Conan the Cimmerian
Do you like Conan? I do too.
I started reading Conan comics when I was a young boy. I remember especially there was one story in which Conan returns to his home village to discover his kin crippled and enslaved by vicious warlords, They’d been hamstrung, unable to escape, and the family sword had been turned into a plowshare which the hobbled family members were forced to use. Conan seeing this, begins plotting his vengeance so off he goes with the plowshare, into a forge where he turns the plowshare back to a sword with which kills each and every one of the vicious warlords and frees his village (I remember it like that, wish I knew which one that was).
Anyhow that made a profound impact on of course. Such a righteous man. He did good to get back at those bastards, the right thing, and I think that hidden in there, is some powerful message.
Anyhow I picked up some Conan Chronicles book when I had a traveling job, a compilation of some of the short stories written for Weird Tales by Robert E Howard. They blew me away and rekindled my interest in Conan the Cimmerian. Howard had a very word-efficient writing style in there which can communicate a lot of information without using many words. Terse.
For example check this out:
There’s this passage in Rogues in the House from 1934
It is simply an arrangement of mirrors. Do you see those mirrors on the walls? They transmit the reflection of the room into these tubes, down which other mirrors carry it to reflect it at last on an enlarged scale in this great mirror.”
Murilo realized that the priest must be centuries ahead of his generation, to perfect such an invention; but Conan put it down to witchcraft and troubled his head no more about it.
This tells a lot about the adversary (some sort of genius), the world in which they live (must be ancient if clever mirror arrangements are centuries away) and Conan, (who at this time was Intelligent and cunning like a wild beast, but not very civilized or educated. (there are other short stories of course where he is a wise King because the stories are from different times of his life)). Also that witchcraft is a feasible explanation for that which they describe.
What I liked most about Conan when I was a young man, and why I held him as sort of a role model, is the fact that Conan will not be wronged without retaliation of equal measure (or more), and he lets no one mess with him.
I used to be like that too, except the other way around.
A lot of the short stories written by Robert E. Howard are now public domain and can be found on Project Gutenberg. My favorite I think is A Witch Shall be Born