Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Cimmerian

Did Howard ever refer to Conan as “Conan the Barbarian”?

He did not. Despite being the most commonly used epithet over the years, the creator of the character widely known as Conan the Barbarian never referred to him as such, neither in the stories, nor in his drafts, synopses or letters.

So what did Howard call him?

In the stories, Conan is most often referred to, or refers to himself, as “Conan the Cimmerian,” or “Conan of Cimmeria.” He is also once referred to as “Conan of the black hair,” “Conan the northron,” “Conan the Throat-slitter,” “Conan the buccaneer,” “Conan of the Barachan pirates,” and twice as “Conan of Aquilonia” and “Conan of Ghor,” referring to his status as , respectively, king and hetman of those places. In his letters, Howard always referred to Conan, when he used an epithet at all, as “Conan the Cimmerian.”

If not Howard, then who came up with “Conan the Barbarian” then?

There are two possibilities: Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, used the phrase in promotional material for the magazine. The second is Howard’s friend Tevis Clyde Smith, as recalled by Novalyne Price:

Bob thought a minute. “Every way, but mostly with a character, I suppose. I’ve got a character going now-” “Conan, the Barbarian,” Clyde interrupted. “A ruthless barbarian who loves, fights, and battles the supernatural.”

— One Who Walked Alone, page 20

It’s unclear who came up with it first, but in terms of print, Wright would appear to be the first to use “Conan the Barbarian” in publishing.

Robert E. Howard in Depth

Where can I learn more about Howard?

An excellent place to start would be Rusty Burke’s “A Short Biography of Robert E. Howard,” available online at the Robert E. Howard United Press Association’s site. CPI (Conan Properties International) has an Official Robert E. Howard site and forums, with plenty of information and discussion on the man and his works. The Wikipedia entry for Howard is a good deal better than it was in previous iterations, but the nature of a publically-editable database means that anyone can go in there and alter it, so it should be correlated with other sources wherever possible. Other excellent online resources can be found at The Robert E. Howard Directory, which include blogs from established Howard scholars: Don Herron’s site, Damon Sasser’s Robert E. Howard: Two Gun Raconteur blog, Dennis McHaney’s McHaney’s Robert E. Howard, Dave Hardy’s Fire and Sword, Ed Waterman’s Barbarian Keep, Brian Murphy’s The Silver Key, the now defunct The Cimmerian blog, and more: just peruse the links to the left.

Beyond the internet, there is a wealth of great scholarly material about Howard, much of which can be found in the “about REH” section of Bill Thom’s essential bibliographic site Howard Works. In particular, Mark Finn’s Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard is an excellent biography, with a second, revised edition coming soon. Other excellent books on Howard’s life include Glenn Lord’s The Last Celt: A Bio-Bibliography of Robert Ervin Howard, Novalyne Price’s One Who Walked Alone, Tevis Clyde Smith’s Report on a Writing Man & Other Reminiscences of Robert E. Howard, and Dennis McHaney’s Robert E. Howard: World’s Greatest Pulpster.

Robert E. Howard and the Whole Wide World

Did Howard ever leave his hometown?

Although it’s sometimes asserted that Howard never left his home state — sometimes that he never even left his home town — there is substantial evidence that Howard traveled outside of Texas. Indeed, Howard left his home town of Peaster fairly early in life, moving to a number of different towns before finally settling in Cross Plains — Dark Valley, Seminole, Bronte, Poteet, Palo Pinto, somewhere in “the Wichita Falls country” (possibly Burkburnett), Bagwell, Cross Cut, and Burkett.* Howard made a few extended stays in Brownwood for school or college, as well as personal visits. It is known that Howard visited San Antonio, Austin, Galveston, Fort Worth and Rio Grande in Texas, as well as New Orleans, Santa Fe and Carlsbad in New Mexico. Quite well-travelled for a Depression-era Texan.

Let’s crunch the numbers:

Cross Plains to Brownwood, Texas = 30 miles
Cross Plains to Peaster, Texas = 91 miles
Cross Plains to Fort Worth, Texas = 115 miles
Cross Plains to Austin, Texas = 153 miles
Cross Plains to San Antonio, Texas = 191 miles
Cross Plains to Carlsbad, New Mexico = 296 miles
Cross Plains to Santa Fe, New Mexico = 306 miles
Cross Plains to Galveston, Texas = 324 miles
Cross Plains to New Orleans = 558 miles

So you can see, even if we consider Howard’s occassional trips to Brownwood, Howard traveled far from his home, and in fact seems to have traveled not just hundreds, but thousands of miles over the course of his life.  Again, this is a Depression-Era Texan we’re talking about.

*Special thanks to Rob Roehm for clarifying the many towns of Howard’s youth.

Robert E. Howard and the Ghost of Conan

I heard that Howard boarded up his windows at night because he feared his “enemies” would come and get him, and that he actually believed the ghost of King Conan was coming to him at night, forcing him to write his adventures at axe-point or he’d kill him, leading to Howard writing all night and collapsing exhausted at the typewriter in the early morning. What’s that all about?

Most of these misconceptions can be traced to “Conan Unchained,” a documentary charting the making of Conan the Barbarian. It is not a great source for accurate information on Robert E. Howard.

…He was convinced that, you know, the town wanted to exterminate him, this kind of thing, and he’d go home and board up his windows and load rifles — complete nut! But the best part, is he’s alone one night, and he feels a shadow overtake him from behind, and he knows that Conan is standing behind him with a large axe. And Conan tells him, “Just stay there and write, and if you don’t do exactly what I’m gonna tell you, I’m gonna cleave you down the middle.” And so, he’s so terrified, because Conan just exudes such power and fear, and he could just see the axe glinting in his peripheral vision, you know, that he just writes all night! And of course with the coming of dawn, he turns around finally and Conan is gone. So he falls upon the floor completely spent, and he realises “I only have to sleep for a few hours, because then I must fortify myself – for when darkness comes again, so will Conan.” And of course, Conan did, and he would, almost all these stories, in a very short period of time because Conan was standing over him with an axe – and I’ve always felt that way myself!”

—  John Milius (Starting 7:10 of the above video)

The first anecdote is completely made up. There is no evidence or suggestion for Howard doing anything of the sort among the letters or hearsay of the time,* and there’s certainly no physical evidence for boarded-up windows at the Howards’ house. Complete fantasy.

The second anecdote may be a misinterpretation of several sources, where Howard recounts the creation of Conan in his mind:

I’m rather of the opinion myself that widespread myths and legends are based on some fact, though the fact may be distorted out of all recognition in the telling. While I don’t go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present or even the future work through the thoughts and actions of living men. This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen or rather, off my typewriter almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of storywriting. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn’t do it. I do not attempt to explain this by esoteric or occult means, but the facts remain. I still write of Conan more powerfully and with more understanding than any of my other characters. But the time will probably come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write convincingly of him at all. That has happened in the past with nearly all my rather numerous characters; suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away, leaving me to search for another character.

— Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, December 14th, 1933

Here, Howard is clearly speaking figuratively and not literally: Conan seemed to grow up in his mind, Howard only seemed to be relating events, as if the man was standing over his shoulder. Nowhere does Howard say anything about actually experiencing the presence of an antediluvian ghost-king looming over his shoulder, and in fact, he specifically discounts any sort of supernatural occurence being involved – though he agnostically refuses to outright deny anything.

Howard produced a biographical sketch for Alvin Earl Perry, which includes the following paragraph:

Conan simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande. I did not create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.

— To Alvin Earl Perry, ca. early 1935

On its own, that last sentence might be construed as ambiguous — if one ignores the first sentence, where Howard notes that Conan grew up in his mind.

Howard returned to the creation of Conan in a later letter to Smith:

It may sound fantastic to link the term “realism” with Conan; but as a matter of fact — his supernatural adventures aside — he is the most realistic character I ever evolved. He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known, and I think that’s why he seemed to step full-grown into my consciousness when I wrote the first yarn of the series. Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prizefighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.

— Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, July 23, 1935

Once again, seemed to step full-grown into his consciousness.

There is also the possibility Milius read a little too much into similar statements recalled by Novalyne Price in her memoir:

“That Conan’s the damndest bastard I ever saw. He gets himself into all kinds of scrapes. I sure don’t try to give him advice when he tells me all that junk. I just sit back and listen.”

“Do you know what he’s telling you?” Clyde said to me. “He’s telling you that a real character has a mind of his own, even in a story.”

— One Who Walked Alone, page 20

He talked on for nearly a page about stories in general–something, he said, I might think about. One thing he wanted to stress was that stories had to be real and important; the characters-real people with real problems, important problems. He was sure, he said (and he was right), that I wondered how Conan could be a real person, but I needed to remember that deep inside every man there was something of the barbarian, something that civilization could not destroy. A man reading his story about Conan, then, would feel again in the depth of his being those barbaric impulses; consequently, Conan acted as they felt they would act in similar circumstances.

— One Who Walked Alone, pages 106-107

It’s easy to imagine in the first excerpt how Milius may have read the first line, and concluded that Howard was, in fact, saying that he believed Conan was a real person, even though Smith quickly clarifies it.

Nonetheless, with the letters and Price’s recollection, there is no reason to suppose that Howard ever actually considered Conan as anything but his own literary creation, and that the verisimilitude of the character is purely borne of his writing skills, not a delusion of literary agency.

*Paul Herman points out that Howard appeared to have quite an arsenal of weapons, including rifles, which Dr. Howard was seen handing out the window to his friends by Kate Merryman. So while Howard did indeed amass quite a collection of weapons, there’s no evidence that he kept them loaded for some coming onslaught like Robert Neville of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.

So who is Robert E. Howard anyway?

Robert Ervin Howard was a prolific Texan author who wrote hundreds of short stories and poems in the 1920s and 1930s. Howard wrote in a wide variety of genres, and was accomplished in all of them: westerns, boxing yarns, historical adventures, horrors, detective stories, even science fiction. Today, Howard is most well-known for his Sword-and-Sorcery tales, and is widely recognized as one of the foundations of the modern fantasy genre, alongside Tolkien, Vance, Wolfe and other masters.

What did Howard look like?

There are quite a few pictures of Howard, some of which have recently been newly scanned in higher definition and put online.  Here are a few. This is probably the most famous photograph of Howard, which he did as a favour to his girlfriend Novalyne Price.

Huh, he kinda looks like a tubby little nerd in an Al Capone hat.

Howard was erudite, incredibly knowledgeable and socially awkward in some respects, but make no mistake, Howard was far from the stereotypical nerd.  From a young age, he began building his body up to defend himself against anyone foolish enough to bully him, until he became a fine figure of a man.  He practised boxing, and fought in bouts at a local ice-house.  He enjoyed horse riding, practised sharpshooting with his pistol, walked all over the area to landmarks like Caddo Peak, and kept a high level of general fitness.  If Howard’s a nerd, he’s a nerd who could kick your arse.