Howard, Robert E - 2 - Bloody Crown of Conan, The

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The Bloody Crown of Conan

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Publication Information

Foreword

Introduction

The People of the Black Circle

The Hour of the Dragon

A Witch Shall Be Born

Miscellanea

Untitled Synopsis (The People of the Black Circle)

The Story Thus Far...

Untitled Synopsis

Untitled Draft

Untitled Synopsis (The Hour of the Dragon)

Notes on The Hour of the Dragon

Untitled Synopsis (A Witch Shall Be Born)

Appendices

The Bloody Crown of Conan

Hyborian Genesis Part II

Notes on the Conan Typescripts and the Chronology

Notes on the Original Howard Texts

Acknowledgments

Praise for Robert E. Howard

Also by Robert E. Howard

Preview for The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

The Bloody Crown of Conan

The illustrations in this book are dedicated

to Margaret and Louis Gianni

Gary Gianni

The Bloody Crown of Conan

The People of the Black Circle

first published Weird Tales, September, October and November 1934

The Hour of the Dragon

first published Weird Tales, December 1935 and January, February, March and April 1936

A Witch Shall Be Born

first published Weird Tales, December 1934

The Bloody Crown of Conan

Foreword

When I was a kid, I watched a man knock down a house with a sledge hammer. It wasn’t a

house exactly – a shack would be a more apt description. I can recall the afternoon vividly, the

neighbourhood boys assembled in my friend Joe’s yard because his father was about to

demolish an old shack which stood at the end of their property. What eight year old wouldn’t

want to witness that?

When I arrived, Mr. Lill was already sizing up the job with the large sledge hammer perched

over his broad shoulders. The structure leant towards him in a show of defiance. Perhaps the

man sensed the mockery for he exploded into action. He was an engine of destruction. With

arms spinning like a windmill he delivered crashing blows to insure maximum damage to his

teetering opponent. The clouds of dust combined with the groaning timbers created an illusion

of a fantastic battle taking place. I, for one, was enthralled by the spectacle and I wonder now

how many of those kids vicariously waged the fight with gritted teeth and clenched fists.

When the last perpendicular post was hurled onto the pile of wreckage, the man climbed atop

the heap, leaned on his sledge hammer and grimly surveyed his handiwork.

In retrospect it was a transcendent moment, a real life brush with the embodiment of John

Henry, Hercules and Samson. We have all had experiences similar to this in one form or

another and these memories can best be described as “Heroic Realism,” a term coined by the

writer Louis Menand. The fantasy elements aside, this is the quality I am chiefly interested in

with my work with Conan – the sense of real danger, romance and intrigue grounded in a

tangible reality.

As a teenager, years after that shack came crashing down, I came upon a paperback book with

a cover painting of a man leaning on a broadsword standing atop a pile of vanquished

opponents. Somehow in the deep recesses of my memories this picture had a familiar feel to it.

I thought of that afternoon and the thrill came rushing over me. The power of images.

The book, of course, was Conan the Adventurer by Robert E. Howard and the cover was

painted by Frank Frazetta. It was my introduction to Howard’s fictional barbarian.

That was a long time ago and many talented artists have portrayed Conan’s adventures. I was

content to stand aside and enjoy their work but the opportunity presented itself after I had

illustrated two of the other great Robert E. Howard heroes – Solomon Kane and Bran Mak

Morn. How could I resist?

The Bloody Crown of Conan

I feel privileged in depicting these characters and I now join the list of eminent illustrators who

have had a crack at depicting Conan. It is a fitting tribute to the writing ability of Robert E.

Howard that regardless of how many artists add to the mythos of Conan in books, comics and

movies, it is the original stories themselves and the powerful imagery they evoke that will

ultimately thrill the reader.

Gary Gianni

2003

The Bloody Crown of Conan

Introduction

“There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction,”

wrote Robert E. Howard to his friend H.P. Lovecraft. This certainly helps to explain some of

the zest to be found in his tales of the indomitable Conan of Cimmeria, for here is history as

vivid, dramatic fiction.

What? Conan as history? Surely this is fantasy, isn’t it? This world, “the Hyborian Age,” is

merely a figment of Howard’s imagination, right? Well, yes and no. Certainly it is Howard’s

unique literary creation – but into its creation he has poured all his love of history and legend

and romance.

Robert E. Howard was an extraordinarily gifted but emphatically commercial writer.

Storytelling apparently came naturally to him: friends of his youth attest that he was directing

their play as early as age ten, and friends of his young manhood tell us that he was a

spellbinding storyteller. Of course, we have the testament of his fiction to tell us that, too. And

while he himself disavowed any particular artistic motives, there is in his best work genuine

artistry. As Lovecraft noted, “He was greater than any profit-making policy that he could

adopt.”

But Howard put his natural storytelling talent to work in wresting a living for himself, so it was

important to him that his work find a market. In the early 1930s, with the Great Depression

settling upon the land, his markets, the pulp magazines, were struggling. Those that survived

sometimes did so by cutting rates, or reducing their frequency (and thus demand for new

material). As much as he loved the historical tales he had been writing for Oriental Stories,

mostly set during the Crusades or the eras of Mongol or Islamic conquests, and the stories of

ancient Irish warriors for which he had not found a market, they required a lot of research, and

that was time he could ill afford. “Every page of history teems with dramas that should be put

on paper,” he wrote. “A single paragraph may be packed with action and drama enough to fill a

whole volume of fiction work. I could never make a living writing such things, though; the

markets are too scanty, with requirements too narrow, and it takes me so long to complete one.”

Howard’s interest in history, as strong as it was, did not extend to “civilized” peoples. “When a

race – almost any race – is emerging from barbarism, or not yet emerged, they hold my

interest. I can seem to understand them, and to write intelligently of them. But as they progress

toward civilization, my grip on them begins to weaken, until at last it vanishes entirely, and I

find their ways and thoughts and ambitions perfectly alien and baffling. Thus the first Mongol

conquerors of China and India inspire in me the most intense interest and appreciation; but a

few generations later when they have adopted the civilization of their subjects, they stir not a

hint of interest in my mind. My study of history has been a continual search for newer

barbarians, from age to age.”

The Bloody Crown of Conan

During the early months of 1932, on a trip to Mission, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, the

answer came to him: the Hyborian Age, a period lying between the sinking of Atlantis and the

cataclysms that shaped our modern world, populated by the forebears – the veritable archetypes

– of all the barbarians he so loved to study. The character Conan “stalked full grown out of

oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.” These exploits took place in

a world populated by Elizabethan pirates, Irish reavers, and Barbary corsairs; American

frontiersmen and Cossack raiders; Egyptian sorcerers and followers of Roman mystery cults;

medieval knights and Assyrian armies. All were given disguises, but with no attempt to

actually hide their identities. In fact, Howard tried to give them names that would allow the

reader to guess their identities without too much effort – he wanted us to recognize them

instantly, but with the wink that says, “We know this is a story, right? On with it!” Can any

reader fail to recognize that Afghulistan is Afghanistan, or that Vendhya is India? Surely not!

With his creation of the Hyborian Age, Howard had created a world in which his beloved

historical barbarians could run riot, and he could weave those tales packed with action and

drama that he loved to tell. It’s a brilliant concept, and one I believe may have been suggested

to him by G.K. Chesterton, whose epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse was one of

Howard’s favorites, to judge not only from his effusive comments in two different letters to his

friend Clyde Smith in 1927, but from his frequent use of quotations from the poem as epigrams

or verse headings for his stories, and the fact that he was still quoting from it in letters as late as

1935. The Ballad of the White Horse tells of King Alfred and the Battle of Ethandune, but

Chesterton admits that “All of it that is not frankly fictitious, as in any prose romance about the

past, is meant to emphasize tradition rather than history.” Because the work he wants to

celebrate, the fight “for the Christian civilization against the heathen nihilism,” was “really

done by generation after generation,” he created fictitious Roman, Celtic, and Saxon heroes to

share in the glory of victory with Alfred. “It is the chief value of legend,” he wrote, “to mix up

the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening.

That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history.”

Chesterton, of course, was hardly the first to create such a literary work: the Arthurian

romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Sir Thomas Malory come to mind, and earlier still the

Norse sagas and the ancient legend of Beowulf. But Chesterton’s statement of rationale may

have wormed its way into Howard’s consciousness to emerge years later as the Hyborian Age.

Howard did write an epic poem, The Ballad of King Geraint, that was an echo of Chesterton’s:

he depicted a valiant last stand of the Celtic tribes of Britain and Ireland against the invading

Anglo-Saxons. But it wasn’t until his creation of the Hyborian Age in 1932 that he was able to

put this telescoping idea to really effective use, turning history into what Lovecraft termed

“vivid artificial legendry.”

Because Howard wrote a lengthy history of the Hyborian Age, and took pains to make it a self-

consistent world, some critics have placed him within what is termed the “imaginary worlds”

The Bloody Crown of Conan

tradition of fantasy, exemplified by such inventive writers as George Macdonald, William

Morris, Lord Dunsany, and J.R.R. Tolkien. But the Hyborian Age is historical, not imaginary:

it is simply a nexus where elements from different historical eras may come together for the

sake of the story. Part of the appeal of the Conan stories is that they seem so real, because we

recognize the world in which Conan moves. And Howard was not a literary stylist in the

manner of these “imaginary worlds” writers: he was a storyteller, who preferred clear, direct,

simple language with a minimum of description. There is, to be sure, considerable poetry in his

best prose, as the opening chapter of The Hour of the Dragon amply demonstrates. Howard

was raised on poetry, which his mother read to him, and was himself perhaps the best poet

among writers of the fantastic. As Steve Eng says, “Howard may have sensed that poetry suited

his imagination better than did prose. His fictional Sword-and-Sorcery heroes and foes would

seem to be more naturally chanted or sung about than portrayed in paragraphs.”

But there was another element to Howard’s fiction: “every urge in me,” he told E. Hoffmann

Price, “is to write realism.” This may seem incongruous coming from an author best known for

his fantasies, but in surveying the corpus of his work, we find a “realistic” novel, a great

number of boxing stories, many historical and western stories – in other words, a good deal of

realism. Jack London was perhaps his favorite writer: best known today for his outdoor

adventures, London was a noted socialist as well, whose semi-autobiographical Martin Eden,

the model for Howard’s own Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, has been suggested as the first

existentialist novel. Another writer Howard thought highly of was Jim Tully, whose

fictionalizations of his life as hobo, circus roustabout, boxer and journalist find echoes in

Howard’s work. Both London and Tully were “road kids,” and Howard frequently wrote of

characters, including Conan, who had left home to roam the world as youngsters.

In his seminal essay, ‘Robert E. Howard: Hard-Boiled Heroic Fantasist,’ George Knight

suggests that Howard was bringing to fantasy something of the same sensibility that his

contemporary Dashiell Hammett and others were bringing to the detective story: a gritty, tough

attitude toward life, expressed in simple, vigorously direct prose (not without poetry), with

violence as the dark heart of the tale. Conan in his Hyborian Age has much in common with the

Continental Op on the mean streets of San Francisco: he is a freelance operator, with a cynical,

worldly-wise attitude tempered by his own strict moral code. He feels no loyalty to rules

imposed by authority or tradition, choosing to live by rules that help him “maintain order in a

world tilting into insanity.” He can be hired, but he cannot be bought. He is, as Charles

Hoffman has noted, ‘Conan the Existentialist’: “The consummate self-determining man, alone

in a hostile universe.” Conan, says Hoffman, knows that life is meaningless: “There is no hope

here or hereafter in the cult of my people,” he says in Queen of the Black Coast. “In this world

men struggle and suffer vainly....” Yet this knowledge of the ultimate meaninglessness of

man’s actions does not cause Conan despair: he “demonstrates how a strong-willed man can

create goals, values, and meaning for himself.”

Herein, I think, lies a good part of Conan’s appeal. Our destiny, he says, does not lie in the

The Bloody Crown of Conan

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TheBloodyCrownofConan1ContentsTitlePageDedicationPublicationInformationForewordIntroductionThePeopleoftheBlackCircleTheHouroftheDragonAWitchShallBeBornMiscellaneaUntitledSynopsis(ThePeopleoftheBlackCircle)TheStoryThusFar...UntitledSynopsisUntitledDraftUntitledSynopsis(TheHouroftheDragon)NotesonTheHo...

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