Episode 6.5: By This Blog Post, I Rule
- James Hedrick
- Jun 9
- 11 min read
Welcome back everyone, to Episode 6.5 of Something About Dragons. I feel like I should explain why I keep splitting these episodes. And why do I call them episodes? Well, this project was originally conceived as a podcast. And it still is a podcast! You can find the early episodes here:
Currently available on Spotify; available soon on all major streaming platforms whenever I get the time to record, edit, rerecord, reedit, get a new microphone, get another new microphone, question my life choices, and then post all the episodes. Writing and adapting scripts is one thing. Trying to find the time to record a podcast with three kids and two jobs is something else. So, instead of delay any longer, I decided to go the old school blog route. But the scripts for 30-45 minute podcast episodes run pretty long for a blog post, between 5,500 and 6,500 words. Considerably longer than I'd like for a blog post that I'm looking to be readable in less than 15 mins, 20 tops (about 2,500-3,000 words). Hence, reworking the written scripts into shorter, more digestible blog posts.
That dispensed with, let's move on to the heart of today's installment, Conan the Cimmerian.
Honestly, as popular as Conan is, he is kinda tough to discuss. Mostly because what is there to say about the character that hasn’t already been said? Probably many, many times. But let’s give it a shot.
First and most obviously, Conan the Cimmerian, Conan on the page, isn’t Conan the Barbarian, Conan of the screen. We’re talking about Howard’s creation, so assume what I’m saying applies there and not necessarily to the (admittedly awesome) Schwarzenegger movies. And one thing I really want to address is literary Conan’s amorality. Conan doesn’t really have a mission, a purpose in many of the stories other than treasure and adventure. He has goals within the stories – protect his fort, steal stuff, murder that guy, murder that other guy – but while he’s set on the path from his initial introduction as a king, he’s not aiming for kingship in his wandering adventures. He’s just adventuring.
Not all fantasy is pure escapism, but Conan largely is. Howard obviously had themes he was interested in, most notably the superiority of certain aspects of “barbarism” to “civilization”. Let’s all remember than pulps were the descendants of the dime novels and, as such, had a lot of Western individualist romanticism underlying them. Again, we’re seeing some of the foundations of the “competent man” myth of later sci-fi writers like Asimov and Heinlein.
In Europe, at least, WWI had pretty well squashed the notion that individual bravery, honor, all that good noble warrior stuff was ever anything but nonsense. As General Patton said in 1922, “Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.”[1] We’ll see the effects of that realization crash into modern fantasy with Tolkien, but, in America, the horrific effects of modern military technology in the Great War had mostly passed us by. American has less than 10% of the combat deaths of just the UK in the Great War, much less the rest of Europe. So, there’s still the prevailing mythos of the cowboy, the loan, noble warrior. America at this time is still honoring Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and San Juan Hill, while Europe is developing a deep understanding of the lesson of the Light Brigade.
Conan as a literary figure embodies this free and independent spirit (and competence at violence) in a way that no early 20th century reader can really be in the Modern Era. As much as American's are yearning for a romantic frontier, free of the tyranny of law, order, and running water, that no longer really exists even in the U.S. Jefferson's yeoman farmers are dependent on the industrial capacity of businesses like Caterpillar and John Deere to produce tractors, when they aren't being driven out of the homes by the Dust Bowl. Geronimo surrendered in 1886; the last Apache raid in the West came in 1924. Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, they all go down in a blaze of glory, but they do go down. Civilization doesn't take well to even romantic outlaws.
There's no more frontier, even the Yukon goldrush was a generation or more in the past by the time Howard is publishing Conan. The lone individual, the lone competent man was always a myth - even the Western Cowboy hero or Kurosawan Ronin needed some place to save - but now the map is getting even smaller still. Civilization has come, with all its Gordian knot of unsolvable problems.
Then here comes Conan, to remind us all of Alexander's solution to the Gordian Knot. Which is to hit it with a sword. Thus does the modern experiencer of anomie live vicariously through Howard's sword swinging hero of the Hyborian age.
Essentially though, underneath the thin veneer of Howard’s criticism of civilization and modernity, you have a highly competent protagonist going on self-contained adventures. It’s perfect RPG fodder and the kind of character that can really appeal for escapist projectionism.
And, I think with the characters of Jirel and Conan, you see a real split in the type of fantasy stories both go on to inspire. Howard’s Conan is featured heavily in Gary Gygaxes Appendix N to the first edition of the D&D Dungeon Masters guide. Conan was also a major influence on Fafrhd and the Gray Mouser, who are themselves a major influence on D&D. Fafrhd and the Gray Mouser are essentially the archetypes for the barbarian and the rogue classes respectively.
Moore’s Jirel is not a major issue on later role-playing games. Neither is Clark Ashton Smith, our other exemplar of early pulp fantasy, but that’s another issue. Which is a crying shame, honestly. I’d absolutely play any RPG module based on any of the Jirel stories, particularly “Hellesgarde”.[2]
The Jirel stories offer potential role-playing scenarios beyond your typical hack & slash. Which is not to criticize hack-and-slash or equate Conan stories to it, though I will look a bit askance at Lieber and Lin Carter’s later additions to the Conan catalogue. However, Jirel very much prefigures a post-modern and late 20th century approach to fantasy literature, incorporating different ideas about character motivation and gender, which Conan doesn't. While Conan really sets the stage for D&D style role playing, not so much as a character himself, but in the influence he had on the people that wrote the stories that become so much of the foundation of everyone’s favorite RPG. High adventure vs. character-driven fantasy.
Also, and very much related, the Conan stories set a new bar and give everyone something to respond to, to react to. It sounds cliche, but if it weren’t for Lord of the Rings, Conan would absolutely be the fantasy ur text that we all compare everything to. Conan would be the Mt. Fuji of modern fantasy. And, to a certain extent, the Conan stories largely were the genre exemplar, up until the 60’s and LOTR’s real explosion in the U.S. An explosion which was due largely to a “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” approach to paperback publication by Ace Books, which we’ll discuss later in the series.
To just run through a few examples, Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone is set up as almost the Conan antithesis. Stygian Conan, if you will. Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sort of splits Conan into two characters and brings it a little more down to Earth and keeps it largely urban. Harold Shea is another anti-Conan-type character. In this stream of “low” or heroic fantasy, Conan gives both inspiration and something to react against for later authors until we get into the era of “epic” post-Tolkien (and really post-Terry Brooks) high fantasy.
Otherwise, there’s a couple other topics and themes I want to mention, either because they’re going to be important later or I just find them interesting. First, Conan stories can get super horny. This goes back to the Weird Tales cover story issue. Weird Tales paid more for cover stories. Weird Tales, specifically long-time editor Farnsworth Wright, liked covers that featured scantily clad women in danger. Therefore, “Red Nails” (and other Conan stories) drops in the occasional lady-on-lady whipping scene and a bit of cheap sexual assault. The Weird Tales cover I mentioned last week – July 1936, with scantily clad ladies holding down and attempting to sacrifice another scantily clad lady – is from the serialization of “Red Nails”. And it’s not the only horny Conan story, just the one where the sex scenes have the least to do with the plot.
Interestingly, especially since we’re discussing feminist pulp pioneer CL Moore as part of this episode, most of those sexy Weird Tales covers were painted by an artist named Margaret Brundage. There’s a decent argument to be made that Brundage’s covers were both wildly influential and less exploitative/male gaze-y than much of the similar, contemporary cover art. Personally, I think as an artist Brundage is always careful to make sure the characters she paints never break the fourth wall. The scantily-clad female characters are always participating in the scene/story, never really nodding to the fact that they’re being ogled or winking in acknowledgement to viewers. It’s an interesting dynamic and there’s a lot to recommend Brundage’s covers. Some, like Weird Tales, Volume 22, No. 4 from October 1933, are downright iconic.
We have to move on, but if you're interested in the art and artists of Weird Tales, I recommend two sources. First, a July 2021 article from Pulpfest.com on Brundage, and the March 6, 2019 episode of Imaginary Worlds podcast on Brundage. Both are excellent.
Back to Conan. Again, another thing to mention is that the casual racism is pretty extensive here. There are quotes like, “The pay was poor, the wine was sour, and I don’t like black women,” from Red Nails. Or, “The Picts were a white race, though swarthy, but the border men never spoke of them as such,” from Beyond the Black River. Again, it’s my humble opinion that Howard’s casual racism is somewhat less virulent than the eugenics of Burroughs or Lovecraft’s deep fear of the other. Howard uses race as a cheap shorthand to describe different cultures. It’s lazy writing, and Howard absolutely accepts, probably unconsciously, the racial hierarchies of the time.
It’s not hard to see some cracks between Howard’s obvious interest in barbarism, savagery, and civilization but that discussion only seems to matter for Howard when applied to white people. There’s some racial coding of certain civilizations as inscrutable Asians, some antisemitic Jewish tropes sprinkled around. Even a bit of “white savior-ism” in Queen of the Black Coast and House of the Dragon. But it’s definitely the issue of blackness and what that means that comes up most frequently and is used most often as a substitute or synonym for “less than.” Be forewarned.
On a more positive note, Howard is a master of the action scene. Even more than Burroughs, the guy knew how to write action and immediacy. Conan also has great one-liners. Even in his introduction, in Phoenix on the Sword, while fighting a mob of potential assassins, he basically pulls a Neo in the Matrix, mocks his enemies, and says, quote, “who dies first?” through “smashed and bloody lips.” In “Gods of the North”, an enemy asks Conan for his name so that he may tell his friends who he killed. Conan responds, “Not in Vanaheim…but in Valhalla will you tell your brothers that you met Conan of Cimmeria.” Or when he commented, “When did a priest ever keep an oath?” Which says a little something about the corrupt nature of the world Conan roams through.
Howard also does a great job of creating cool monsters and, occasionally, giving Conan something to do besides stab them. I mentioned the fire demon in Beyond the Black River in the previous post. He negotiates to free the elephant god Yag-kosha in The Tower of the Elephant, which brings in some of the cosmic influence of Lovecraft. He fights evil baboon demons (The Phoenix on the Sword), kills Nabonidus the Red Priest mid-monologue with a thrown chair (Rogues in the House, a personal favorite). Howard’s description of the battlefield in Gods of the North is brilliant, followed by an indescribable chase sequence. Howard could write. His style was all immediacy and action, and it has been a major influence on later writers.
Oh yeah, and he fights a giant spider in Tower of the Elephant. The scene is…magical. We might see that again somewhere.
Fianlly, perhaps most importantly, Howard wrote a kind of world bible for the Conan setting. The Hyborian Age is a pseudo history of the world up until the time of Conan, including the fall of Atlantis, the Stygians, migrations of peoples, etc. Be forewarned, the “barbarism” vs. civilization commentary (and the constant discussion of race “mixing”) can get really tiresome. For example, at one point he describes the lower classes of an area as “a down-trodden mongrel horde, a mixture…”
But The Hyborian Age is an interesting document to review to see the thought that Howard is putting into the backstory of his fiction. It does make the world feel more concrete. Conan (and other characters) mention other nations, ideas, etc. all the time that aren’t directly relevant to the immediate story, but are consistent across the stories and give the world a lived-in feel. You really see the parallels to someone like Robert Jordan, and the development of Randland. Each nation having one or two major traits to use as a basis for distinguishing their culture. Jordan, of course, was originally a writer of later Conan pastiches in the ‘80’s before he published Wheel of Time. Which is actually how I originally got to Conan, backwards through Wheel of Time, RJ’s Conan, and then original Conan.
Conan has been a frequent subject of pastiches and extensions of his story by later authors, most notably, or infamously perhaps, by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp. You’ll notice that none of those stories are directly referenced here, and I leave you to suss out what that means regarding their quality. We may come back to these as we get into later authors. I’m planning on covering stories by both de Camp and Carter, as well as Robert Jordan and Poul Anderson and Harry Turtledove, all of whom have written Conan stories (with varying degrees of success), so he’ll probably come up again.
And I think that’s a wrap for today. We’re moving into the time when the pulp fantasy genre becomes less weird and more codified, allowing for the development of long-running and famous characters, like Jirel and Conan, but also less well remembered characters like Jules de Grandin or Solomon Kane. With Jirel, we talked in the previous episode about the interiority of the character, how CL Moore explores psychological motivations, while taking Jirel to a variety of secondary worlds. Conan is more immediate and physical, and, while the stories contain a lot of racial coding and shorthand, the immediacy and visceral nature of Howard’s writing make them a worthwhile read, even today. We’re moving out a bit of the wild west of the weird fiction days and into some more codified genre territory.
Next time, we’ll going to do something a little different. So far, we’ve been working our way through early fantasy more-or-less chronologically. Moore and Howard are both publishing throughout the 1930’s, but the Jirel and Conan series start in 1934 and 1932, respectively, so that’s why we covered them here. Next episode, we’re going to blur the chronology a bit and pick up two pieces from 1936 and 1939, before back tracking in two episodes to pick up two stories published in 1936 and 1938.
For those of you who have been reading ahead, I think you know where this is going. Prepare yourselves, fantasy fans. Next episode, with no more gilding the lily and without any further ado, we’re going to introduce the grand master himself. The one. The only. The genre godfather and the Eru Ilúvatar to my…let’s say, Elrond? There’s not really a historian among the Valar or Maiar, so the metaphor kinda falls apart on me.
It’s Tolkien. Eight episodes in, and we’re finally to the man himself. And of course, what else could we start with Tolkien but his…essays. That’s right. Get pumped to dig into the transcribed lectures of a perfectionist Oxford Classics professor. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and the famous On Fairy Stories, next time on Something About Dragons.
[2] There does seem to be an RPG based on Black God’s Kiss under development now. Disappointingly, the Kickstarter closed in September 2022, so I can't contribute to it. See here: https://www.blazingworlds.com/
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