The Riddle of Steel
After the scene where Conan’s parents forge this badass sword for him, Conan is inducted into the Northern European Sword Cult:
The secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn it, little Conan. You must learn its discipline. For no one, no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts. This (referring to the sword) you can trust.
It is fitting that these words should haunt Conan for the remainder of the film, as there is a great and terrible irony here. Listen:
The archetypal Barbarian transmitted to popular culture by Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is defined by its opposition to the decadence and Lawful Evil of Civilization. Again and again, Steel has proven itself the perfect conductor for the decadence and lawful evil of Civilization.
Each step forward in the art and science of extracting and processing metallic ores has advanced the cause of Civilization; in the case of steel, it has always done so by orders of magnitude.
At this stage in the game, we’ve graduated from mere Civilization. This is Industrial Civilization; It’s iron and glass and paperwork all the way down, folks. The Barbarian would have hated this.
Robert E. Howard’s Conan character distills Anglo-British colonial fetishism, racial mysticism, and historical tropes about the Celto-Germanic people living north of the Barbarian Horizon. That is a lot to unpack, but you can tell within the first few minutes of the film that the Celto-Germanic layer of Conan’s identity is the one that the director is leaning into.
The body of archaeological, folkloric, historical, and literary evidence suggests that the Celtic, Germanic, and Scandinavian tribes of Northern Europe all had a special reverence for the sword as a cult object.
The Conan of the Rob Howard literary canon has no special relationship to his sword, or to any other weapon.
The Phoenix On The Sword was the first Conan story to see print, and it does feature a sword that is enchanted by a dream-sage who gives it the power to cut phantoms— but Rob Howard never visits the Magic Sword trope again. None of Conan’s weapons are ever given a name, and no weapon is ever described in any more detail than the story would require.
For the Conan of Rob Howard’s literary canon, the sword is no more and no less than a tool. On the other hand, the Conan of John Milius’ film is involved in the Cult of The Sword from the beginning.
A detailed analysis of the archaeological evidence further suggests that the Northern European cult of the Sword drove innovations in steel-working that would remain unsurpassed in the western world until the time of the Italian Renaissance; it wasn’t for nothing that the Northern Barbarians produced the most advanced steel objects in the western hemisphere. After all, it would have taken a good blade, and a steady hand to wield it, to stave off the Romans, and then Roman Catholicism, for as long as they did.
Look at these maps.
They represent the geopolitical landscape of continental Europe, several hundred years apart. In both cases, the line between the Roman (or Roman Catholic) and Barbarian (or non-christian) world is defined by the physical boundaries of the Danube and the Rhine rivers.
The Danube River flows southeast from its source in modern Germany’s Black Forest until it merges with the Black Sea.
The Rhine flows north from it’s source in modern Switzerland and empties into the North Sea.
These rivers describe the edge of a socio-political holding pattern that remained in force for hundreds of years. And it wasn’t for lack of trying; when Emperor Trajan finally made in-roads into Dacia beyond the lower Danube, it was considered a monumental victory. Trajan’s Conquest of the Dacians was commemorated in the equally monumental Trajan’s Column:
The great and terrible irony is this:
A cheap and ready abundance of steel was the precondition that needed to be met before the Moloch Machine that we are living in could be developed.
One of the chief instruments of Barbarian independence, the steel that the Northern people had worked to such a high polish, would become one of the chief instruments of humanity’s enslavement to terminal decadence.
Is this why the word ‘irony’ is so close to the word ‘iron’?
If there is a riddle in all this, the wizard Thulsa Doom may have already answered it:
'What is the power of steel compared to the strength of the hand that wields it?'
Speaking of the archetypal Dungeons and Dragons Barbarian; it turns out that it was Conan the whole time. Big Surprise. Behold:
John Milius’ Conan: The Barbarian was released in theaters on May 14, 1982. The film was kind of a big deal.
In July of that same year Gary Gygax, inventor of the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop gaming system, unveiled the Barbarian subclass in the July issue of Dragon Magazine, #63.
Here is the archetypal Dungeons and Dragons Barbarian as 1982 understood him (hint: it’s the elemental, primitive figure of Conan stripped of his dense patina of misogyny and racism):
Proceed to The Riddle of Steel pt. 2?
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