Conan the Barbarian is one the great characters of fantasy literature that everyone has seen, yet never seen. Conan material in the form of television, comic book, novel, and motion picture abounds, but how much of it is really the work of Conan’s creator Robert E. Howard? The answer is almost none.

Howard wrote a mere 16 short stories and one full-length novel of Conan tales that were published in Weird Tales during his lifetime. There were an additional four unpublished complete short stories found in Howard’s papers after his suicide in 1936. A number of other story fragments were also discovered that were reworked by Conan pastische writers L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. This is the complete extent of the authentic portrayal of Conan the Cimmerian, as his creator envisioned him.

The muscle-bound, loincloth-clad character popularly associated with the Conan name is (in a number of ways) a creature of pastische, of other authors using the name Conan and attempting to write in Howard’s style. This trend began as early as the 1950s with the first publication of the Conan tales in novel form. It was taken a huge step further in the 1960s when L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter began a series of linear, chronological novels for the Conan character similar to those of the John Carter and the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Given the limited amount of Conan material produced by Howard and that the tales do not present Conan’s life in chronological order, significant gaps were filled to create the desired text. An undetermined amount of edits were made to the original Conan tales, and they were combined with other rewritten non-Conan material by Howard along with new material by the editors.

These novels were then used as source material when Marvel Comics conducted Conan even further afield in a series of popular Conan comic books that ran for decades. The original stories of Robert E. Howard got lost and diluted in this sea of material set in the “Conan Universe.” It was not really even possible to read all of the original Conan tales in their original form without access to copies of the issues of Weird Tales in which they appeared.

This situation finally began to change about six years ago. All of the original Conan tales were printed by the Gollancz imprint of the Orion Publishing Group to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Howard’s birth. This led to further interest in the original Conan tales on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in a trilogy of three new anthologies published by Wandering Star in the United Kingdom and Del Rey in the United States:

The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian
The Bloody Crown of Conan
The Conquering Sword of Conan

These texts contain all the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, exactly as Howard wrote them (taken from his original typescripts where possible), in the order that he wrote them. There is no filler, no editing, and no rewrites. The new anthologies also provide extensive biographical notes and supplemental material that describe the context in which each story was written based on the author’s existing story drafts, synopses, and correspondences with friends, family, and other writers.

Reading these three books is something of a thrill, because they have been so long in coming and we can see how reinterpretation caused the Conan character to suffer. Howard was a writer from the plains of Texas and Conan is much more the drifter cowboy, the mountain man of the Rockies, and the lone Indian warrior of American western literature than the muscle-bound killing machine played by Arnold Schwarzenegger on film. The original tales present Conan as someone with a feral snarl and sometimes possessed of berserk fury, yes, but also as someone possessed of a patient, sometimes brooding native intelligence. It is perhaps more fair to see Conan as more like a pumped-up Hugh Jackman than Schwarzenegger — Jackman is someone who can turn in a Clint Eastwood-esque colder-than-cold “you are going to die” scowl, but also offer a lot of personality and charm.

These anthologies also allow the reader to see the themes that Howard originally wished to explore in the work. Of these, the most prominent deals with constructs of “nature” and “civilization” and the conflict between the two. Howard writes from a point of view that civilization is an odd and artificial imposition on the true nature of man. Conan, being the wild creature of Cimmeria, is vastly superior to any city-bred aristocrat. Conan can pick up some of the manners and trappings of civilization, but he can still be himself. Other, more civilized men cannot do the same and become strong the way Conan is. Conan is wild because he was born to it; he represents the true nature and possiblity of man that strongly bears the mark of Social Darwinism.

Finally, it is possible to see the connection of the Conan tales to the work of H.P. Lovecraft. The two corresponded regularly for several years, and it is clear that Howard absorbed a number of ideas that Lovecraft used in his stories of Cthulhu and the other Elder Gods. Many of the magical beings that Conan encounters possess a cold, dispassionate intelligence that is almost ambivalent to the momentary needs of human beings. Magic is generally very black, very evil, very alien. It somehow represents the pinnacle of civilized learning, that is the antithesis of the wild, untamed power of Conan. In this, there is also a paradox: true practicioners of the dark magical arts eventually become something very wild and rather alien to the human civilization that spawned them, making them the only adversaries that are truly Conan’s equal.

With the wealth of detail and additional literary depth that these anthologies provide, they are a fascinating “must read” for any serious fantasy fan.