The Frozen Landscape of Reality

By Dale E. Rippke
This essay originally appeared in REHUPA #203, February 2007
This essay is dedicated to the late Robert Anton Wilson, who taught me that “Reality is what you can get away with”.

I tend to find the study of the Conan series written by Robert E. Howard an absolutely fascinating look into the nature of psychology. I’ve read many scholars expound at great length on the merits of who the character of Conan is and how he will respond in any given situation. The conventional wisdom created by this doesn’t really seem to me to accurately reflect the information relayed by his author.
That conventional wisdom is probably founded in the way that we perceive “heroes” and the very nature of “heroic action”. Our perception of what it means to be a hero tends to run in certain predetermined channels (i.e. Archetypes) and that hero’s actions outside of our expectations seem to engender a fair bit of psychological resistance and discomfort for the reader. It is the mental conflict between our currently held beliefs and “reality”. This conflict is a psychological phenomenon described as cognitive dissonance. We naturally attempt to alleviate our mental discomfort by attempting to rationalize and explain away the conflict. This in turn leads us to project our own biases onto the material at hand; we “read into” the story things that aren’t necessarily there.
I’m going to attempt to show how the conventional wisdom in a typical Conan yarn may be due more to how we wish to perceive the story, than to its actual reality. The tale I will use is The Frost-Giant’s Daughter.
Chronologically the first Conan tale, The Frost-Giant’s Daughter features a teenaged Cimmerian in his first real run-in with the supernatural. The wounded last survivor of a band of northern warriors, Conan encounters a dazzlingly beautiful girl who goads him into pursuing her.
Conventional wisdom takes the line that Conan is not, at heart, a rapist and that Atali drove the young Cimmerian into the madness of extreme lust through some type of spell or enchantment. It also takes the position that the tale takes place in the reality of Conan’s world and that the yarn’s strangeness is all due to Atali’s spell. A specific reading of the story in particular and the Conan series in general shows that this is not necessarily the case.
First, I want to touch briefly on the notion that Conan’s pursuit of Atali was “out-of-character” and the result of Atali’s spell. That is completely and undeniably false. Several Conan stories feature the Cimmerian in pursuit of a woman, complete with sexual subtext (The Devil in Iron and The Vale of Lost Women). But far and away, the most damaging to the “out-of-character” notion is the events at the beginning of Red Nails. That yarn describes a pursuit sequence not unlike the events of The Frost-Giant’s Daughter. In that story, Conan is a bored mercenary soldier that has taken a completely sexual interest (Howard is explicit about that) in the new girl in town, Valeria. When she flees town because of a murder rap, he decides to pursue, due to his interest in her. According to the tale, the chase lasts several weeks before Conan catches up to her. He makes it clear once again that his interest in her is sexual, and that Valeria’s refusal of his advances don’t really change matters all that much to him. While the story doesn’t feature a rape scene, Howard clearly implies that Conan’s intentions weren’t all that honorable.
The point of all of this is to illustrate that if a sex-obsessed Conan is determined enough to pursue a woman for weeks without being under the influence of a spell of any kind, then his jaunt through the snow in pursuit of Atali isn’t remotely out of character.
Next, I’ll deal with the notion that this is all due to a spell or enchantment, because I don’t really buy into it. The idea of Atali enchanting Conan makes no sense when examined logically. First big red flag is that there is absolutely no mention by Howard of Atali doing ANYTHING to Conan other than some talk and fleeing from him. Secondly, we supposedly have a demi-goddess who can magically make herself invisible to all but her intended victims, as well as magically inflaming their lust, who has been doing this for many years, yet is completely unable to save herself by dispelling her enchantment or just making herself invisible to Conan after everything goes pear-shaped. Howard was not writing the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” here. Powerful magic-user one minute and weak, helpless woman the next doesn’t mix particularly well.
I’ve studied this story closely and it is my belief that something completely different is going on in this story. I finally discovered the key to understanding the story when I realized that Howard is writing this story entirely from the perspective of Conan’s consciousness. Conan passes through three distinct levels of consciousness in this story, yet he as the observer doesn’t realize it; it’s all reality to him as its occurring. I believe that Howard intuitively created a powerful meditation on the nature of reality. This is what I think is going on in The Frost-Giant’s Daughter.
"Heimdul roared and leaped, and his sword flashed in deathly arc. Conan staggered and his vision was filled with red sparks as the singing blade crashed on his helmet, shivering into bits of blue fire. But as he reeled he thrust with all the power of his broad shoulders behind the humming blade. The sharp point tore through brass scales and bones and heart, and the red-haired warrior died at Conan's feet.
The Cimmerian stood upright, trailing his sword, a sudden sick weariness assailing him. The glare of the sun on the snow cut his eyes like a knife and the sky seemed shrunken and strangely apart. He turned away from the trampled expanse where yellow-bearded warriors lay locked with red-haired slayers in the embrace of death. A few steps he took, and the glare of the snow fields was suddenly dimmed. A rushing wave of blindness engulfed him and he sank down into the snow, supporting himself on one mailed arm, seeking to shake the blindness out of his eyes as a lion might shake his mane."
There are various methods to achieving an altered state of consciousness; dancing, chanting, drugs, exhaustion, and extreme pain. Conan is exhausted and has taken a blunt-force trauma to the head. His brain isn’t working as it normally does; his neutrons are shorting out and misfiring. He is the perfect candidate for what is about to befall him. While the default setting of his brain usually receives cable channel 3 (the mundane reality), it now has switched to channel 4 (where the supernatural resides). He has entered the twilight zone world of altered consciousness.
It is interesting in that Howard plays with the idea of nested realities. This first appears in the 1928 Kull yarn, The Screaming Skull of Silence.  In it, Howard expounds on the nature of reality: “All is illusion, all outward manifestations of the underlying Reality, which is beyond human comprehension, since there are no relative things by which the finite mind may measure the infinite. The One may underlie all, or each natural illusion may possess a basic entity..” The supernatural world is usually invisible to the mundane world, while the supernatural incorporates the mundane world into its reality. The supernatural world, however, isn’t exactly the same; its appearance is somewhat strange; it shimmers and its colors are heightened. The supernatural realm is a magical fairyland of enchantment. And it has its own denizens; beings that are usually unable to interact with the creatures of the mundane world. Atali and her brothers.
When Conan’s consciousness starts channeling the supernatural reality, it seems that the influx of information flooding into his brain from both realms causes his brain to try to shut down into unconsciousness. This manifests itself as blindness and he attempts to shake it off through sheer willpower. He becomes aware of Atali through hearing her laughter; presumably she is happy because she has found a victim. He is aware of the strangeness of the world, but has decided to ignore it. He is having problems seeing Atali clearly, though. He can’t tell if she has red or golden hair; it blinds him with its brightness. He is struck by her extreme beauty and has a physical reaction to her; the blood starts pounding in his temples. Conan ignores his reaction and he and Atali chat a bit. He then begins to use his rational mind to worry about his comrades and whether Atali lives close by. Conan’s rationality will eventually present a problem, since it will reject the supernatural reality and kick it back into the mundane world, given half a chance. Atali would lose him, so she can’t let this happen; she asks him pointedly “Am I not beautiful, oh man?”
She does this so that he really takes a good look at her. She needs to inflame his physical and emotional reaction to her for one good reason. Atali needs for Conan’s rational mind to be swamped and swept out of existence by his desire for her. She needs to do this because it will effectively anchor him to her supernatural reality. He won’t be able to slip back into the mundane world.
I want to touch for just a moment on whether Atali uses a spell on Conan. She doesn’t ever obviously cast a spell on him, but then Howard doesn’t really need her to. Conan is in an altered state of reality. The rules of the mundane world no longer apply. His passions could be inflamed due to the nature of the enchanted world he is in, due to her killer pheromones, or simply because she is the most desirable woman he has ever seen. Atali doesn’t need to use magic on Conan; her effect is innate to her character. It’s what she is. Conan isn’t ensorcelled so much as he is enthralled by Atali.
So anyway, she anchors Conan to her reality by appealing to his lust, but she also has an agenda; she needs to lure him away from the battlefield. So she enrages him by flat-out stating that he’s not “man” enough to follow where she leads. It all comes together, the lust, the rage, and the diminished capacity for rational though brought on by the head trauma and Conan experiences a type of strange madness; the compulsion to rape the icicles off of this taunting frost-princess. He arises due to sheer strength of will; almost mind over matter.
So they take off across the enchanted landscape (it should be noted that she does leave footprints in her reality, but just barely), Conan forging deeper into the Supernatural Realm. Howard describes the realm in fantastic terms; an aurora glowing fantasyland. He has bought completely into Atali’s reality. It doesn’t even faze him when he is beset by her brothers; the two ice-giants. Conan dispatches them after a brief struggle; now he’s really enraged.
Now this is the point where Atali, if she actually had any magic, would use her spells to become invisible or strip her enchantment from Conan. She doesn’t do that because she can’t; she has no magic. Atali doesn’t control anything. She is just a supernaturally enhanced girl in way over her head and caught by her own trap. Left to her own resources, she does the only thing she can; she runs.
Actually, it’s not a half bad idea. Conan is fixated on her, and that is keeping him anchored to the supernatural realm. If she gets far enough away, he will lose his fixation and exhaustion, coupled with his head trauma should drop him back into mundane reality. Howard describes Conan’s fixation on Atali in the final chase and the effort it takes for him to accomplish her capture in grim detail.
Conan captures Atali and she writhes out of his grasp, stripping herself in the process. She beseeches the god Ymir, her father, to save her. He does; she disappears in a flash of light and a clap of thunder. As an aside, I love how Ymir doesn’t actually inhabit the Supernatural realm; Howard makes the supernatural world itself a nested reality of a larger invisible God’s-world. Howard’s view of reality is that it has layers, like an onion.
When Atali disappears, Conan is cut off from his anchor in the Supernatural world and Howard describes the Cimmerian’s vertigo, as fatigue and trauma pitch him headlong back toward the mundane world and unconsciousness;
“Then suddenly the borealis, the snow-clad hills, and the blazing heavens reeled drunkenly to Conan’s sight, thousands of fire-balls burst with showers of sparks, and the sky itself became a titanic wheel which rained stars as it spun. Under his feet the snowy hills heaved up like a wave, and the Cimmerian crumpled into the snows to lie motionless..”
If the previous paragraph wasn’t proof enough that the story is being told from the perspective of Conan’s conscious perceptions, then the next one positively does, since Howard details what Conan experiences while unconscious.

"In a cold dark universe, whose sun was extinguished long ago, Conan felt the movement of life, alien and unguessed. An earthquake had him in its grip and was shaking him to and fro, at the same time chafing his hands and feet until he yelled in pain and fury and groped for his sword..”
Conan comes to, back in the mundane world and his rational mind begins to convince him that he experience some type of dream. He makes a statement: "A strange madness fell upon me when I looked at her, so I forgot all else in the world. I followed her. Did you not find her tracks? Or the giants in icy mail I slew?" Now, I have seen people use this statement as the rational that Conan was under a spell, but all a “strange madness” really signifies is that he was suffering from a type of mental aberration that he had never encountered before. Any idea that this implied a spell is simply reading something into the statement that isn’t there. Also, Conan’s statement reiterates Howard’s depiction of reality being a series of nested worlds. The Supernatural realm contained the mundane world, but the people in the “real” world are completely unable to see Atali’s track or the dead giants. They aren’t “real” to them.
The only Aesir that believes Conan is Gorm. He saw Atali when he was wounded in battle as a youth. Like Conan, he had taken a sword blow to the head, which seems to be the consistent way to experience her appearance. Unlike Conan he was unable to follow her, although he howled like a dog because he couldn’t.
The story ends with a twist, where Conan discovers Atali’s garment in his hand. Conan brought it back with him because she was so real that he incorporated her into his reality paradigm. His belief was enough to make the garment real. This is Howard’s way of telling us that reality is an illusion made concrete by the application of consciousness.
One final thought; some people might think that this theory of “altered-consciousness” is kind of “out there”. Just remember that Conan experiences states of altered reality several times during the Conan saga. In fact, in the story that Howard wrote just prior to this on, The Phoenix on the Sword, Conan is in an altered state (dream state) when he talks to Epemitreous and that the sage places the symbol of a phoenix on Conan’s sword, and like Atali’s garment, it appears in the mundane world. Howard was consistent in the way he handled reality in Conan’s world.
I don’t expect to convince everyone that my way of looking at this story is the correct way. I do feel that my theory makes more sense than conventional wisdom allows although I understand that I may simply be projecting my own biases onto the material. In the end, I’m really only providing food for thought.

The Frozen Landscape of Reality essay  Copyright 2007-2010 Dale E. Rippke
All rights reserved

The Tao of Conan

Why everything you think you know about Conan is probably wrong
By Dale E. Rippke
This essay originally appeared in REHUPA #199, June 2006

He was not merely a wild man; he was part of the wild, one with untameable elements of life; in his veins ran the blood of the wolf-pack; in his brain lurked the brooding depths of the northern night; his heart throbbed with the fire of blazing forests.
-Excerpt from BLACK COLOSSUS, by Robert E. Howard

The single most frustrating aspect of being a fan of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian is the myriad of reader’s subjective opinions as to the values that Howard’s character embodies. It’s not as if he wrote the Conan stories to be so opaque that any interpretation could be considered valid. I’m positive that Howard knew exactly what Conan’s character traits and motivations were and thus described him acting in a reasonably consistent manner across the entire series.
So what happened? Why is there so much confusion as to who and what Conan was?
The single biggest contributor to this confusion is the absolute plethora of pastiche material that has been added to the Conan saga since Howard’s suicide in 1936. The first pastiche offerings by L. Sprague DeCamp and Lin Carter set the tone for all the subsequent works, since they were incorporated into the Conan mythos as having equal standing to Howard’s own yarns. The DeCamp/Carter stories moved away from Howard’s vision by offering their own sanitized version, emphasizing Conan’s “heroic” qualities (like his “rude chivalry” toward women) and minimizing his more distasteful aspects. They also tended to present Conan as being more cerebral than Howard’s instinctual barbarian. However, they were just novices compared to what was to come next.
The biggest offender in almost every way was Marvel Comics. Their version of Conan was almost a completely different character than Howard’s vision. Oddly enough, quite a bit of this came about because of an agenda forced upon Marvel Comics by being a member of the Comics Code; they had to present Conan as a positive role-model. This presented writer Roy Thomas with a bit of a tightrope to walk in order to keep Conan somewhat true to what Howard envisioned. Conan still killed his enemies (something other Comic Code heroes weren’t allowed), but it was always shown as self-defense; he wasn’t allowed to murder anyone, anymore. Some people may argue that this wasn’t a big change, but it completely altered Conan’s personality and motivations. Other changes to the Conan character came about by Thomas taking bits of history, events from stories, and throwaway character quirks and spinning them into a consistent, homogenous whole. To add to the confusion, Thomas was eventually allowed to adapt the DeCamp/Carter stories into the Marvel series, with wildly varying degrees of success. Soon after Thomas left the series, it rapidly fell into a static, bland mess that slowly shifted Conan into the role of a defacto superhero; a veritable Hyborian Age boy scout. Even Thomas’s return late in the series couldn’t prevent it from running off the rails and collapsing under it own gigantic mythology.
In the meantime, dozens of pastiche novels of wildly varying quality were released, as well as a couple of motion picture that further confused the issue. Is it actually any wonder that people don’t know who Conan really is?
The other main contributors to this confusion are the consumers of Howard’s yarns, from casual fans to Howard scholars. The casual fan is generally uninterested in Robert Howard, considering him to be just the first in a growing number of Conan scribes; all equal in their eyes. It really doesn’t matter if they are reading Dark Horse Comics, Marvel Comics, or any of the pastiche authors. All they are really interested in is the adventures of the Conan character.
At the other end of the spectrum are Howard fans and scholars. They want to discover the true nature of Conan solely through the writings of Robert Howard (a position I absolutely endorse). The weird thing is, even limiting the playing field to Howard doesn’t seem to make the confusion go away. This seems to be due to one main reason; there is a pre-existing bias that exists due to reading the comics or pastiche material first. This has a tendency to contaminate and eclipse Howard’s characters and world with the ideas from the earlier readings, thus leading to inaccurate comprehension of the material.
What perplexes me is that most people seem to be wholly ignorant with this state of affairs, and usually tend to project the blame out onto Howard’s stories; citing inconsistencies, opaque motivations, and the general belief that Conan is “everything to everyone”. This is something that nearly every Howard scholar (myself included) is guilty of. It’s also human nature to try to create order in our own minds out of all of this sometimes contradictory information. Frequently, the end result is a type of myopia; you literally can’t see the forest because of all the trees. We all project personal bias and become locked into a subjective paradigm of belief that is extremely hard to discard.
To some degree this essay is a direct example of the paradigm of belief. I came to Conan through the agency of Marvel Comics. I was happy living this delusional existence; happy in my belief of all things Conan. Then I joined the Robert E. Howard United Press Association (REHUPA). It didn’t happen right away, but slowly the scales fell from my eyes and I was able to perceive Conan in a truly different light. There were real, tangible differences between Howard’s barbarian and the guy in the comics. It was almost as if some of Conan’s more heroic aspects had gotten pushed out to the most extreme positions possible. Several of the Marvel Conan's noblest qualities didn’t exist or were seriously muted in the Howard stories. Some of the more egregious differences are:

• Conan has an iron code of morality that he lives by.
• Conan only preys on people who deserve it.
• Conan protects the poor and the innocent from bad people.
• Conan would never, under any circumstance, kill a woman or harm a child.

This is just a small sampling of some of the facts that people argue are central to the character and mystique of Conan. The only problem is; there is almost no evidence of any of this in Howard’s writings other than that which people project onto it.
Let’s examine, as an example, the fanciful notion that Conan would never kill a woman. There are only about four references given by Howard over the course of the Conan series that address this issue. Examining these four passages, using Occam’s Razor and a bit of common sense should illuminate Howard’s intentions.
First clue is mentioned in Queen of the Black Coast. The ship that Conan is passenger on comes under attack by the black corsairs led by Bêlit. Conan decides to feather the pirate ship with arrows, and as it closes, spies Bêlit: “Conan drew the shaft to his ear – then some whim or qualm stayed his hand and sent the arrow through the body of a tall plumed spearman beside her.” On the face of it, it can be used to support the notion that Conan won’t kill women. It only real problem is that Howard shows it to be the result of a “whim or qualm”, which seems to be too unpredictable to easily fall in line with the rational that he would never, ever harm a woman.
The second comes from Xuthal of the Dusk. Conan’s woman Natala has been kidnapped by Thalis and is going to be killed, so that the Stygian can have Conan to herself. Natala points out the flaw in Thalis’ plan: “‘He will cut your throat,’ answered Natala with conviction, knowing Conan better than Thalis did.” This should actually kill that notion that Conan would never kill a woman. Howard doesn’t write that Natala hopes he will kill her or imagines that he will kill her; he states that she KNOWS he will kill her. Conan WILL KILL a woman under certain provocations. The murder of a girl under his protection is reason enough.
The third comes from The People of the Black Circle. Conan needs to camouflage the Devi and decides to take the clothes of a young woman nearby. The Devi worries that he is going to kill the girl for them. “‘I don’t kill women ordinarily,’ he grunted; ‘though some of the hillwomen are she-wolves.’” There are a couple of interesting facts gleaned from reading that statement in context. First of all he is implying that under extraordinary circumstances he might consider killing women. Secondly, that circumstance has to do with women who intend violence upon his person. For the sake of argument I’m going to limit it to those women that he would find himself hard-pressed to defeat in battle or that have him at a disadvantage. We theoretically would have seen this happen in Red Nails if Valeria had been unable to kill Tascela; it would have fallen to Conan to try to try to take her out without becoming fried by her magic laser wand. It really only takes common sense to realize that Conan isn’t going to let himself be killed by a woman, even if he is adverse to killing them.
The fourth comes from Rogues in the House, and it seems to be the main evidence that people use to advance the idea that Conan will not kill a woman. In the story, Conan’s woman has betrayed him to the authorities, who have captured and incarcerated him. Conan escapes, and makes his way back to his ex-lover’s apartment. Instead of killing her, he takes her atop the building and drops her into the cesspool behind it. The main argument that Conan won’t kill women comes from the notion that “If she didn’t deserve death at his hands, then really, who does?” The problem is one detail that tends to mitigate this argument somewhat. There is an interesting passage that occurs during the scene that sheds light on Conan’s motivation. Conan enters the room and faces the girl. She begins to beg for her life as he stands there with a bloodstained knife in his hand: “Conan did not reply; he merely stood and glared at her with his burning eyes, testing the edge of his poniard with a calloused thumb. At last he crossed the chamber…” Howard uses this passage to illustrate Conan’s motives during his encounter with the girl. The overwhelming sense I get from it is that Conan entered the room fully intending to kill her and paused to collect himself for a moment. While she begs for her life, he is wrestling with his impulse to murder her outright (testing the edge of his poniard with a calloused thumb). In much the same way that he couldn’t bring himself to kill Bêlit due to a “whim or qualm”, Conan can’t bring himself to murder his punk either. He assuages his need for vengeance by chucking her into a cesspool, instead.
According to Howard, while it really isn’t in Conan’s nature to kill women, he will kill them under certain circumstances; if he is hard pressed in battle with one or if a woman murders someone under his protection being the two that we know about. While the girl in Rogues in the House certainly betrayed him, Conan escaped death, so she doesn’t really fall into either category of “women he would kill”. She instead lucked into a Cimmerian version of “no harm, no foul”, although it was a pretty near thing. Anyone who still believes that Conan would never, ever kill a woman is projecting his own bias. Howard frankly implies that Conan WILL kill women, given the right provocation.
All of which leads us back to the general theme of this essay. Since most people have a skewed idea of who or what Conan is maybe we should take a look at what Howard was attempting to tell us about his Cimmerian. It is my contention that Conan’s character is consistent across the breadth of the series and that Howard had a very clear conception of the character to draw upon.
Howard claims that he modeled his character after various men he knew; oilfield workers and the like. Each provided traits that made up the amalgam called Conan the Cimmerian. While this is a true statement on the face of it, the Conan character also contains elements that are pretty iconic, if not downright archetypal.
Arguments have been made in the past concerning the allegorical nature of the Conan stories; its overarching theme of civilization versus barbarism, collectivism versus individualism; the hooks that Howard hung his Conan tales upon. Stating the allegory in those simple terms does it much injustice. When you get down to it, true barbarism is not the antithesis of civilization. Barbarism is really nothing more than a simplified version of civilization. Howard’s idealized view of barbarism has nothing to do with reality. It goes down deeper. It goes back to a debate that is one of the oldest in the Western philosophical tradition, between Nomos and Physis (Fusis). 
The principles of nomos were the bedrock of civilized Greek society. They consisted of artifice, order, rationality. Every civilized society, including most barbarous cultures, adheres to the concepts of nomos. Artifice is the imposition of man’s will upon the world around him, while order is the tool of control, and rationality is the explanation of why things work the way they do. All civilized societies that we know of operate out of a nomos paradigm. The nomos worldview is pretty much always collective, in that we generally all share the same outlook.
Howard’s view of the nomos reality was that since humans were flawed, then it stands to follow that any civilization based upon their perceptions would be equally flawed. The Conan stories plays upon the artifice of civilized culture and always presents it as being corruptible and in decline due to either the disparity between components of the culture (the power of haves over the have-nots) or because the security of the collective brings about a sort of ennui that attempts to fulfill its desires through decadence. This decadence brings about a weakness in the race that hastens it inevitable downfall. Civilization’s adherence to rationality also leads to its own destruction through dogma and a false sense of moral superiority.
Howard shows civilization in an entropic light. It always has a sense of decay, a whiff of corruption. He states in Beyond the Black River that: “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstances. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” In a very real sense, what this means is that civilization becomes so entrenched within its artificial laws and dogma, that it is unable to respond to the challenge presented by barbarism. Barbarism embraces the chaotic, the unpredictable, and the creative. It attacks civilization in ways that are impossible to prepare for as well as defend against. Civilization is limited by its own perceptions, while barbarism has no limitations at all.
In the Conan saga, the Cimmerian is nearly always presented as the catalyst that shakes things up; he drives the adventure to new places. He is the antithesis of civilized behavior, so it should come as no surprise that Howard seems to have based Conan upon the “Wild”; upon the principle of physis. It consists of nature, chaos, and irrationality. Conan definitely exhibits all of those traits. Howard plays up the nature angle by comparing him to different types of wild animal in nearly every story he wrote. He shows Conan exhibiting chaotic behavior, operating according to whims and describes him as “turbulent”. He proclaims Conan basic irrationality every time he operates instinctively. The character is practically a poster child for physis behavior.
A character operating out of a physis paradigm would have to be anti-collective. Conan is an individual, not a part of the collective, and doesn’t buy into civilization’s laws and bullshit. By definition, Conan is completely amoral and self-centered. He functions as a law unto himself and even though he preys on civilization wholesale, he doesn’t come across as especially evil, since his victims are essentially corrupt. This tends to color him as a bright ray of light in a very dark world.
The biggest problem in making Conan a sympathetic character is that his motivations seldom come across as altruistic, and usually appear pretty self-centered. Howard needed to give the individualistic Conan a set of values that could supplant those of typical nomos behavior, yet not appear too amoral and self-serving. He tried to solve this by taking the physis model of the rugged individualist and moving it to its logical extreme. In my mind, Conan is based on the idea of the Alpha-male. The interesting thing to me is that it isn’t the human “top-dog” type of alpha-male, but one based on the way animals actually behave in nature (the Wild). He exhibits several different traits that belong to the “alpha-male of a pack” model.
The most obvious trait is that Conan always attempts to rise to the leadership role of any group that he is a part of by direct conflict with the group’s current leader. We see excellent examples of this in his fights with Sergius of Khrosha in Iron Shadows in the Moon, and with Zaporavo in The Pool of the Black One. The best example of this trait occurs in A Witch Shall Be Born. Conan usurps the command of the Zuagir tribesmen from Olgerd Vladislav in a scene that conjures the best elements of being the alpha-male of a pack of animals, right down to Conan’s statement that “There’s no room for a fallen chief on the desert. If the warriors see you, maimed and deposed, they will never let you leave the camp alive.” The apex of this trait is, of course, Conan strangling King Namedides to take the throne of Aquilonia.
Another trait Conan exhibits is his absolute refusal to ever submit to another person’s will. The man, in the entire saga, never once surrenders to an antagonist. He always goes down swinging, even when it seems to be in his best interests not to. He may leave a fight by tactical withdrawal, but he never submits or surrenders. In nature this would be considered “baring your throat” and its something an alpha-male would never do. He’d rather die first.
A third trait concerns the alpha-male’s responsibility to protect the members of his “pack” from outside dangers. Anyone who accepts Conan’s leadership status becomes a member of his “pack” and he will protect them to the point of laying down his life for them. This trait is most obviously illustrated by how fiercely he protects his women satellites, but also shows in his refusal to abandon his beleaguered tribesmen in The People of the Black Circle, even though they are howling for his blood. It even manifests itself in The Hour of the Dragon when Conan recognizes his responsibility toward protecting “his subjects” from the depravations of the invading Nemedians. This is an important trait in viewing the Conan character; he isn’t the king of the nation of Aquilonia as much as the people of Aquilonia are members of his “pack”.
The final trait is in regards to how Conan relates to the women of his “pack”. In nature, the alpha-male has the right to mate with any female of his choosing that enjoys his protection. And we sort of see Howard broach this issue several times in the series. The most obvious example is Octavia in The Devil in Iron. Conan protects her from Khosatral Khel and afterwards considers her to be “his woman”. Even the fact that she was only playing at being enamored of him doesn’t really faze him much; he still expects to have sexual relations with her. A similar scene appears in The People of the Black Circle after Conan rescued the Devi Yasmina from the seers of Yimsha and reestablished his protection. They eventually realize that she is no longer useful as a hostage, so Conan decides to keep her as “his woman”, and states quite frankly that she doesn’t have any choice in the matter. Even The Vale of Lost Women alludes to this a bit when Conan realizes that Livia doesn’t want to play by “his” rules and so gallantly kicks her out of the country because of the rationalization that she isn’t “the proper woman for the war-chief of the Bamulas”.
Conan also exhibits a physis trait by acting in an appropriately chaotic manner in any number of situations. Howard knew that the Conan character needed to be unpredictable; He alludes to it all the time: “Barbaric men did strange inexplicable things”. The earlier argument about Conan killing women is a case in point.
When Conan decided, through a whim or a qualm, not to shoot Bêlit, it was an act of unpredictability (it also skirts the edge of irrationality, since Bêlit was the corsair’s leader and her death might have ended the fight). Chaos means unpredictability. Howard presented the scene between Conan and his punk in Rogues in the House as an act of unpredictability, since he wrote it to appear that the Cimmerian intended to kill her, only to change his mind at the last second. And lest we forget, in Black Colossus, Amalric describes Conan as being “the most turbulent of all my rogues!” Turbulent means wildly or violently unpredictable. It seems clear that Howard intended Conan to behave in such a manner.
Irrationality is the other physis trait that Conan exhibits and this one is a bit harder to pin down, mainly because the word itself has negative connotations to the current way of thinking. Irrationality in the true sense means that the character exhibits thinking that has no logical basis as its source. Howard describes Conan as acting instinctively, putting action before reflection. In the Howard story The Devil in Iron, Ghaznavi of Khawarizm points out that the crafty Conan exhibits traits that are more aligned with “wild animal instinct than through intelligence”. Howard links Conan’s irrationality to his emotional state. He flees in horror from the decapitated body of the Son of Set that he slew in The God in the Bowl. His escape attempts in both Queen of the Black Coast and The God in the Bowl are set into motion by first slaying unarmed men who have pissed him off, rather than the more rational and logical choice of the armed men in the room.
It seems pretty clear to me that Howard intended Conan to be the antithesis of civilized behavior. He operates out of a completely different paradigm than the worldview of the civilized nations he wanders through. He interacts with the civilized mindset, but he never actually embraces it; he usually expresses disdain toward it. His rejection of the civilized worldview come straight out of The Vale of Lost Women: “Customs differ in various countries, but if a man is strong enough, he can enforce a few of his native customs anywhere. And no man ever called me a weakling!”. Conan is not nomos. He is physis through and through.
Conan left Cimmeria, according to Howard, because of his intense curiosity to see the world and to experience life to its fullest extent. That is pretty much his mandate throughout the entire series. Conan isn’t about an unexamined life; its about the desire to “Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content” and “I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and I am content.”
Conan deals in death, but his reality is that he is constantly moving toward life. It seems like a paradox, but that’s really when he’s viewed from the nomos perspective. Conan is so enamored of living his life that he is will to risk it by flirting with death at every opportunity. Like any war veteran can attest; People only just exist – you don’t actually live life until you’ve laid it on the line. Conan lives his life like it’s nothing less than a dance with death.
One thing always perplexed me about the Conan saga was the fact that his becoming king seems to fly in the face of his physis paradigm. Even Howard himself seems to acknowledge problem in Hour of the Dragon, when Conan rides disguises himself as a Free Companion and rides through Zingara in pursuit of the Heart of Ahriman: “And more than looking the part, he felt the part; the awakening of old memories, the resurge of the wild, mad, glorious days of old before his feet were set on the imperial path when he was a wandering mercenary, roistering, brawling, guzzling, adventuring, with no thought for the morrow, and no desire save sparkling ale, red lips, and a keen sword to swing on all the battlefields of the world.” It seems that he is moving toward nomos worldview and perhaps he is to a degree. The important thing to keep in mind is the context. Conan becoming king of a civilized land is nothing less than Howard’s main theme of civilization versus barbarism written on a more personal scale. Barbarism is so potent that just one guy can upset the order of the civilized world.
All of this leads us back to the original point of this essay. The reason that people, authors and fans alike, don’t really “get” Conan is because they tend to look at him through nomos eyes. They feel the need to categorize him; to plug him into pre-existing pigeonholes. They change him to fit their comfort zone. DeCamp and Carter make Conan more rational; a nomos trait. Roy Thomas takes Conan’s unpredictable behavior and constructs a veritable iron code of behavioral traits; the very essence of nomos belief. And people buy into it.
Conan isn’t nomos. Howard certainly didn’t write him that way, or he wouldn’t have had to power to capture our imaginations the way that he did. Conan, when you get right down to it, fires up our imaginations because he is his own man. He doesn’t buy into civilizations bullshit; it doesn’t concern him much at all. He only exists to live his life on his own terms; live free or die. That is the real Conan.
Why is this important? On the overall scheme of things it’s probably too late to change people’s perceptions of Conan due to the flood of pastiche material out there. But at one time, a long time ago it was important enough that a Texan writer took the time to figure out how to present the ultimate icon of human freedom. It’s important to me to honor his vision of what was important to him.
I don’t really expect to change anyone’s mind by this essay. The reality is that it’s just my point of view. But I believe that it makes a valid point based on solid evidence. All I really want is to make you consider it for a bit. It’s the least I could do for Bob…

The Tao of Conan essay Copyright 2006-2010 Dale E. Rippke
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