“The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian”, by Robert E. Howard, illustrated by Mark Schultz

 

496 pages, Del Rey, ISBN-13: 978-0345461513

In the early oughts, Del Rey began producing the complete works of Robert E. Howard; The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, illustrated by Mark Schultz, was the first volume to be published. I first heard of the Cimmerian when I saw the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger adaptation Conan the Barbarian on HBO; to learn from my Dad that this pale imitation of one of his boyhood heroes was meh at best was the height of insanity in my eyes…I mean, AH-nold was Conan; nobody, but NOBODY, could have played that part, and the movie was a rollicking good time with swords and wizards and blood and sex (a little). What’s not to love, right? That movie had to have been the best thing to happen to Conan since Frank Frazetta.

And THEN, I began collecting this Del Rey series of the original, unedited tales of Conan and…damnit, Dad was right again. The movie is still one of my favorites (the sequel? Not so much), but compared to these unadulterated Howard-and-ONLY-Howard tales (sorry, L. Sprague de Camp) the movie really is meh. We can at least be thankful that Howard has the following that he has and that his tales which, I would argue, truly launched the sword and sorcery milieu, are considered modern classics, and to thank Weird Tales for bringing him to the world’s attention – even as we bemoan their inability to pay him what he was owed; ah, well, then as now this literary environment is not for everyone.

The tales to be found in this volume are amongst the classics of the Conan corpus, printed in order of when they were originally published, rather than utilizing some later-day chronology that can only be guessed at, seeing as Howard himself seemed to write stories without regard to their placement in any sort of history. So we get The Phoenix on the Sword, The Frost Giant’s Daughter, The God in the Bowl, The Tower of the Elephant, The Scarlet Citadel, Queen of the Black Coast, Black Colossus, Iron Shadows in the Moon, Xuthal of the Dusk, The Pool of the Black One, Rogues in the House, The Vale of Lost Women and The Devil in Iron. But this collection also offers other Conan-related works, as well, such as the poem Cimmeria, several synopses Howard penned of his stories, various notes concerning the Hyborian Age and even a map drawn by the man himself.

What this volume of Conan lore does is prove that no one could write Conan like his creator could; I suppose I have to give credit to his inheritors for giving it a try and attempting to keep the flame flickering, but to appreciate the full force of the Cimmerian’s appeal one must return to the source material, as Del Rey has done. For all these being tales of blood and gore, Howard’s prose is actually quite good. His descriptions of characters, locations and events are detailed and descriptive, especially of the ancient cities that decorate this savage era. The battles rage and the blood flows with descriptive detail, almost to the point of absurdity: for some reason, Howard often wants his readers to know whose blood this character’s horse slipped on, or the exact positioning of the archers and the pikemen.

Seeing as these tales were written in the 30’s, the dialogue can occasionally be rather stilted or over-the-top; I mean, as uneducated barbarians go, Conan is as philosophical and, um, “kind” as they come, but even so, reading one deep (and lengthy) monologue after another from this muscle-bound philosopher became rather ridiculous after a time. Also, these dissertations read just like that, as if Howard had written an essay for a philosophy class, rather than as a conversation between two persons. This becomes more obvious as the stories flow, for I believe that the earlier tales are stronger than the latter. But don’t fret none, for after a discussion on the meaning of “civilized” comes to an end a ferocious gorilla-thing leaps at our hero and Conan must do what Conan does. This is what Howard’s Conan tales are, in a nutshell: deep philosophical debates on the meaning of civilization masquerading as blood-and-guts fantasy adventure.