“Red Nails”)

“I’ve been a mercenary captain, a corsair, a kozak, a penniless vagabond, a general—hell, I’ve been everything except a king, and I may be that, before I die.” The fancy pleased him, and he grinned hugely. (“Beyond the Black River”)

Volume One retains what Damon Knight quotably described as “dreamdust sparkle,” but enables us to see Conan’s world more clearly than ever before. The Picts who would come into their own later in the series were an offstage presence as early as the very first story to be set in the Hyborian Age. But between “By This Axe I Rule!” and “Phoenix” they have morphed from the historic allies of Valusia to an essentially ahistorical and aboriginal threat to Aquilonia, the “Amerindian” guise of which in “Wolves Beyond the Border” and “Beyond the Black River” is foreshadowed by Ascalante’s disclosure that the fuel for a frontier in flames is firewater. And it is spellbinding to watch as “Phoenix,” “The God in the Bowl,” “Queen of the Black Coast,” and “Black Colossus” foster the sinister mystique of that “dark-bosomed mistress of the south” Stygia, a snake-pit into which we will not descend until The Hour of the Dragon.

It is one thing to be aware of “Cimmeria” as a Howard poem, and another to encounter its mournful and never-ending remembrance as a bleak gateway or overture to the Conan series. Its few lines are as revelatory as any “Exile of Atlantis”-style origin story, and its mood spilled over like blacker-than-black ink into the first draft of “The Phoenix on the Sword,” in which the Howard that we know from his poetry clearly seizes control of the Underwood:

I have seen the strange madness of futility fall upon them when a little thing like a spinning dust-cloud, or the hollow crying of a bird, or the moan of the wind through bare branches brought to their gloomy minds the emptiness of life and the vainness of existence. Only in war are the Cimmerians happy.

Conan—or Howard—can only remember Cimmeria; it is a terrible land, the mere evocation of which brings 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.

As a reformed Conanist, one who has made it through all of the novels and many of the comics, this writer can attest that Cimmeria’s off-limits status was respected by most of those who labored drearily in the pastiche mines (The exceptions being John Maddox Roberts, who exaggerated the dour-and-doughty qualities of Howard’s hillmen to postmodern, semi-parodic effect in 2 novels, and soon Harry Turtledove, whose Conan of Venarium will rush in where Aquilonians fear to tread later in 2003). And yet a case can just about be made that Cimmeria became more than just terror incognita or a Slough of Despond as the series wore on. Howard wrote the blackhairs’ intractability into the entirely new Acheronian imperial interlude, post “Hyborian Age” but pre-Hyborian Age, of The Hour of the Dragon:

“No, he is a Cimmerian, one of those wild tribesmen who dwell in the gray hills of the north.”

“I fought his ancestors of old,” muttered Xaltotun. “Not even the kings of Acheron could conquer them.”

And with Venarium in “Beyond the Black River,” the Cimmerians leave off being shadowy silhouettes long enough to act decisively and destructively on the world-historical stage. Louinet has cautioned us (in his “Waiting for the Barbarians” essay) that Venarium should not be misinterpreted as merely a new chapter in Conan’s biography; fair enough. As an event, it redirects Aquilonia’s colonizing energies from the north to the west, and presages not only the loss of Conajohara in “Black River” but also the role of the Cimmerians in administering the coup de grace when the Hyborian Age is in extremis.

“It won’t hold our weight—but there’s strength in union. That’s what the Aquilonian renegades used to tell us Cimmerians when they came into the hills to raise an army to invade their own country. But we always fight by clans and tribes.”

That such renegades would deem it worthwhile, in the aftermath and past the ashes of Venarium, to risk their cause and their lives—and that they apparently survived long enough to make their pitch—is an indication that the Cimmerians may have been edging their way closer and closer to participating in the series. As Howard put more distance between himself and what Cimmeria represented or recalled, he put less distance between Cimmeria and Conan. By March of 1936 he was assuring P. Schuyler Miller that “there were other returns to his native land from time to time.”

Volume One also offers evidence in its wonderful Miscellanea that Conan’s status as a singularity was not always set in stone: to wit, the list of Cimmerian names Howard prepared but never used: Eithriall, Eanbotha, Rotheachta, Giallchadh, Cruaidh, Eamhua, even an unchronicled, politically unlikely King Cumal. Like the lilt and skirl of Conan’s “Lir an mannanan mac lir!” imprecation in “Xuthal of the Dusk”, the insistently Celtic quality of this nomenclature is another reason to deplore the inadequate and ill-advised impersonations of the character on big and small screens by Germanic weightlifters.

There is no more inflammatory term than “posthumous collaboration” in Howard studies, and it may be that the Texan’s only legitimate posthumous collaborators have been artists like Frazetta, Steve Fabian, the Severins, and Barry Windsor-Smith. Steeped in the comic strip classicism of Hal Foster, Wally Wood, Alex Raymond and Al Williamson, Mark Schultz is an inspired choice to illustrate Volume One. He is the creator of the Xenozoic Tales collected by Kitchen Sink Press as Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Dinosaur Shaman, and Time in Overdrive, and has been inducted by no less an authority than William Stout into “the Good Lizard Men—a term [Al] Williamson coined to describe guys who are adept at drawing dinosaurs.” It’s a shame that Schultz won’t have a shot at the rampageous saurian of “Red Nails” or the sabre-tooth summoned by Zogar Sag; in Volume One this Good Lizard Man tacitly concedes that the Conan the Usurper painting will always be the definitive Satha but acquits himself very well with the slumbering sinuousity of the snake sacked out on the throne in “The Devil in Iron.”

Schultz’s Conan has a distinctive phiz; he looks as if he’s been forced to repeat several grades in the school of hard knocks. And this Cimmerian is refreshingly not the prisoner of his own musculature; we believe that he is able to strike blows as well as poses. The Schultzian women have some Frazetta-esque heft to them and could break Margaret Brundage’s skinny flappers in their bare hands like breadsticks. Thalis in “Xuthal of the Dusk” and the Dagonian girl in “The Devil in Iron” wear expressions that emphasize that not all vamps need fangs; their voracity is balanced by the inside front and back covers, on which Conan and several other horsemen gallop past a tower so assertively phallic that somewhere Andrea Dworkin is flinching without even having seen the book.

Schultz provides a single valedictory image beneath the final paragraph of each story as a keepsake and visual synechdoche: a wisp of gossamer caught on one horn of an Aesir helmet, a skull between batwings, with the gemmed Bêlit’s-bane necklace dangling below, a black scorpion, the grandfather of all parrots, the stool that does for the Red Priest, a Bamula shield with crossed assegais. To repeat, he is an inspired choice, with the sole caveat that he could have been a little more Howard-inspired in his choices. An over-reliance on Mesopotamian and Graeco-Roman costumes threatens to become as distracting in Schultz’s drawings as the Aztec trappings unaccountably inflicted by Alicia Austin on the 1975 Donald M. Grant A Witch Shall Be Born hardcover.

Arus, Demetro, and Dionus resemble curly-bearded Babylonian grandees more than they do a Numalian nightwatchman and the Nemedian flics. Patrice Louinet remarks in “Hyborian Genesis” on the escalation of medievalism between “Phoenix” and “The Scarlet Citadel,” but Schultz’s figures could have stepped from a frieze at Nineveh. The worst offender in this respect is a full-page drawing for “Black Colossus” in which the Khorajan spearmen, who should be down-on-their-luck Hyborians, have become Shemite asshuri. Schultz also deviates, as did John Buscema and Alfredo Alcala in the Savage Sword of Conan version of the story, from Howard’s specific-to-the-point-of-being-pedantic description of the upstart general’s panoply:

At her command they brought harness to replace Conan’s chain-mail—gorget, sollerets, cuirass, pauldrons, jambes, cuisses, and sallet. When Yasmela again drew the curtains, a Conan in burnished steel stood before his audience. Clad in the plate-armor, vizor lifted and dark face shadowed by the black plumes that nodded above his helmet, there was a grim impressiveness about him that even Thespides grudgingly noted.

Schultz’s Conan is outfitted more like a centurion or hoplite than what Howard had in mind, and artistic license should not extend to ignoring the explicitly medieval milieu established by the story:

There were the knights, gleaming in richly wrought plate-armor, colored plumes waving above their burnished sallets. Their steeds, caparisoned with silk, lacquered leather and gold buckles, caracoled and curvetted as their riders put them through their paces. The early light struck glints from lance-points that rose like a forest above the array, their pennants flowing in the breeze. Each knight wore a lady’s token, a glove, scarf or rose, bound to his helmet or fastened to his sword-belt.

Louinet describes the backdrop of “Black Colossus” as “an antique Assyria torn with rivalries between city-states,” and that is certainly accurate for the pocket-kingdoms overrun by Natohk’s hordes early in the story. Khoraja on the other hand, “carved out of Shemite lands by the swords of Kothic adventurers,” is redolent of Outremer, the Crusader enclave imperiled by a sandstorm of desert fanaticism. Against the chevaliers of Thespides Howard hurls the charioteers of Kutamun, entirely unperturbed by Robert Yaple’s observation that Stygian forces are “essentially an antique army, almost as great an anachronism in the high Hyborian Age as the army of Ramses II would have been in the Hundred Years’ War.” Much of the counterfactual thrill of “Black Colossus” comes from the flaunting of the story’s anachronistic antagonists, and to simplify the gorgeous mosaic of the Hyborian Age, to impose uniformity on its multiculturalism and multi-temporalism as the illustrations for Volume One risk doing, is to cheapen Howard’s vision. Schultz, whose own cataclysm-birthed Xenozoic was characterized by Al Williamson as “a time 5 or 6 hundred years in the future where all past ages meet” should have intuited that.

Still, it is difficult not be mollified by the closing sentence of the artist’s foreword, in which he is upfront about the extent to which one of his pictures can never be worth a thousand of these words. Howard’s brushstrokes are as fierce and well-aimed as Conan’s swordstrokes, and his imagery is not to be outdone by any that paint with pigments rather than prose:

The crushed black body lay among the flaming riot of jewels that spilled over it; the hairy legs moved aimlessly, the dying eyes glittered redly among the twinkling gems.

Her silent companion was etched vaguely against the softer darkness. There was no break or falter in the rhythm of his oars; he might have been a fantasmal oarsman, rowing her across the dark lake of Death.

Yet while his swift horsemen overthrew armies far from his frontiers, at his very borders an audacious foe plucked his beard with a red-dripping and smoke-stained hand.

Louinet notes that the Border Kingdom that appears on Hyborian maps never made it into an actual Conan story, but Howardian sword-and-sorcery is itself a border kingdom, ruled by a robber baron whose ambitions annihilate distance in search of the riches that can be looted from history, mythology and horror. We can see this predatory outreach at work in Volume One, first in the come-sail-away paragraphs of “Queen of the Black Coast” as Howard writes his way down the coast of the world-continent from Shem to Stygia to Cush, and then in the expansionism of “Black Colossus”:

Eastward, Shevatas knew, the desert shaded into steppes stretching to the Hyrcanian kingdom of Turan, rising in barbaric splendor on the shores of the great inland sea. A week’s ride northward the desert ran into a tangle of barren hills, beyond which lay the fertile uplands of Koth, the southernmost realm of the Hyborian races. Westward the desert merged into the meadowlands of Shem, which stretched away to the ocean.

When Howard writes that “All this Shevatas knew without being particularly conscious of the knowledge, as a man knows the streets of his town” he is being casual about the width and breadth of his own more-than-Texas-sized imagination.

The secondary/supplementary material in Wandering Star’s Howard volumes has not concerned itself overmuch with Howard’s supernatural effects and his teratology. Only the sleep of monsters breeds reason, and Howard could be irrational with the best of them, but in his fiction xenophobia and speciesism are at times too small and small-minded to accommodate him:

“Oh man, listen,” said the strange being. “I am foul and monstrous to you, am I not? Nay, do not answer; I know. But you would seem as strange to me, could I see you. There are many worlds besides this earth, and life takes many shapes. I am neither god nor demon, but flesh and blood like yourself, though the substance differ in part, and the form be cast in different mold.”

The ancestors of the Winged One in “Queen of the Black Coast” are “of heroic proportions; not a branch on the mysterious stalk of evolution that culminated in man, but the ripe blossom on an alien tree, separate and apart from that stalk.” The tree motif persists in “The Pool of the Black One,” the ebony islanders of which are “a perverse branch on the tree of Life, developed along lines outside human comprehension,” but there is much less room for tragedy, and the story is the poorer for it.

The prouder they are, the farther they fall, and all of the arduous climbs and devolutionary declines in these stories are haunted by what befell Conan’s own Atlantean forebears and by Murilo’s “fleeting realization of the abysses of bellowing bestiality up through which humanity had painfully toiled.” Only “The Scarlet Citadel” separates the paradise lost and paradise posthumously regained of Yag-kosha from the degeneration through violence of “the oldest race in the world” in “Queen of the Black Coast.”³ The Winged One in particular is an unforgettable conflation of those Howardian repertory players, the ape-like and the darkly angelic. A crimson-eyed lord of the night’s Miltonian shore and the author of one of the most succinctly Circean scenes in modern fantasy when he transforms the prehistoric Stygians, he never palavers with Conan as will Br’er Swamp Devil in “Beyond the Black River,” but his actions speak louder, and taunt more effectively, than mere words.

Patrice Louinet twice calls the nightflyer of “The Vale of Lost Women” unconvincing, and it is obvious that Howard’s best monsters stalk his stories because he needs them to be there. Outer demons are emissaries from an inner daimon. When that isn’t the case, the harder his prose works, the softer the impact of his creatures seems to be:

…she knew she looked upon black cosmic foulness born in night-black gulfs beyond the reach of a madman’s wildest dreams.

All the obscenity and salacious infamy spawned in the muck of the abysmal pits of Life seemed to drown her in seas of cosmic filth.

Lovecraftian overdrive is not nearly as effective for Howard as the casual complicity with which the sky-patriarch of “Iron Shadows in the Moon,” having avenged his only begotten son, indicates that the metallicized warriors will be allowed the conditional release of further killing, or the relative restraint with which he brings Conan to the brink of understanding the true depth of his “Citadel” predicament:

He tried to tell himself that this well connected somehow with the outer world, but his instincts told him it was a thing unnatural. He was not merely inside the hill; he was below it, far below the level of the city streets. How then could an outer wind find its way into the pits and blow up from below? A faint throbbing pulsed on that ghostly wind, like drums beating far, far below. A strong shudder shook the king of Aquilonia.

The contrast between Yara’s exquisitely calibrated and choreographed comeuppance in “The Tower of the Elephant” and Thugra Khotan’s perfunctory sendoff in “Black Colossus” highlights what a technical challenge it is to devise a suitable undoing for a quasi-omnipotent villain. This would continue to give Howard problems at times. With Xaltotun as with Yara, he was a wizardly wizard-killer, but the Master of Yimsha’s quietus is just hackwork on Conan’s part.

There is gratifying evidence in Volume One at how quick Howard was with the white-out; he was very good very quickly at keeping the overtly Good out of the Conan stories. The Mitraic high priest in the first submitted draft of “Phoenix” gives a little homily:

“…We see only the outward evidences; we do not see the eternal play of the forces which lie behind; the powers of Light opposed to the powers of Darkness. By a symbol of evil, a sorcerer calls forth nightmare shapes from the abyss; by a symbol of Light, they are hurled back again. Dark wings shadow our souls; other unseen wings are spread protectingly over us.”

That won’t do at all; it smacks of the bargain basement Manichaeanism of “The Hand of Nergal” and Conan of the Isles. We don’t want balance, we want balefulness. And Howard’s original synopsis for “Black Colossus” features the eleventh-hour “intercession of an old, old Kothian god.” Anyone who has suffered through the inability to let sleeping gods lie of the later Conan pastiches will be thankful that the Kothian deus never made it ex machina

Volume One is a not-at-all-embarrassing embarrassment of riches. “The Devil in Iron” is often disparaged as a paint-by-numbers Conan story, and yet it is haunted by the reanimated Dagonians. Eat, drink, and be merry, for yesterday we died:

…he was suddenly aware that the pinnacles of Dagon no longer glimmered through the trees. They had faded like smoke—the battlements, the crenellated towers, the great bronze gates, the velvets, the gold, the ivory, and the dark-haired women, and the men with their shaven skulls.

Xapur is an isle full of noises, which prompts speculation that Howard is echoing Prospero (after whom the Brule-replacement in “Phoenix” may have been named) in Act Four of The Tempest:

These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.

The arrival of this book means that Conan is no longer an albatross around the neck of Howard’s literary afterlife, but a phoenix like that traced by Epemitreus on a usurper’s blade, a phoenix capable of soaring up into the empyrean of timeless classic status. And any fence-sitters out there should keep in mind that Volume One offers both of the occasions on which the Cimmerian wields a beef-bone to murderous effect.

Near the end of Dean A. Miller’s survey The Epic Hero, there is a beautiful passage that says as much about Conan as it does about Akhilleus and Prince Igor, El Cid and Cu Chulainn:

The most naïve epic description still has the power to catch and hold us: all of us, not merely the old sword nobilities that once generated these images and songs. To the ominous flow of history as profane time, the ever young hero—we are all older than the oldest hero—opposes his hard, extreme, and tested fatal excellence.

As Conan opposes his hard, extreme, and tested fatal excellence to Ascalante’s assassins, Howard writes “His barbaric soul was ablaze, and the chants of old heroes were singing in his ears.” Those chants sing throughout Volume One. Wandering Star has made an old hero new again, or perhaps has helped us to realize just how new Howard’s Conan will always be.

Footnotes

¹Now that we can pore over the differences between the first submitted and the final published version of “The Phoenix on the Sword,” we can mourn the loss of a bit of mapmaking mischief:

“South of Hyperborea lies Brythunia,” he murmured aloud. Selecting a broad blank space far enough out on the Hyrkanian desert to baffle inquisitive explorers, he wrote laboriously, “Here be dragons.” Then leaning back he surveyed his work with childish pride.

Of course there is a sense in which the joke turned out to be on Conan, as he would ultimately be faced with a not at all imaginary dragon in “Red Nails.”

²We lack the story leading up to Conan’s self-crowning achievement the night Tarantia fell (not even a Karl Edward Wagner-imagined version, damn the luck) but maybe we don’t need it spelled out for us. Maybe Numedides was just Zaporavo or Olgerd Vladislav writ large, and was undermined and overthrown in much the same way.

³Louinet comments that “the real force of the tale [lies] not in its plot, but in the strange relationship binding Conan and Bêlit,” and yet there is a sense in which “Queen” is too little, too soon for its female lead. Would Howard have been better able to handle Bêlit two or three years later? Her dialogue is a marvel of passion and poetry, but we are denied her interior monologue. Howard keeps his distance from Bêlit; she is never a viewpoint character. Her gaze is adoring as it rests on Conan but we never see him through her eyes, as we will see him through the eyes of Yasmina, Valeria, or even, minus the pheromonal input, Balthus. There was scant profit in trade with the sons of Shem—what of the daughters of that land? Does the fact that Bêlit operates under the influence of both Cupid and cupidity account for Howard’s standoffishness?

The Chants of Old Heroes, Singing in Our Ears

Wandering Star Liberates Robert E. Howard’s Complete Conan of Cimmeria, Volume One (1932-1933)

Footnotes