The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, Robert E. Howard

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language: English
country: USA
year: 1932-1967
form: short fiction
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 31.12.23-15.12.24

The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian collects “the first” thirteen of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, plus a poem, along with some miscellaneous ancillary material that I mostly ignored except for “The Hyborian Age”, a backstory essay Howard wrote summarizing his world-building. as might be expected, it is often wildly racist and sexist, and this is exacerbated by the fact that this edition, published by Del Rey in 2002, bills itself as “fully illustrated throughout”. the illustrations are pretty much without exception glaringly sexist, racist, or both. given the number of people involved in the production of this book it’s a pretty searing indictment of the editorial environment at Del Rey!

the actual stories are, on the whole, much like the illustrations: racist and sexist, deeply rooted in 1930s American racism and the 19th-century racial thought that shaped the sources Howard drew on for his world-building. as I’ve said before, Conan directly adopts many of the stereotypes of “Celts” in 19th-century race science but with their valence inverted, adding a little twist of the “Aryan” Germanic barbarian and positioning him squarely against the “decadent” inhabitants of “civilized” urban areas and states, with their corrupt politics, their dubious racial backgrounds, and their “softness”.

with that said, I think Howard is actually a pretty good prose writer for about 30 pages at a time — approximately the length of one story. his pacing is effective, his descriptions are vivid, and he’s good at action sequences. reading multiple stories in succession does, however, tend to drag, because he ultimately only had two concepts: Conan and a sexy white woman are trapped in or near a ruin inhabited by evil dark-skinned humans or inhuman monsters, or Conan has to fight his way out of some kind of supernatural trap in a decadent city.

a few stories stood out for me:

• “The Phoenix and the Sword” is the first Conan story, published in 1932, and I think it may be the best in the collection, not least because its setting is substantially different: here Conan has become the King of Aquilonia; we see him in perhaps his forties, still sharp and eager for battle but weighed down by the responsibilities of state, ultimately leading to a supernaturally-backed coup, which is in turn riven by internal politicking. its villain is still an evil dark-skinned sorcerer, but it’s one of the only stories which I would say had interesting characterization.
• “The Tower of the Elephant” is a partial inspiration for the snake tower heist scene in the 1982 film, but its content here is very different: within the tower Conan finds a terrifying alien being — but not, for once, a monster. rather, the being has been trapped by an evil sorcerer and begs Conan to release it from its misery and to avenge it. this was one of two such variations, and it made a refreshing change.
• “Iron Shadows in the Moon” (originally published as “Shadows in the Moonlight”) is largely pretty standard racist garbage, but it’s also the only story whose female main character — I would even venture to call her a protagonist — has meaningful agency and, in fact, gets to rescue Conan when he’s been tied up by pirates. it’s not a great story, but the bar for Howard’s handling of women is so low that I did want to flag it as a nice surprise.
• “Rogues in the House” features a “primitive” humanoid from distant jungles who’s explicitly described as an intermediate evolutionary step between apes and humans — the usual wildly racist stuff. however, in stark contrast to many of the other stories, not only does the the story frame him as partly justified in his violent killing of a bunch of people (he’s been imprisoned and possibly tortured by an evil priest), but also when Conan kills him both Conan and the narration explicitly reject the idea that he is “merely” an animal. Conan in fact says: “I have slain a man tonight, not a beast. I will count him among the chiefs whose souls I’ve sent into the dark, and my women will sing of him.” again, it’s not good, but the bar for Howard is so low that any deviation from unmitigated racism stands out.

otherwise there’s just not a lot to write home about. I was especially unimpressed by “The Vale of Lost Women”, which has the added distinction of having been published not during Howard’s lifetime but rather in 1967, at the height of the civil rights movement. to add insult to injury, Mark Schultz opted to close the story with an illustration of what is obviously a Nguni shield, not even bothering to pretend that it’s not a story about Conan murdering a bunch of Evil Africans. it’s also apparently inspired by a romanticized interpretation of the life of John Richard Parker — once again we find Celticism and settler colonialism closely entangled, wrapped up here in a veneer of European colonialism in Africa.

all in all, while I didn’t hate all of this, it was not particularly inspiring, and I didn’t come out of it feeling particularly moved to read more Conan stories. I think I’m likely to get more out of Howard’s other protagonists, perhaps especially Bran Mak Morn and maybe Kull.

moods: adventurous, grimy, lighthearted, tense

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