The character of Conan the Cimmerian is well-known. Conceived by Robert E. Howard in the winter of 1932 while he was traveling the south Texas border country, Howard went on to write more than 20 Conan stories and story fragments before his death by suicide in 1936. Many of these were published within his own lifetime and the character remains widely popular today, thanks to a legion of imitators and the efforts of Howard enthusiasts such as Glenn Lord and L. Sprague de Camp.
Mighty-thewed reaver and skin-clad barbarian, Conan is famous for his strength and ferocity. What is often overlooked, however, are his “gigantic melancholies,” the deep emptiness upon which Conan broods throughout the stories written by Robert E. Howard. But what is it about this melancholic adventurer that has made him an enduring commercial success for more than seventy years?
The Foreigner as Alien Other
Seth Tomko, in his article, “Heroic Fantasy and Ethnic Identity,” points out that Conan is a product and victim of his ethnic heritage, always subject to the prejudices of more “civilized” persons. As the only Cimmerian to ever appear in Robert E. Howard’s stories, Conan is forever a foreigner, an alien, outside the law and unbound by the traditions and customs of place that tie others to family, friends, and homely occupations.
As a foreigner, Conan has the ability to reveal the crudest aspects of human relationships when proprieties give way before the results of confrontations, for the foreigner confronts us with an unreadable cipher that rejects civility and returns to a violence laid bare. Conan is the alien, the enemy, the Otherly unknown. The hatred of civilized persons tells him that he is an intruder, that his uncouth ways are irritating, and that this will be shown to him frankly and without caution. As a stranger in a strange land, no one can either defend or avenge him. He does not count for anyone, he should be grateful for being tolerated in civilized society. After all, civilized people need not be gentle with foreigners.
Yet, in crossing a border or two, Conan has changed these discomforts into a base of resistance, a citadel of life, and attained the self-confidence of simply being, settling within himself with a smooth, opaque certainty. Free of ties to his own people, Conan is “completely free.” However, the consummate name for such a freedom is solitude. Indifference becomes the Cimmerian’s shield. Insensitive, aloof, he seems beyond the reach of attacks and rejections that he nevertheless experiences deeply, for beneath his armor, he is hypersensitive, humiliated in a position where he embodies the enemy, the traitor, the victim.
Secret Wounds
This aloofness, however, is only the resistance by which he succeeds in fighting off the matricidal anguish of the foreigner, for Conan, like all exiles, is a stranger to his mother. Estranged from her maternal comforts, he does not call to her. He asks nothing of her. Some secret wound drives Conan to wandering, and yet that wound is never revealed. Arrogant, he proudly holds on to what he lacks, to absence.
The enduring power of Conan is this melancholic
Normal
0
foreignness, for Conan, whose homeland and countrymen never appear in any of Robert E. Howard’s stories, represents the foreigner that lives within each of us: he is the hidden face of our own identity. And yet, through his indomitable courage and endless stints of valor, he shows us that, if one has the strength not to give in, there remains a path to be discovered.
