When the screen version of Conan the Barbarian starring Arnold Schwarzenegger hit screens in 1982, most people who thought about it all, I’ll wager, made the understandable assumption that its origin lay in the Marvel Comics series, which had launched in 1970. As it happens, the character had been created by pulp author Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) about a half century earlier.
How resonant that Howard shared a birthday (January 22) with August Strindberg. I’m overdue to write a post about that Swedish mad man; maybe next year. The shared element has to do with Nietzsche. Strindberg considered the German philosopher his God, at least for a time. Howard, on the other hand, seems not to have stood in the direct sunlight, but basked in its reflection as cast by writers he admired like Jack London and H.P. Lovecraft. The 1982 film draws heavily from Nietzsche and Wagner. It was directed and co-written by the extremely right-wing John Milius. It is both interesting and frightening to trace the cult of Germanic and Celtic mysticism as it wends its way from the 19th century all the way to modern times. You might have thought it had been nipped in the bud in 1945, but it starts to creep back not long afterward. America was theoretically built on reason, its founding documents collectively and carefully devised by political scientists who lay awake at night worrying that they got it right. They were empiricists who deeply cared about real world outcomes of what they said and did. Even the fantasists of that age, Voltaire, for example, wrote moralistic allegories.
In the 20th century, the movies changed all that. Movies are dreams, and dreams are irrational. Movies are also big business. They reach everyone. They reach everyone and they fill their heads with irrational dreams. How can reason compete with that?
Time once again to demonize Marvel Comics and their doleful influence on the popular mind. Comic books had always been problematic, at best. Superman literally takes his name from Nietzsche. Think of all the body building and martial arts ads in the back pages of comics. It’s all about the weak and the insecure fantasizing about strength. In the ’60s, Stan Lee began introducing pseudo-mystical elements into his comics — Thor, The Silver Surfer, and Doctor Strange spring immediately to mind. The sixties also saw a new burst of popularity for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ring trilogy, and other fantasy classics. The Brits were particularly into this kind of thing. H. Rider Haggard’s She came out as a movie, for example. In the late ’60s and ’70s, rock bands, heavy metal in particular began to heavily reflect its influence. Amidst all of this came the revival of Howard’s previously obscure pulp stories as a series of paperbacks in the late ’60s, followed by their transplantation to Marvel Comics.
Here is where we excavate the life of Conan’s creator. Robert E. Howard was a mama’s boy who lived with his parents off and on well into adulthood. His father was a doctor who had trouble making a living, necessitating lots of moving around during his early years. The family lived in Texas. Most of Howard’s youth was spent in the small town of Cross Plains, a couple of hours west of Fort Worth. (His boyhood home is now a museum). The mother felt she had married down. She and the boy bonded closely, and she taught him to love literature, not just as something to read, but something to memorize and recite. He dreamed of becoming a writer from quite a young age, although his father generally disapproved until the last year or so, when Robert began to achieve some financial success.
Howard’s influences included Bulfinch’s Mythology, the Theosophical writings of Madame Blavatsky, and the fiction of Kipling, London, Lovecraft, and others. As a Texan he was also enthusiastic about western lore, and western stories make up a goodly portion of his oeuvre. As do boxing stories. He was very much into what was then called Physical Culture, the kind of thing we wrote about here. I don’t want to claim that his fantasizing about this stuff rose to the level of weirdness — I’ll just allow you to contemplate these photos and draw your own conclusions:
I’m afraid I can be a little judgy about cosplay. (It’s why you never see me at these Jazz Age parties, which everyone seems to assume are my thing. I’m like, “The twenties? You mean, the peak membership years of the Ku Klux Klan?”) Anyway maybe Howard’s a teenager in some of these pix, though, even still, it seems to me more appropriate behavior for an eight year old. Maybe a twelve year old? If he’s a 28 year old, my amateur diagnosis is “arrested development”. Go ahead and be insulted, Baby Men. I stopped caring two days ago.
In the ’30s, Howard began to put together his own mythos of an imagined Celtic or pre-Celtic culture, descended from the society of Atlantis (maybe there’s a little Ignatius Donnelly in there too). The frustrating thing about the Celts is that they are so key to European history, and yet we know almost nothing about them, as they wrote nothing down, and the Bardic tradition, which was orally transmitted, died out. The culture stretched all the way from Central Europe to the Atlantic (in what is now the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, the British Isles, and all the tiny countries in the cracks between those) until they were displaced and replaced by the Romans and the Germanic tribes. The culture of the Celts remains a big mystery. Since it’s a tabula rasa, Howard had the brain wave to jump in and simply create tales that were set in that world, or something like it (as his stories also had magical elements).
Also, Howard was of Irish heritage, and the most vital of the surviving Celtic cultures is that of Ireland, followed in no particular order by the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Manx, and the Bretons. It makes perfect sense that the Irish would be the last of the Celts — look at a map. Celtic culture was essentially pushed to the western margin of Europe. Why the hearts of the Irish people were never completely conquered by the invaders is beyond the scope of this article. The Irish language (Gaelic) survives, though it was almost wiped out by English. And Roman Catholicism overwrote the native Irish religion. But much of the visual art of the Celtic people remains, and some of the lore. Irish nationalism fostered a real attempt to revive the native culture in the late 19th and 20th centuries. And where there were holes in the Celtic mythos — well, what fun it would be to fill it in. And so Howard wrote several stories starring his hero Conan, cast in the mold of Hercules or Samson or Beowulf. (The name Conan, by the way is Gaelic. Conan O’ Brien had the bad fortune to be born in 1963, prior to the big revival of Howard’s character. His parents had merely given him a traditional Irish name, but we all thought that it was hilarious in the 1990s when he became famous and seemed to be named after the cartoon Barbarian).
Most of the Conan stories were published in Weird Tales during Howard’s life. As we say, he was beginning to enjoy some success by the mid-1930s. Then in June 1936, with his mother on her deathbed, slowly succumbing to consumption, Howard took a pistol and blew out his brains.
Ah, Fantasy: the Fast Track to the Führerbunker!
For a related post, go here.