Treading Jeweled Kingdoms Beneath His Cowboy Boots

It is somewhat cliche to introduce Robert Ervin Howard as the man who created Conan the Barbarian. It slights his other characters: Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, King Kull, Cormac Mac Art, and Black Turlogh. But truth told, Conan is the ultimate embodiment of the Howardian hero.

Robert E. Howard's fiction is usually thought of as sword and sorcery, but he wrote for all the pulp fiction magazines, most notably Weird Tales. His stories cross genres, and also include horror, detective stories, and westerns. However, as several critics have pointed out, any of these stories could be rewritten as a Conan story with only cosmetic alterations.

Howard was born in 1906 in Cross Plains, Texas. He was a runt as a child and older boys picked on him. To compensate, he took up weightlifting and boxing and became almost as much of a he-man as his favorite characters. It didn't help young Howard that he was an intelligent, moody, and above all, imaginative misfit with poor social skills. Howard began writing professionally not only because he best expressed himself through writing, but because he was completely unsuited for any other job in Cross Plains.

It is easy for the "lit snobs" to dismiss Howard's writing as purple prose for mass audiences. However, Howard had a distinct style with undeniable power. His writing is big, expressive and gloomy: a Wagnerian Opera filtered through the skies if the American prairie. His voice is supremely masculine, and he used it to extol the virtues of the self-made, independent man. Although in parodies, Howard's heroes are often stupid and dull-witted, Conan and his fictional brethren all possess keen intelligence, and usually out-smart their opponents as well as out-fight them. Although many of his characters came from different times and places, Howard was writing about a peculiarly American roughneck; they are the kind of men who tamed the West with nothing but smarts, determination and hard, back-breaking work.

Moreover, while literary merit is often judged by the number of professors teaching the works, there is something to be said for the fact that more people will correctly identify Conan the Barbarian than Jay Gatsby, or Nick Adams. If the three characters are personifications of different American Male stereotypes, it was Conan who endured the Depression and won World War II.

What makes Howard interesting to us is his use, and roundabout contribution, to High Weirdness. Although Howard never traveled more than 30 miles from his hometown, he loved to read about faraway times and places. His favorites were new articles on archaeology, anthropology, and history. Even in his most fantastic stories, he incorporated the latest research of the day on historical cultures. In addition, Howard corresponded with other pulp writers of the day, including H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith who also shared his passions for using real information and basing fantastic tales on it. This writer's community used shared plot devices and even characters alongside stock references to real history. The real and the imaginary combined and intertwined in the minds of the readers. Even today, it can be hard for the casual reader to know that the Cimmerians really were a proud, Celtic, warrior people, that the Yezidi people of the Middle East really do worship the Devil (well, after a fashion), or that Set really is an Egyptian serpent god. University librarians still get confused calls from well-meaning individuals for access to copies of Unausspreclichen Kulten and even the Nemedian Chronicles. His imagination can be that convincing.

Of course, none of Howard's inventions have reached the lunatic proportions of Lovecraft's infamous Necronomicon. (No, I'm not linking from that reference. It deserves its own topic with its own series of links.)