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Robert Ervin Howard (1906-36) was born in Peaster, Texas, and lived most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of Texas between Abilene and Brownwood. During his last decade, this prolific and versatile writer turned out a large volume of what was
then called "pulp fiction"-sport, detective, western, historical, adventure, weird, and ghost stories, as well as his many stories of adventure fantasy. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert W. Chambers, Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, Jack London, and H. P. Lovecraft
(of whom he was a pen pal) all influenced him. At the age of thirty, he ended a promising literary career by suicide. Howard's adventure fantasies belong to a kind of fiction called heroic fantasy, or sometimes swordplay-and-sorcery stories. Such stories are laid in a world not as it is or was but as it ought to have been. The setting may be the world as it is conceived to have been long ago, or as it will be in the distant future, or on another planet, or in another dimension. In such a world, magic works and spirits are real, but modem science and technology are essentially unknown. Either they have not yet been discovered, or they have been forgotten. Men are mighty, women are beautiful, problems are simple, and life is adventurous. When well done, such tales furnish the purest fun to be found in modern fiction. They are designed primarily to entertain, not to educate, uplift, or convert to some faith or ideology. They derive ultimately from the myths, legends, and epics of ancient times and primitive peoples. After several centuries of neglect, William Morris revived the genre in England in the 1880s. Early in this century, Lord Dunsany and Eric R. Eddison made further contributions to the field. A notable recent addition to it has been the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. The appearance of the American magazines Weird Tales in 1923 and Unknown Worlds in 1939 created new markets for heroic fantasy, and many notable stories in the genre were published. Among these, Howard's tales were outstanding. Howard wrote several series of heroic fantasies, most of them published in Weird Tales. Of these, the longest and most popular series comprised the Conan stories. Eighteen Conan stories were published in Howard's lifetime. Eight others, from complete manuscripts to mere fragments and outlines, have been discovered among Howard's papers since 1950. Late in 1951, I stumbled upon a cache of Howard's manuscripts in the apartment of the then literary agent for Howard's estate. These included a few unpublished Conan stories, which I edited for publication. Other manuscripts have been found in more recent years bv Glenn Lord, literary agent for the Howard estate, in collections of Howard's papers. The incomplete state of the Conan saga has tempted me and others to add to it, as Howard might have done had he lived. In the early 1950s, I rewrote the manuscripts of four of Howard's unpublished adventure stories, with medieval or modem settings, to turn them into Conan stories. More recently, my colleagues Bjorn Nyberg and Lin Carter have collaborated with me in the completion of the stories that Howard left unfinished and in the composition of pastiches, based upon hints in Howard's notes and letters, to fill the gaps in the saga. The reader must judge how successful our posthumous collaboration with Howard had been. Before he undertook the writing of the Conan stories, Howard constructed a pseudo-history of Conan's world, with the geography, ethnography, and political units clearly worked out. It is partly the concreteness of Howard's imaginary world that gives his stories their vividness and fascination - his sharp, gorgeous, consistent vision of "a purple and golden and crimson universe where anything can happen - except the tedious." He incorporated this plan in a long essay, The Hyborian Age, which is printed in two parts in the volumes Conan and Conan the Avenger of this series. According to Howard's scheme, Conan lived, loved, and plunged into his desperate adventures about twelve thousand years ago, eight thousand years after the sinking of Atlantis and seven thousand before the beginnings of recorded history. In this time (according to Howard) the western parts of the main continent of the Eastern Hemisphere were occupied by the Hyborian kingdoms. These comprised a galaxy of states set up by northern invaders, the Hyborians, three thousand years earlier on the ruins of the evil empire of Acheron. South of the Hyborian kingdoms lay the quarreling city-states of Shem. Beyond Shem slumbered the ancient, sinister kingdom of Stygia, the rival and partner of Acheron in the days of the latter's bloodstained glory. Further south, yet, beyond deserts and veldts, were barbarous black kingdoms. North of the Hyborians lay the barbarian lands of Cimmeria, Hyperborea, Vanaheim, and Asgard. West, along the ocean, were the fierce, savage Picts. To the east glittered the Hyrkanian kingdoms, of which the mightiest was Turan. About 500 years after the time of Conan the Great, most of these realms were swept away by barbarian invasions and migrations. After some centuries during which the earth supported a drastically shrunken population of wandering, quarreling barbarians, civilization - what was left of it - was further overwhelmed by the last advance of the glaciers from the poles and by a convulsion of nature like that which had previously destroyed Atlantis. At this time, the North and Mediterranean Seas were formed, the great inland Vilayet Sea shrank to the dimensions of the present Caspian, and vast areas of West Africa arose from beneath the waves of the Atlantic. Mankind sank to the most primitive savagery. After the retreat of the ice of this glaciation, civilization again revived and recorded history began. Conan was a gigantic barbarian adventurer who roistered, brawled, and hauled his way across half the prehistoric world, to rise at last to the throne of a mighty realm. The son of a blacksmith in the bleak, backward northern country of Cimmeria, Conan was bom on a battlefield in that land of rugged hills and somber skies. As a youth, he took part in the sack of the Aquilonian frontier settlement of Venarium. Later, joining a band of AEsir in a raid into Hyperborea, Conan was captured by the Hyperboreans. Escaping from the Hyperborean slave pen, he wandered south into the kingdom of Zamora. For several years he made a precanous living there and in the adjacent lands of Corinthia and Nemedia as a thief. (See map, pages 6 and 7.) Green to civilization and quite lawless by nature, he made up for his lack of subtlety and sophistication by natural shrewdness and by the herculean physique he had inherited from his father. Tiring of this starveling existence, Conan enlisted as a mercenary soldier in the armies of Turan. For the next two years he traveled widely, as far east as the fabled lands of Meru and Khitai. He also refined his archery and horsemanship, both of which had been at best indifferent up to the time of his joining the Turanians. It is during the later part of his Turanian service that the present volume begins. |