The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E. Howard
I just finished reading this collection of early Robert E. Howard's Conan stories from the 1930's and I am surprised at the sleek prose and level of backstory conveyed in such short tales. This collection was something I grabbed on a whim in the stacks at the library while searching for another book and my expectations were not exceptionally high.
My only exposure to Conan as a character has been from the Arnold Schwarzenegger films and a handful of Marvel comics. Recently reading of his relationship with H.P. Lovecraft piqued my interest. I mean if Lovecraft was a pal, there has to be something there, right?
The first tale in the collection finds Conan as a king, fending off a coup and a monster sent by an evil wizard. Not too far out of the mold for what you might expect for a sword & sorcery tale, except that this is where the mold is being forged! Credit where credit is due, until this point the genre doesn't even exist yet. "Sword & Sorcery" as a label or phrase won't even be coined for another couple of decades!
The invocations of ancient mysticism and religious magical elements are ethereal even now...imagine your are a 14 year-old kid reading this in your room in December of 1932. Boom, this story just rocked your world. It alludes to years of history and story and intrigue, whetting your appetite for so much more.
Granted, Howard had the benefit of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan and Mars books and other contemporary works. Tarzan evokes some of the same savage-fish out of water quirks that we get in Conan. Also the fantastical action seems to whiff of John Carter to be sure, but the combination of magic and might blend so perfectly here that they feel completely new.
Tolkien's epics are still years away and the minds of readers are a blank canvas for Howard, untainted by bland retreads and disappointed expectations of decades of mediocre retellings of wizard vs. barbarian stories. No, here the pieces are set on the board for one of the first times and his moves are hypnotizing. This is it...this is ground zero, and it is oh, so compelling to read.
The stories get better as Howard finds his voice for Conan. He had tried his hand at this type of thing in preceding years with Kull and other characters, but none stuck. In Conan he was able to incorporate just the right mix of brutality, magic, history and fantasy. At the time, fantasy magazines abound with horror, crime and westerns, even fantasy, but here was something special.
The character of Conan develops over Howard's nine stories into a complex hero, bearing the weight of his past and the lessons of his many untold adventures. The reader is given a glimpse of the figurative and literal miles he has travelled in his life as the stories bounce around through periods of his life. These glimpses create pieces of a puzzle that entice us to read on and pour over details and allusions to the unspoken decades of exploits.
For all the praise I am heaping upon the stories, I'm afraid they really need the credence of context to fully deserve the attention here. As stand alone stories they are well-written action-adventure tales with some interesting elements, but very few surprises to modern readers. Anyone familiar with the genre will find little new here, but the craftwork is worth witnessing first-hand. We often miss much of the significance when talking about important works because we rely on derivatives to tell us the story.
I knew of Conan through movies and comics and from seeing dozens of copy-cat works, but never actually going to the source material. In reading them, I get a sense of the excitement these stories created in readers. Conan has become a part of popular lexicon, legend larger than himself.
Reading from these original stories allowed me a glimpse of a somewhat naive idea of science-fiction/fantasy in its infancy and that was certainly worth the time to read. Conan is not a favorite character of mine, though I do like sci-fi/fantasy. These stories comprise some of the earliest steps on the path to modern fantasy and sci-fi, and it was enlightening to see the bricks that laid the foundation for so much great work to follow.
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