The Coming of Conan
The Barbarian meme as we know it goes back to Robert E. Howard’s Conan character.
The first Conan story was published in the pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales in 1932, three years into the Great Depression.
Conan steps out onto a landscape marred by the pitfalls of industrial capitalism, and his stories may be read as a conscious attempt to deny the modern condition. His advent could not have been more timely; the self-serving, gritty Barbarian was an ax through the head of the erosion of individual identity that undergirds industrial society.
Conan made landfall six years before Superman did. For the man of his day, this was the ultimate power fantasy.
Howard himself was working with an earlier meme; the pastiche of historical tropes about the people living north of the ancient roman Barbarian Horizon.
These were people who lovd fighting for it’s own sake,and who fought their battles wearing nothing but cloaks made from animal skins, if they wore anything.
People who Tacitus tells us rejected the accumulation of wealth, who didn’t understand or appreciate gold and silver. People who refused to build cities, or to set their houses on stone foundations. People who were as simple as Conan himself, prizing honesty and good cheer over sophistication and the ritualized, artificial behaviors urban civilizations call ‘ettiquette’.
These might have been the first Noble Savages in western history; people who’s codes were not written in stone, but flowed out from their own hearts, to be submitted for approval by a tribal concensus. People who, in stark contrast to the Roman fascist tradition, seemed to have placed a hearty emphasis on that rugged individualism toward which a Texan like Rob Howard must have felt deeply sympathetic.
As nice as all of that sounds, Conan plied his way through life as a mercenary and a pirate.
While his Barbarian simplicity is used as a foil to reflect the corrupt values festering beneath the rotten scab of civilization back at itself, Conan built his fortunes gleefully robbing the people of the global south. The goodness of his Barbarian heart seems to have been reserved for the non-melanated.
Rob Howard, by way of Conan, demonstrates the implicit racial basis which must have been baked into the American experience from the start. More troubling still, this feature may have been one of his works’ selling points.
These stories were pure escapism, sold in bulk at thirty cents per lot to the underemployed who drifted like ghosts from soup line to exploitative, grueling itinerant work and back again. Rob Howard wrote an Iliad for the every-man- a bardic song unironically championing the privileges and powers of an exceptional man who unreflectively tramples on the basic rights and fundamental humanity of others. This might have been empowering on a subconscious level, as the us-vs-them paradigm has proven timeless in its efficacy if you wish to cultivate a sense of cohesion or identity among certain individuals while also creating a sense of isolation in out-groups. A Conan reader might have thought, ‘I might be stuck working at this canning factory until I die, but at least I’m not black.’
The racism in many of Rob Howard’s Conan stories is so overt as to be disgusting. Reading a Rob Howard book in public feels embarrassing. Why am I writing all this, then?
The real enemy in the Conan universe is not blackness, but black magic. One of the defining traits of the archetypal Dungeons and Dragons barbarian is in his detestation of magic and of magic users, and in the delight with which he destroy enchanted objects. In the original iteration of the Sword and Sorcery genre pioneered by Rob Howard, the pattern is always this: Sword vs. Sorcerer.
You might look at the 1982 Conan film and say, ‘The Black Wizard in this movie is a black man. In fact, he is the only black person on the entire screen. Are you sure that black magic isn’t just a metaphor for blackness?’.
I think Rob Howard fell into the trap of using it that way, and that he believed his own bullshit. It didn’t help that he had H.P. Lovecraft egging him on. Rob Howard probably gave Tolkien the idea, just as much as the European Crusading Cult did. The racist roots of Epic Fantasy run far deeper than the uninitiated might guess, and one day I’ll get around to writing about it. The first few Conan stories are actually brilliant, and the racial tropes briefly referenced are almost excusable in light of the era in which they were produced. Over time, race becomes one of his overarching themes. The creators of the 1982 Conan film were almost certainly doing homage to Rob Howard’s racial ideology when they cast James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom, the incredibly ancient and incredibly evil leader of the cult of the serpent.
Recall that one of Thulsa Doom’s chief powers was that of hypnosis. I believe this to be the most important of all the film’s disclosures; much of what we the public are exposed to may be regarded as misdirection, obfuscation, and hypnosis; this film included.
Geezer Butler was telling the truth; the men who plot wars, the men who manipulate stocks, the men who rule over all of us from the highest stations of industry and finance, are sorcerers. Identitarian us-vs-them paradigms are actively sponsored and cultivated by wizards trained in the ancient and evil art of hypnosis toward the end of keeping every one of us blind, lost, and groping in the dark for answers that will never come from any the outlets we’ve been taught to trust.
This is the deeper, more fundamental fantasy that Sword and Sorcery speaks to; that these shadowy agencies of unknown power and provenance, these lords of the earth skulking behind masks of cosmic abomination like Scooby-Doo villains, might be confronted and overcome.
To be a strong man, to have a different woman in every episode, to win your way in the world by your own hand with no one telling you what to do, and to live a life of high adventure winding your way unimpeded through ancient temples toward untold treasure. In terms of escapist literature which caters to the male fantasy, Rob Howard’s Conan stories were expertly crafted. For all that his stories pandered to the tastes of those who might best be described as anti-intellectual, He wasn’t a complete idiot. He sensed something moving behind events, and did his best to discern it’s shape. If he failed in his guess-work, he wouldn’t be the first. After all, that’s how this whole thing was set up. You don’t come to command the entire military and economic apparatus on accident.
