Today on Project Gutenberg: "The Hyborian Age"

Today on Project Gutenberg, we have…

The Hyborian Age by Robert E. Howard

If you are a fan of fantasy novels and short stories, chances are you already know who today’s author is. If you don’t, then you should. Despite his tragically short literary career, lasting from 1924 to his suicide in 1936, Robert E. Howard is one of the most famous, prolific and influential pulp writers of all time. He’s credited with creating the “sword and sorcery” subgenre of fantasy, action-adventure tales influenced by mythology, folklore and historical fiction. His bibliography also includes Westerns, mysteries, horror and much more. Certain characters got their own series of stories, like the Puritan swashbuckler Solomon Kane and the 1930s boxer Steve Costigan. But Howard’s most famous creation towers over them all, the one and only Conan the Barbarian.

Today’s work is not technically a Conan story, but it’s part of the Conan mythos. Specifically, it’s about the world which Conan inhabits. Howard was a big history lover, and he took a historian’s approach when creating his sword and sorcery tales. Rather than set them in a real time and place, he would invent a fictional historical era and tell stories about that era. For Conan, he created the Hyborian Age, a time between the destruction of Atlantis and the start of recorded history.

In this short essay, published in a magazine called The Phantagraph, Howard lays out some key details about this fictional history. “When I began writing the Conan stories a few years ago,” he says, “I prepared this 'history' of his age and the peoples of that age, in order to lend him and his sagas a greater aspect of realness. And I found that by adhering to the 'facts' and spirit of that history, in writing the stories, it was easier to visualize (and therefore to present) him as a real flesh-and-blood character rather than a ready-made product…I have never violated the 'facts' or spirit of the 'history' here set down, but have followed the lines of that history as closely as the writer of actual historical-fiction follows the lines of actual history.”

Taking inspiration from the Stone Age, the late Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages, Howard presents a vision of a continent in upheaval and constant evolution. The powerful civilizations of the world are struck down by the Cataclysm, which causes the nations of Atlantis and Lemuria to sink into the ocean. Survivors of the Cataclysm are scattered across the world, regressing into nomadic barbarians at best and barely sapient ape-men at worst. Out of this mess arises a warrior tribe from the north called the Hyborians. They push into the rest of the continent and soon form the kingdoms they subjugate into a new empire. Rivals soon appear to oppose and, after thousands of years, overthrow them. Peoples clash and nations rise and fall until a new cataclysm — the forming of Earth’s modern continents — throws everything into turmoil and restarts the cycle. Scattered once again, the Hyborian groups reemerge as the various classical and medieval societies of recorded history.

That’s the long and short of it, but the piece goes on for quite a while — probably longer than it needs to. Howard could write decent poems and short stories, but in this he adopts a dry, boring-professor’s-lecture style of narration. It doesn’t help that the names of these civilizations tend to sound the same, and there aren’t many clear differences between them. They all pretty much fit the basic archetype of “warriors who love to pillage and maim and kill things.” They’re differentiated mainly by appearance, and Howard’s descriptions of how these people look is…uh…look, we all know the guy was racist. He was BFFs with Lovecraft, for God’s sake.

In additions to the outright racial slurs that sometimes crop up, Howard includes the idea that apes can literally evolve into humans and then back again if they don’t remain civilized enough. The warrior tribes who establish the earliest empires are described in distinctly Aryan terms: fair hair, blue or gray eyes. Multiple paragraphs are spent describing how these characteristics change as the different races mingle with each other. In an unexpected move, Howard depicts this intermarrying as a morally neutral thing. It doesn’t make the tribes inherently better or worse: he simply records which groups tended to mix with others, which ones didn’t and how that affected the average physical characteristics of those groups. It’s still weird and bad to read, though.

Perhaps more annoying is Howard’s habit of giving every culture a singular personality trait — usually “we are basically orcs” — and then implies that they don’t have the mental capacity to be anything else. Take the Picts, for example. Not the actual historical Picts: Howard did write about them, but the tribe he depicts here is wholly fictional. You might call them Hobbesian, in that they are nasty, brutish and short. They think of nothing more than slaughtering their enemies and taking all their stuff. When a priest named Arus tries bringing religion to the Picts by holding up the rich neighboring kingdoms as examples to follow, the Picts have a different takeaway:

But the Pict was little calculated to seriously regard teachings which bade him forgive his enemy and abandon the warpath for the ways of honest drudgery. It has been said that he lacked artistic sense; his whole nature led to war and slaughter. When the priest talked of the glories of the civilized nations, his dark-skinned listeners were intent, not on the ideals of his religion, but on the loot which he unconsciously described in the narration of rich cities and shining lands. When he told how Mitra aided certain kings to overcome their enemies, they paid scant heed to the miracles of Mitra, but they hung on the description of battle-lines, mounted knights, and maneuvers of archers and spearmen. They harkened with keen dark eyes and inscrutable countenances, and they went their ways without comment, and heeded with flattering intentness his instructions as to the working of iron, and kindred arts.

I forgot he used the phrase “dark-skinned” in this paragraph. What the hell, Robert?

So yeah, from a modern standpoint, most of this is very bad no no don’t write that. But it’s also got a bigger legacy than that. Howard was not the first writer to basically make up a fantasy world like this. But he was among the first to write out supplemental details like this, trying to make his world feel more authentic. He’s essentially doing a very primitive version of what J.R.R. Tolkien would later do with his Middle-earth stories collected in The Silmarillion, or what George R.R. Martin would do with Westeros in his book Fire & Blood. And when you consider the limited resources and education Howard had compared to those other guys, this is actually kind of impressive. He’s clearly passionate about this work, and he demonstrates a desire to better himself as a worldbuilder and storyteller. I can certainly relate to that.

If you’re looking for something of Howard’s to read, I would recommend one of his short stories over this. Some of his work is in the public domain already, and his most famous works like the Conan series are available as published collections. If you’re familiar with Howard, then this serves as an interesting look into how he thought about his imaginary lands. He’s certainly not the greatest writer of all time (or one that’s aged well), but like his friend Lovecraft, I think he’s still worth reading and studying after all these years. After all, not every writer invents a whole new subgenre.

And that’s what we found today on Project Gutenberg! See you next time!

— Dana