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Robert E. Howard (1906-36), the creator of Conan, was born in Peaster, Texas,
and spent most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of Texas. During his
short life (which ended in suicide at the age of thirty) Howard turned out a
large volume of popular fiction: sport, detective, western, historical,
adventure, science-fiction, weird, and ghost stories, besides his verse and
his many fantasies. Of his several series of heroic fantasies, the most
popular have been the Conan stories. Eighteen of these were published in
Howard's lifetime; eight others, from mere fragments and outlines to complete
manuscripts, have been found among his papers since 1950. The incomplete
stories have been completed by my colleague Lin Carter and myself.
In addition, in the early 1950s, I rewrote four unpublished Howard manuscripts
of oriental adventure, to convert them into Conan stories by changing names,
deleting anachronisms, and introducing a supernatural element. This was not
hard, since Howard's heroes were pretty much all cut from the same cloth, and
the resulting posthumous collaborations are still about three-quarters or
four-fifths Howard. Two of these converted stories appear in the present
volume: Hawks over Shem (originally called "Hawks over Egypt"), a story laid
in eleventh-century Egypt, in the reign of the mad Caliph Hakim; and The Road
of the Eagles, originally placed in the sixteenth-century Turkish Empire.
Moreover, my colleagues Lin Carter and Bjorn Nyberg and I have collaborated on
several Conan pastiches, based upon hints in Howard's notes and letters.
The Conan stories are laid in Howard's fictional Hyborian Age, about twelve
thousand years ago between the sinking of Atlantis and the beginnings of
recorded history. Conan, a gigaqtic barbarian adventurer from the backward
northern land of Cimmeria, arrived as a youth in the kingdom of Zamora (see
the map) and for several years made a precarious living there and in
neighboring lands as a thief. Then he served as a mercenary soldier, first in
the oriental realm of Turan and then in the Hyborian kingdoms.
Forced to flee from Argos, Conan became a pirate along the coasts of Kush, in
partnership with a Shemitish she-pirate, Be1it, with a crew of black
cor-sairs. After Belit's death and some hairsbreadth adventures among the
black tribes, he returned to the trade of mercenary in Shem. Here the present
volume begins.
Nearly twenty years ago, my old friend John D. Clark, a chemist and a Conan
buff long before I was, edited the then known Conan stories for the volumes
published by Gnome Press. He wrote an eloquent introduction to the first
volume of this series to be issued, Conan the Conqueror. This essay gives a
free-swinging impression of Howard's fiction in general and the Conan stories
in particular. Dr. Clark has allowed me to quote it here:
It was almost seventeen years ago when I collided with the Hyborian Age. It
was a notable collision, occurring when I was caught by the somewhat juicy
cover on the September 1933 Weird Tales, read The Slithering
Shadow, and met Conan for the first time. It was an introduction that
stuck, and from then on I followed the adventures of that slightly
unconventional character with more than casual interest. A little later (1935
or so) Schuyler, Miller, and I decided to make a try at plotting out
Conan's world. It turned out to be ridiculously easy. The countries flopped
out on the paper, squirmed about a bit, and clicked together into an
indubitable and obviously authentic map. We wrote to Howard then and found
that his own map was practically identical with ours; his biography of Conan
was also identical in all important respects with the one Miller and I had
concocted from the internal evidence in the stories. As I remember. the most
important point of disagreement was a two years' difference in Conan's age at
one point in the stories.
We knew then that we had a story-teller on our hands who knew his business.
And when we read the manuscript of The Hyborian Age, some time before it
was first published, we were sure of it.
Anyhow, in the next few years I managed to pick up the rest of Howard's
fantasies, including King Kull and all the rest. It was obvious, of course,
that although some of them had apparently been written before that gorgeous
concept filtered into his mind, they might be fitted into the pattern with a
little stretching. . . .
Among the Conan stories are fragments of the biography of that remarkable
character, as deduced by Miller and myself, accounting for most of Conan's
travels and adventures that are not recounted in the tales themselves. They
do not, however, explain how he managed to get rid of the woman of which he
was usually possessed by the end of a story in time for him to acquire another
in the next. I might, by the way, recommend that question as a subject for
literary research to some budding Ph.D. in English. The results of the
inquiry might be at least as useful as a publication purporting finally to
decide whether Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford really wrote the works of
the alleged W. Shakespeare. . . .
I do not intend to write about Robert E. Howard himself. I never knew him
personally and those who did can do a better job than I. I knew him only as the
writer of some incredibly good fantasy. The parts of a writer that don't die
with his body are his stories - and Howard's yarns are not going to die among
those who frankly and wholeheartedly like adventure on the grand scale. You
are probably one of those readers or you wouldn't have bought this book in the
first place.
Howard was a first-rate teller of tales, with a remarkable technical command
of his tools and with a complete lack of inhibitions. With a fine and free
hand he took what he liked from the more spectacular aspects of all ages and
climes: proper names of every conceivable linguistic derivation, weapons from
everywhere and everywhen under the sun, customs and classes from the whole
ancient and medieval world, and fitted the whole together into a coherent and
self-consistent cosmos without a visible joint. Then he added a king-sized
portion of the supernatural to add zest to the whole, and the result was a
purple and golden and crimson universe where anything can happen - except the
tedious.
His heroes are never profound - but they are never dull. Kull, Solomon
Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Conan himself, walk and talk and are alive and of one
piece. They may not be exactly the types of persons whom we would invite to a
polite party, but they're not exactly the sort of persons whom we would forget
if they came anyway. Conan, the hero of all Howard's heroes, is the armored
swashbuckler, indestructible and irresistible, that we've all wanted to be at
one time or another; the women, in appearance, 'manner, and costume (or lack
of it) are the inmates of the sort of harem that harems ought to be but aren't
(and isn't it a shame, and wouldn't it be nice, if they were commoner?); the
villains are villainous as only perfect villains can be; the sorcerers are
sorcerers in spades; and the apparitions they conjure up, or who appear under
their own power, are (thank God!) out of this world.
And above all Howard was a story-teller. The story came first, last, and in
between. Something is always happening, and the flow of action never
hesitates from beginning to end, as one incident flows smoothly and inevitably
into the next with never a pause for the reader to take breath. Don't look
for hidden philosophical meanings or intellectual puzzles in the yarns - they
aren't there. Howard was a story-teller. The tales are the
sword-and-cloaker carried to the ultimate limit and a little beyond, with
enough extra sex to keep the results off the more tedious library shelves.
So here is the book. If you have read of Conan before, you know what to
expect. If you haven't, and are addicted to fantastic adventure, you can
repair the omission and sit down now and read of the gods and demons and of
the warriors and their women and of their adventures in a world that never was
but should have been. If the history propounded doesn't agree with what you
know of history - if the ethnology is remarkable and the geology more so - don't
let it worry you. Howard was writing of another Earth than this one - one
painted in brighter colors and on a grander scale.
If, on the other hand, you insist on realism in your reading - if you must have
novels about introverts suffering in a brutal world - if your meat is something
"close to the soil" or concerned with psychopathology or the state of the world,
then, my friend, this book is not for you. You'd better find yourself a hole
and read Crime and Punishment. But I won't be there with you - I have an
engagement in the Hyborian Age, and will be busy all evening.
John D. Clark, Ph.D.
New York City
April 5, 1950
For further information on and opinions about Howard, the Conan stories, and
heroic fantasy in general, see the other volumes of this series.
L. Sprague de Camp
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