The Conan Connection
As the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien is a man who needs no introduction. I am going to risk hyperbole by saying the magnitude of his impact on the imagination of the West rivals that of Greek Mythology and The Bible, by this point.
The works which influenced Tolkien is a subject that has been poured over by fans and critics alike. An exhaustive list ends up looking like a whos-who or road map of the history and literature of Ancient Europe. We should expect no less; by vocation, Tolkien was a scholar and a linguist. He had served as professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University from 1925 to 1945 until graduating to the seat of Merton professor of English, a position he held until his retirement in 1959. In his long affair with language and literature, Tolkien even produced translations of perennial classics like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and The Green Knight.
One name that I’ve never heard come up in any discussion of Tolkien’s influences is that of American author Robert E. Howard. I wouldn’t have guessed it, myself, but as I was reading through Rob Howard’s Conan catalog, I thought I kept hearing echoes of Tolkien. But that wouldn’t make sense, unless Tolkien some kind of Time Bandit. Because The Hobbit wasn’t released until a year after Howard’s death.
For folks don’t know him yet, let’s introduce Rob Howard.
Robert Ervin Howard was born on January 22, 1906, in Cross Plains, Texas, where he spent most of his life. His works would appear mainly in the pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales, where they were printed alongside the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The two men even shared a literary correspondence almost as fruitful as the one between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
Pulp fiction is defined by dictionary.com as “fiction dealing with lurid or sensational subjects, often printed on rough, low-quality paper manufactured from wood pulp.” Being lowbrow is one of pulp fiction’s defining characteristics, but to any serious writer, having the term applied to their work must have felt like a jab. It suggests your work is as expendable as the cheap paper it was printed on.
Tolkien is unique among fantasy authors in that his work is treated as having real literary value. Everyone understands that it transcends the limitations of genre fiction; even people who haven’t read it. Moreover, this heady and serious reputation is something that he could support with working credentials. Howard’s work, on the other hand, is regarded as being comparatively crude or simplistic; and it can easily be cast as pandering to the lowest common denominator of the 1930s American reading public
Stephen King said of the Sword and Sorcery genre that Howard is famous for inventing;
“[It is] puerile material.. [] and most of his Conan tales seem to almost fall over themselves in their need to get out. Yet his other work was either unremarkable or just abysmal. ‘
Professional critic Hoffman Reynold Hays swings on Rob Howard even harder under the heading “Superman on a psychotic bender”:
“[In Sword and Sorcery is] a degraded echo of the epic. But the ancient hero story was a glorification of significant elements in the culture that produced it. Mr. Howard’s heroes project the immature fantasy of a split mind and logically pave the way to schizophrenia.”
But Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman didn’t debut until April 1938, almost two years after Rob Howard’s death. Howard pioneered the mass-market power fantasy, a formula that would dominate American pop in coming decades. The man deserves far more credit than either Stephen King or Hoffman Reynold Hays are willing to acknowledge.
After looking into the matter, I am furthermore convinced that can add Tolkien scholars to the long list of people who owe Robert E. Howard a debt of gratitude; for as I toked on Tolkien and deconstructed the career of Conan, I unveiled so many points of identity between the two that I am now certain of a ‘Conan Connection’ underpinning the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s as if Rob Howard lurched forward like a dusty, American Igor holding a basket of severed limbs so that Tolkien could Frankenstein them into his masterpiece.
After all, it is as Pablo Picasso famously quipped;
good artists borrow; great artists steal.
Sword and Sorcery vs. Epic Fantasy
Robert E. Howard’s Conan debuted three years into the Great Depression.
Conan really hit the ground running. The first story to feature the Barbarian appeared in In the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales. It was The Phoenix on the Sword, widely considered among Howard’s finest works.
Between the publication of the first Conan story and Howard’s untimely death four years later in 1936, he had more than doubled his royalties. While Conan had developed a large following in the United States, his mass appeal was such that he had also attracted an international readership.
In a world ravaged by near-total economic collapse, Howard’s barbarian strode with his head up through a landscape torn by hardship. Conan’s power fantasies provided a much-needed escape, particularly for the disenfranchised. As Stephen King aptly observed, Conan “gave power to the powerless.”
Robert E. Howard died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on June 11, 1936, but in his short career, he opened a door large enough for a giant to walk through. The analogy might be more literal than figurative.
The first full-length novel Conan novel was Robert E. Howard’s only novel. It was also the last Robert E. Howard story to see print before the author’s untimely death. It was The Hour of the Dragon, serialized in Weird Tales from December 1935 to April 1936.
Although The Hour of The Dragon is largely a retrospective of Conan’s career as an adventurer, the novel pushed the Sword and Sorcery genre into new and previously unexplored dimensions.
The Hour of The Dragon might be the first modern novel to embody what would later be recognized as Epic Fantasy—though it predates the genre’s formal development by nearly two decades.
Sword and Sorcery focuses on the narrow, terrestrial battles of morally ambiguous heroes pitted against a dog-eat-dog world where the winner takes all. In contrast, Epic Fantasy is defined by its pitched battles between the forces of good and evil, where the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance.
In The Hour of the Dragon, Conan faces just such a predicament—if he fails to reclaim his kingdom, the dark wizard Xaltotun will resurrect the ancient and malevolent empire of Acheron, dooming every living being in Hyborea. This shift from a personal to an apocalyptic scale marks the first appearance of Epic Fantasy in modern literature, though the genre wouldn’t be fully realized until Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was published between 1954 and 1955.
The Hobbit was first published on September 21, 1937, a date that coincides with the Autumn Equinox. It had been a little over a year since Rob Howard died, and it was as though the reins of fantasy literature were passed on like a sputtering torch.
But within Tolkiens work, we find memories, fragments of Rob Howard— props from the stage of Conan’s storied life that have been repurposed.
To begin our exploration of this ‘Conan Connection’ we have to go back to the beginning. Back to the December of 1932. Back to the first Conan story; back to The Phoenix on the Sword.
THE PHOENIX ON THE SWORD (1933)
In The Phoenix on the Sword, we find the wizard Thoth-Amon being held hostage by Ascalante, a brigand plotting to betray his employers after they’ve carried out their plan to assassinate King Conan, who has risen to the throne of Aquilonia by committing regicide. With that background, consider this passage where Thoth-Amon reclaims his magic ring from the foolish Baron Dion:
“Thoth Amon cried out as if he had been struck, and Dion wheeled and gaped, his face suddenly bloodless. The slaves eyes were blazing, hismouth wide, his huge dusky hands outstretched like talons.
“The Ring! By Set! The Ring!” he shrieked. “My Ring-They stole it from me-”
Steel glittered in the Stygian’s hand and with a heave of his great dusky shoulders he drove the dagger into the Baron’s fat body. Dion’s high thin squeal broke in a strangled gurgle and his whole flabby frame collapsed like melted butter. A fool to the end, he died in mad terror, not knowing why. Flinging aside the crumpled corpse, already forgetful of it, Thoth grasped the ring in both hands, his dark eyes blazing with a fearful avidness.
“My Ring!” he whispered interrible exultation. “my power!”
Amazon’s series loosely based on Tolkien’s The Silmarillion is called The Rings of Power because that’s how the Rings were described; for example, in the heading of the final section of The Silmarillion: “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age.”
It’s hard not to hear Thoth-Amon’s cry, “My Ring—they stole it from me!” in the voice of Gollum, whose obsession with his “precious” defines his tragic arc from The Hobbit onward.
But Thoth-Amon uses his Ring of Power to summon a demonic chimpanzee to do his bidding.
Tolkien’s One Ring, by contrast, is infinitely more complex. It draws on multiple sources.
There’s Plato’s Ring of Gyges, which grants its wearer invisibility and serves as a rhetorical device in book two of The Republic to explore the nature of morality and the concept of the Good; and also the Ring of the Nibelung, which is the central quest object in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a classic of German opera deeply rooted in Norse mythology. The Ring of the Nibelung grants its bearer the power to rule the world, a power so tempting that even Odin, king of the gods, pursues it, leading ultimately to the downfall of the Heroic Age, and the downfall of the gods.
While Thoth Amon’s Ring of Power is a pretty compelling Conan Connection, it isn’t water-tight. Good thing but we’re just getting started.
Next up is another fan favorite; 1933’s The Tower of The Elephant.
THE TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT (1933)
It is an unforgettable moment in fantasy literature when The Two Towers shifts into survival horror as Sam and Frodo are stalked through Gorgoroth by Smeagol. The tension peaks when, after the taming of Smeagol, the hobbits are led up the sheer precipice of Cirith Ungol where their helpful guide plans to feed them to a giant spider.
While this scene is iconic, it’s not without precedent.
In Robert E. Howard’s 1933 Conan story The Tower of the Elephant, Conan meets Taurus, one of the few male companions he’s given throughout the whole of his 21-story career. Typically, Conan is either with a single-serving female friend we will never hear from again, or no one.
As fellow thieves with a common goal, Conan and Taurus scale the Tower of the Elephant, where the wizard Yara hoards his treasures and secrets. Howard describes Yara as
“the high priest, who worked strange dooms from this jeweled tower,” and who “came not often from his tower of magic, [but] always to work evil on some man or nation.”
Yara sure sounds a lot like Saruman. Then again, the motif of a wizard in a tower is ancient. Roughly speaking, it might go as far back as the Tower of Babel legend.
After Conan and Taurus achieve the impossible by scaling the sheer walls of the Elephant Tower, they step from a gem-encrusted threshold into darkness. Before their eyes can adjust, Taurus falls dead with two puncture wounds at the base of his neck. Conan quickly identifies the assailant:
“He had a flashing glimpse of a hairy black horror that swung past him with a clashing of frothing fangs, and something splashed on his bare shoulder that burned like drops of liquid hell-fire. Springing back, sword high, he saw the horror strike the floor, wheel and scuttle toward him with appalling speed—a gigantic black spider, such as men see only in nightmare dreams. It was as large as a pig, and its eight thick hairy legs drove its ogreish body over the floor at headlong pace; its four evilly gleaming eyes shone with a horrible intelligence, and its fangs dripped venom that Conan knew, from the burning of his shoulder where only a few drops had splashed as the thing struck and missed, was laden with swift death.”
Today, giant spiders are a staple of genre fiction, but before The Tower of the Elephant, the only other example I could find was in H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, where giant spiders are among the genetic aberrations created by the mad doctor. As far as I can tell, Howard’s story marks the first instance of Spider-As-Nemesis in literature.
After concluding his business at the Tower of the Elephant:
“Conan started like a man waking from a dream. He turned back uncertainly, to stare at the cryptic tower he had just left. Was he bewitched and enchanted? Had he dreamed all that had seemed to have passed? As he looked, he saw the gleaming tower sway against the crimson dawn, its jewel-crusted rim sparkling in the growing light, and crash into shining shards.”
I’d be hard-pressed to find a more direct precursor to the scene in The Return of the King where Eowyn and Faramir witness the collapse of Barad-Dur, Lug-Burz, and all of Mordor.
This is a rare moment where Howard’s writing achieves that raw beauty he could sometimes affect, but Tolkien’s handling of the similar scene is genuinely moving. I cried in public when I read it. Howard was a master of brutality and violence, but when it comes to knightly romance, Tolkien is almost as good as Wolfram von Eschenbach.
I read these stories, The Phoenix on The Sword and The Tower of The Elephant, back to back. Rings of power and spiders on top of sheer towers definitely had me raising my eyebrows, but I wasn’t sold. When I got through the Scarlet Citadel, though, that was it. There was a Conan Connection running throughout Tolkien; I was beyond certain.
Bear with me and maybe I can convince you, too.
THE SCARLET CITADEL (1933)
1933’s The Scarlet Citadel opens on a battlefield littered with corpses, where:
“The oliphants sounded a fanfare of triumph all over the plain…”
Who could forget Tolkien’s Oliphaunts?
Maybe this doesn’t deserve mention—Hannibal Barca famously shocked the West by crossing the Alps with 37 war elephants during the Punic Wars—but ‘oliphaunt’ is such a distinct spelling, one I had only encountered in The Lord of the Rings and The Scarlet Citadel. It turns out that ‘Oliphant’ in Old French meant both ‘Elephant’ and ‘Ivory,’ and is the etymological ancestor of the modern English word ‘Elephant.’
But The Scarlet Citadel offers far more compelling parallels to the Tolkien legendarium; it’s actually my prime example—the pièce de résistance, if you will.
The ongoing debate over the nature of orcs was a question Tolkien wrestled with in the margins of his notebooks until the end of his life. For this demonstration, I’ll settle on the explanation given in Christopher Tolkien’s compositing of The Silmarillion.
In Chapter 3, “Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor,” we’re told:
“Yet this is held true by the wise of Eressëa: that all those of the Quendi that came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty and wickedness were corrupted and enslaved. Thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orkor in envy and mockery of the Eldar.”
The first hundred or so pages of The Silmarillion can be tedious. They require readers to learn a new language just to make sense of the material, and it feels like wading through the genealogical tables in the Book of Genesis. I’ll translate: the orcs were created by Sauron when he kidnapped and tortured some elves in his dungeons at Utumno. It was an act of cruelty and spite, meant as an affront to both the elves and the gods.
Now, consider the abominations that lurk in the dungeons beneath Rob Howard’s Scarlet Citadel:
“Conan… thought of the grisly tales he had heard of Tsotha’s necromantic cruelty, and it was with an icy sensation down his spine that he realized that these must be the very Halls of Horror named in shuddering legendry, the tunnels and dungeons wherein Tsotha performed horrible experiments with beings human, bestial, and demoniac, tampering blasphemously with the naked basic elements of life itself.”
Not that Howard wasn’t being derivative, here—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had been published some hundred years earlier. In that book, a young medical student blends black magic and cutting-edge science to bring a horrible flesh golem to life.
While imprisoned alongside the dark abominations of the wizard Tsotha in the dungeons beneath the Scarlet Citadel, Conan negotiates his escape and finds another captive—the wizard Pelias, who made the mistake of resisting Tsotha’s evil ambitions. Evil wizards imprisoning good wizards has a distinct “Saruman holding Gandalf prisoner in Orthanc” vibe, except that this is what happened to Merlin in some tellings of the Arthurian legends. But there’s even more to connect here to Gandalf with Pelias.
A gigantic snake emerges from the darkness and rears over Conan, threatening to swallow both him and his new friend. Conan braces for impact, but Pelias merely folds his arms and smiles. The snake’s countenance is overcome with fear, and:
“With a swirling rush like the sweep of a strong wind, the great snake was gone.”
“‘What did he see to frighten him?’ asked Conan, eyeing his companion uneasily.
“‘The scaled people see what escapes the mortal eye,’ answered Pelias cryptically. ‘You see my fleshly guise; he saw my naked soul.’”
Wizards as earthly avatars of angelic beings? Big Gandalf energy. More likely, Gandalf was endowed with big Pelias energy. Of course, Tolkien could have been inverting the Arthurian tradition where-in the wizard Merlin was born of an Incubus and therefore half-demon. But there’s more here to reinforce this Conan connection that I’m postulating.
Pelias and Conan emerge from the dungeons to find the Scarlet Citadel abandoned. Tsotha-Lanti and his forces have left to lay seige to a leaderless and vulnerable Aquilonia. Conan wonders out loud if he even has a kingdom to return to. In answer, Pelias produces a large, glittering sphere that belonged to Tsotha-Lanti.
“…Pelias laid it on the table before Conan’s eyes. The king looked into the cloudy depths, which deepened and expanded. Slowly, images crystallized out of the mist and shadows.”
Tsotha-Lanti’s crystal ball reveals to Conan the status of the siege on Aquilonia.
Tolkien’s Palantíri were a bit more sophisticated than crystal balls; they were telepathic devices, not just seeing-stones. The identity between Tsotha-Lanti’s crystal ball and Tolkien’s palantíri is hardly compelling, as the “gypsy with a crystal ball” trope was already well-established by the 1930s. Going further back, we find a magic orb with the power of remote viewing atop an enchanted tower in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival—but it’s what Pelias does with the knowledge imparted by the seeing-stone that really drives the Conan connection home.
Conan is in agony, knowing that even if he rode the fastest steed to death, he couldn’t make it back to Aquilonia in time to save his kingdom. Pelias offers him an out:
“‘There are creatures,’ said Pelias, ‘not alone of earth and sea, but of air and the far reaches of the skies as well, dwelling apart, unguessed of men. Yet to him who holds the Master-words and Signs and the Knowledge underlying all, they are not malignant nor inaccessible. Watch, and fear not.’”
“He lifted his hands to the skies and sounded a long, weird call that seemed to shudder endlessly out into space, dwindling and fading, yet never dying out, only receding farther and farther into some unreckoned cosmos. In the silence that followed, Conan heard a sudden beat of wings in the stars and recoiled as a huge bat-like creature alighted beside him. He saw its great calm eyes regarding him in the starlight; he saw the forty-foot spread of its giant wings. And he saw it was neither bat nor bird.”
“‘Mount and ride,’ said Pelias. ‘By dawn it will bring you to Tamar.’”
Conan’s capital city is being overrun by Tsotha-Lanti’s forces, and just as things look irreversibly bleak for the defenders:
“Out of the crimson dawn came a flying speck that grew to a bat, then to an eagle. Then all who saw screamed in amazement, for over the walls of Tamar swooped a shape such as men knew only in half-forgotten legends, and from between its titan wings sprang a human form as it roared over the great tower. Then with a deafening thunder of wings, it was gone, and the folk blinked, wondering if they had dreamed. But on the turret stood a wild, barbaric figure, bloodstained, brandishing a great sword. And from the multitude rose a roar that rocked the towers, ‘The King! It is the King!’”
There it is—The Return of the King. Is it possible that Tolkien’s eagles began as Robert E. Howard’s Lovecraftian bird-friend?
Mounted on this cosmic horror, Conan arrives just in time to save his falling kingdom. This is exactly the role Gandalf’s eagles play, always called forth by wizardly wiles at crucial moments. I’m telling you—this was my “aha” moment. Not only did Tolkien read Robert E. Howard, he was consciously emulating his work.
If Tolkien didn’t copy Howard’s homework, the only way to know for sure would be to go through his notes. Can we file a Freedom of Information Act with the Tolkien estate?
I think I’ve proven my point by now, but if you want more, I’ve got it.
RED NAILS (1936)
Published in serialized format from July to October 1936, Red Nails came out just months after Robert E. Howard’s tragic suicide. Among Howard’s Conan tales, this one might be the most exploitative. It stands out for its extreme depictions of violence, female bondage, as well as it’s unmasked and deeply unpleasant racial stereotypes.
The Phoenix on the Sword, The Tower of the Elephant, The Scarlet Citadel, and The Hour of the Dragon are all highly regarded by Conan fans, and it’s easy to imagine Tolkien appreciating them. Red Nails, however, is something else entirely. It reads like a gaudy, coarse fever-dream, one of the most surreal of Howard’s iron age power fantasies. Perhaps I’m squinting too hard into the shadowy interior of the walled city of Xuchotl, but I think I can detect shades of Red Nails in Tolkien’s work.
Smeagol is one of Tolkien’s most original creations, a character for which I’ve found no direct literary precedent.
Sure, Rumplestiltskin shares some of Smeagol’s menacing characteristics. And in the Norse Volsung Saga, a character who apparently part man and part otter spends his days catching fish with his mouth before being butchered by the gods.
That same saga features Fafnir, transformed by the Nibelung Treasure into a monster who burrows underground to guard his hoard—a creature we see reflected in both Smaug, the gold-guarding dragon of The Hobbit, and Gollum, who guards his precious ring in the damp caverns beneath the Misty Mountains. There’s also Alberich, the dwarf who keeps the Nibelung treasure in the Nibelungenlied, and perhaps even Mephistopheles from Goethe’s Faust, who feigns friendship while working toward the betrayal of the one he serves.
But despite all these literary parallels, Smeagol still somehow manages to feel deeply original— that is, until I read Robert E. Howard’s Red Nails.
As Conan and Valeria navigate the dark, labyrinthine city of Xuchotl, they are guided by a character whose behavior and mannerisms immediately brought to mind Tolkien’s Gollum. This character, Techotl, is a guide of questionable integrity, and as it turns out he, is leading Conan and Valeria straight into the jaws of a trap.
“Who is this madman?” Conan asks in the Aquilonian tongue.
Valeria shrugs. “He says his name’s Techotl. From his babblings, I gather that his people live at one end of this crazy city and these others at the other end. Maybe we’d better go with him. He seems friendly, and it’s easy to see that the other clan isn’t.”
‘Techotl listens intently, head tilted dog-like, as triumph and fear struggle on his repellent countenance. “Come away, now!” he whispers.’
For two pages, Techotl acts as their timid and unsettling guide through the perilous halls of Xuchotl, his demeanor echoing Gollum’s as he leads Frodo and Sam through the maze-like wastes of Gorgoroth.
“…so in silence they glided on with the green fire-stones blinking overhead and the flaming floors smoldering under their feet, and it seemed to Valeria as if they fled through hell, guided by a dark-faced, lank-haired goblin.”
At one point, Techotl hears telltale signs of that which he fears echoing in the dark, empty halls of the walled city. The whole scene is so exactly like the Mines of Moria, Except this time an anxiety-drenched Smeagol is counted among the Company of the Ring;
“Perhaps they are your friends,” suggests Valeria.
“We dare not chance it,” [Techotl] pants, beads of sweat on his brow, moving with frenzied activity. He turns aside, gliding through a doorway leading to a chamber with an ivory staircase winding down into darkness.
“This leads to an unlighted corridor below us!” he hisses. “They may be lurking there, too. It may all be a trick to draw us into it. But we must take the chance that they have laid their ambush in the rooms above. Come swiftly now!”
To me, the similarities between the behavior of Techotl and Gollum are so striking it’s hard not to see Red Nails as a possible influence, however indirect, on Tolkien’s depiction of Gollum; particularly when Red Nails sets such a clear precedent for Tolkiens scene in the Black Pit of Moria.
While Smeagol remains one of Tolkien’s most original creations, and the Black Pit of Moria one of his most powerful settings, the goblin-like guide in the dark labyrinth of Red Nails suggests that even Tolkien’s trademark elements may have been lifted from the American pulp of Robert E. Howard.
THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON (1936)
Returning to where we began; that is, at the end of Sword of Sorcery and the beginning of Epic Fatasy in Rob Howard’s ‘the Hour of The Dragon’, there is one more Conan Connection that sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb.
Do you remember the Black Corsairs, from ‘The Return of The King’?
…Also known as the Corsairs of Umbar, who threatened to overwhelm the garrison at Minas Tirith and turn the tides of the battle at Pelenor Field inexorably in the favor of Team Darkness?
Probably not. both in the book and in Peter Jackson’s film, the Black Corsairs were mostly the specter of a bad time. Aragorn’s ghost army showed up while the Corsairs were raiding Lebennin; presumably, all of the pirates were killed, because Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, and the armies of the dead pulled up to the final battle in these stylish black ships that had previously belonged to the Corsairs of Umbar.
In Rob Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon we learn that in Conans wayward youth, he had been the leader of an infamous band of pirates known as ‘the Black Corsairs’.
Eighteen years before the battle at Pelenor Field!!!
The Atlantean Connection
Now that we’ve treated the particulars, we’re going take a step back, pan out and take a broad view of our subject.
The conventional understanding is that, before Tolkien, extensive world-building in speculative fiction wasn’t really a thing. But Robert E. Howard had, in fact, devised his own world, complete with its own history, prehistory, peoples, nations, customs, languages, and religions. This aspect of Howard’s work was extremely impressive to his contemporary and friend, H.P. Lovecraft, who was known for his own sweeping cosmic vision. We know this because Lovecraft said so himself:
‘Howard has the most magnificent sense of history of anyone I know. He possesses a panoramic vision which takes in the evolution and interactions of races and nations over vast periods of time, and gives one the same large-scale excitement which (with even greater scope) is furnished by things like Stapledon’s ‘Last and First Men’.
Here is Robert E. Howard’s map of Hyboria, drawn in 1936, the same year of his death. While I couldn’t determine when it was first published, let’s compare it with Christopher Tolkien’s 1954 map of Middle Earth.
Above is REH’s 1936 map of Hyboria. To the right is Christopher Tolkien’s 1954 map of Middle Earth.
One aspect of Howard’s world-building that irritated Lovecraft—and might have contributed to why Hyboria is often overlooked as one of the first fully conceived fantasy worlds—is that Howard named things as if he’d cut apart an encyclopedia of world history and pasted it back together to suit his whims. This approach diminished the power of the overall effect by echoing real history while also being fake.
In Howard’s universe, the barbarian tribe Conan belongs to, the Cimmerians, are descendants of the lost continent of Atlantis. Conan’s defining moment comes when, at the age of 40 and in the fashion of the historical northern barbarians, he seizes the crown of a great southern kingdom.
This pattern is repeated almost verbatim in The Lord of The Rings: Aragorn is one of the Dúnedain, the last descendants of the men from Númenor, which was Tolkien’s Atlantis—a civilization close to the gods, which Sauron corrupted and sent beneath the waves.
Of course, the Dúnedain didn’t revert to barbarism; rather, they faded into obscurity, watching over the world from behind the scenes like a vanilla Illuminati. And Aragorn didn’t seize the crown of Gondor by force—he was entitled to it as a descendant of Númenor.
The racist roots of high fantasy are so glaring that they demand attention. I think that’s what the Black elves and sympathetic orcs in Amazon’s The Rings of Power are really addressing, but that’s it’s own video. Briefly, we have to remember that all these men—H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and J.R.R. Tolkien—existed in an intellectual climate where ideas like those of Helena Blavatsky were taken seriously in academic circles, and Aryanism was widely accepted, even by those who didn’t identify as Nazis. Lovecraft openly endorsed Hitler, while Tolkien decidedly did not—but a close review of the contextual evidence reveals that both these lotus flowers of fantasy literature were rooted in the same intellectual swamp.
I’m not trying to strip Tolkien of his accolades in all this. His writing is fantastic. His sense of beauty is far more pronounced than Howard’s; Tolkien’s prose flows like a tapestry, softening the hard edges of modern life. He invites readers on a journey there and back again, and it’s a testament to his powers of enchantment that so many get lost.
Meanwhile, Howard’s world is much more like our own: governed by, and almost worshipful of, brute force. When at his peak, Howard’s writing is tight, muscular, and physically dense. At its worst, it’s paunchy and self-indulgent, delivered in the idiom of a 1930s radio host. Flaws aside, Howard was the only writer of his time doing what he was doing.
Whenever people discuss the origins of modern fantasy, the first forays into authentic world-building, and the influences bearing on a serious author like Tolkien—whose monumental achievement in European literature stands nobly astride the great works that inspired him— the name Robert E. Howard, the hard-working Texan whose formulaic power fantasies may have single-handedly shaped the still-beating heart of every successful comic book franchise, almost never comes up.
With all of these uncanny similarities laid out in front of us, I think it’s clear that Tolkien had a lot of help in building his world—not just from ancient European myth and literature, but also from across the Atlantic; specifically, from a little place called Cross Plains, Texas.
It’s fun to imagine Tolkien hiding a secret stash of Weird Tales magazines whenever his Oxford friends came over to smoke pipes and discuss the inherent superiority of the Aryan race—but it probably didn’t go down like that. Tolkien was open about his appreciation for Howard’s writing, having said in an interview that he had read and ‘rather enjoyed’ the Conan stories.
While he wasn’t as forthcoming in acknowledging the Conan connection I’ve been postulating, I think the writing is on the wall with this one.
