Hyborian Bridge 83

Well, I asked RT if Howard had ever crossed the border and he wasn’t sure, but said he’d written it into Savage Sword #200. I looked it up and the tale has flashfowards from a prequel to People of the Black Circle of Howard crossing the border for inspiration.

That’s all she wrote from my perspective, except that there is a very clear inspiration in Red Nails, his final story of a feuding city based largely on Aztec culture – with names like Tolkemec – as well as the labyrinth of Knossos in ancient Crete (the bull-necked prince Olmec).

I was partly asking because I realize Howard’s Conan tales have a grim, revenge-laden atmosphere, and are not “light”. If you glance at Pictorial 73 it does say that cultures that are balance between psyche and physical have a lightness that we – trapped in our heads – have lost.

I even cited the revived Aztec ball-game that has a “hippy” song-like grace of body (male and female). How can the lost, song-like lightness square with the often gloomy tone of Howard’s Conan yarns?
The Annotated Guide by Robert Weinberg is very good on that score, and he says of a quote from Queen of the Black Coast on Crom

Compare this god to the same god as written about by those authors who have continued the Conan saga. In reality, there is no comparison. The benevolent being masquerading as Crom in the de Camp-Nyberg Conan stories is not the same being that Conan speaks of here.. The Conan stories are grim, moody pieces, with a truly barbaric hero.

Weinberg also says there is no room at the inn for humour in Conan (unlike some of the other output). While there are no jokes as such, Conan does indulge in rough badinage, as in this scene from People of the Black Circle  

Buscema/Alcala art

Where there is any light banter it has to fit the plot, as here in a peasant hill shack a haughty Diva is set amongst, by her barbaric abduction.

There is also in the story the physical proximity of Conan to Yasmina. It’s not high comedy but a less-than-grim irony of the sexual kind.

 

Savage Sword #17(c) Marvel

There is a sexual freedom of the kind that is certainly not grim. One of the most famous covers by Brundage was for Black Colossus

 

Weinberg notes this was not the case in the story, where Yasmela states

“It is not fitting that I come before the shrine clad in silk. I will go naked on my knees as befits a suppliant, lest Mitra deem I lack humility.”

“Nonsense!” Vateesa had scant respect for the ways of what she deemed a false cult. “Mitra would have folks upright before him..” Thus objurgated, Yasmela allowed the girl to garb her..

It still makes a very fitting cover, though!
Conan’s hot kisses in Hour of the Dragon to his rescuer are again a typical counter to barbaric gloom.

Conan’s love and loss of Belit in Queen of the Black Coast more than anything else casts a baleful shadow over his personality. The wild, sea-bound love, the jungle fastness that sends Belit to her death, only to conquer for an instant that ultimate abyss, while Conan has to abide in the land of the living.

There was no light in his eyes that contemplated the glassy swells. Out of the rolling blue wastes, all glory and wonder had gone.. For himself, its glittering blue splendor was more repellent than the leafy fronds..

Wild love, grim violence, the everlasting sea. Such events will touch Conan forever, their psychic luster, their physical calamity. Because Howard’s writing is so taut and poetically inspired, there is gloom aplenty. The events are grim but Conan will shake their shackles loose and roar with mirth.

The difference with the subsequent writers is they are not as wild and so neither as grim (think of The Grey God Passes for vast wildness of landscape and mindscape alike). It’s a world of extremes; of crude lusts and badinage, of godless violence in forests of the night, of moody depths.

It’s a world of psychic luster that reflects the physical. Our modern world is the exact opposite! One of mildness and verbosity in which the only grim pursuits are ball-games. I’ve nothing against ball games but they’re not life or death issues and they seem to get grimmer by the year.

Conan is honestly moody and also honestly light because he is wild and footloose and not under the rule of mildness. Is it not true that the more mild people are the more you can be sure they are running you? That is grimness with not the slightest trace of lightness.