 Well, I ranked every Robert E. Howard Conan story, and those that originated with him and then were edited by others. But that was only about half of the stories I read for this chronology; excluding the Hyborian Age essay and the two poems, which I didn't assign star ratings to, I read 54 stories for this project, and I want to give my ranking for all of them. Because I don't want to subject you to quite that much torture (I'm not a Hyperborean, after all), I'm challenging myself to leave only a one-sentence review for each. It's not like you can't go read a post I made for each one if you want to really know my full thoughts. Here they are below! 55. "The Vale of Lost Women" - ☆☆☆☆☆Not only staggeringly racist, but also staggeringly forgettable. 54. "Shadows in Zamboula" (AKA "The Man-Eaters of Zamboula") - ★☆☆☆☆While it starts decently, was this written specifically for the pleasure of Nathan Bedford Forrest? 53. "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" - ★☆☆☆☆Even a sophomore creative writing major could have made huge improvements to this one by giving the manuscript a once-over. 52. "The Lair of the Ice Worm" - ★★☆☆☆This story reminds me (for no reason at all, I'm sure): did you know that "GNDN" is written on all the Jefferies Tubes in Star Trek, which stands for "Goes Nowhere - Does Nothing?" 51. "Wolves Beyond the Border" - ★★☆☆☆A Conan story without a Conan didn't turn out to be that great. 50. "Red Moon of Zembabwei" - ★★☆☆☆While it's got a few decent ideas at its core, this late-life tale doesn't ultimately amount to much other than a big battle. 49. "The Castle of Terror" - ★★☆☆☆Not the worst of the bunch, but absolutely one of the most forgettable fantasy stories I've ever read that doesn't feel very "Conany" at all. 48. "The Witch of the Mists" - ★★☆☆☆While there's some fun to be had in the first "Old Man Conan" tale, it doesn't bode super well for what was to come after. 47. Conan the Liberator - ★★☆☆☆You have the greatest, most physical adventurer in all of pulp fiction as your hero and you keep him confined to military tents to do extended politicking? 46. "Shadows in the Skull" - ★★☆☆☆While the final Conan story is a step up from those preceding it, it's only a shadow of his earlier, more glorious days. 45. "Iron Shadows in the Moon" (AKA "Shadows in the Moonlight") - ★★☆☆☆This one follows a common formula: lost city, damsel in distress, scary monster to fight, and it doesn't stand out doing any of it. 44. The Return of Conan - ★★☆☆☆Like a legacy band playing the hits long after they've stopped making them, this story doesn't land quite like all the better stories it calls back to. 43. "The City of Skulls" - ★★☆☆☆While Juma is a good one-off companion and there's some fun to be had (mostly involving cool settings), this one feels both inconsequential and behind the times. 42. "The Hand of Nergal" - ★★★☆☆The adventure to be had is all well and good, but Lin Carter really took a swing and a miss on some of his writing here. 41. "Drums of Tombalku" - ★★★☆☆Left unfinished by Howard and you can feel it. 40. "Xuthal of the Dusk" (AKA "The Slithering Shadow") - ★★★☆☆Like "Drums of Tombalku" if it had actually been finished, this one doesn't quite stick the landing despite introducing the Black Lotus powder and beating Conan up more than any other story. 39. "Moon of Blood" - ★★★☆☆Following "Beyond the Black River" with this is like when Green Day tried to follow up their beloved rock opera "American Idiot" with another rock opera in "21st Century Breakdown," and all you can think about when you listen to "21st Century Breakdown" is how good "American Idiot" is and how you'd rather be listening to that. 38. "The Ivory Goddess" - ★★★☆☆While it's small in scale, this is a fun one that works a little bit better in comic form. 37. "A Witch Shall Be Born" - ★★★☆☆A middling Conan story with one mind-blowingly good scene. 36. Conan of the Isles - ★★★☆☆This is the only elderly Conan story that really feels like it has anything to say or any new ground to tread. 35. "Jewels of Gwahlur" (AKA "The Servants of Bit-Yakin") - ★★★☆☆If this story ended as good as it started, it would have been one of the all-timers. 34. "The Gem in the Tower" - ★★★☆☆L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter are obviously working off ideas that have been time-worn, but putting Conan at the center still yields a decent pirate romp. 33. "Black Tears" - ★★★☆☆A pretty good premise that doesn't quite stick the landing still makes for a halfway decent story. 32. "Hawks Over Shem" - ★★★☆☆Not the most thrilling of Conan stories, but a serviceable mix of action and intrigue. 31. "The Pool of the Black One" - ★★★☆☆An alright story with the expected lost cities and creepy enemies that's buoyed by a really great ending. 30. "The Devil in Iron" - ★★★☆☆A fun time in a lost city on the Vilayet Sea that doesn't give me a ton to work with. 29. "The Curse of the Monolith" (AKA "Conan and the Cenotaph") - ★★★☆☆A story that takes us farther east than any other with a decent villain and a fun conceit of a gigantic, magnetic obelisk. 28. Conan the Buccaneer - ★★★☆☆A fun pirate adventure that is done no favors by its somewhat workmanlike prose. 27. "The Snout in the Dark" - ★★★☆☆A decent mix of politics, action, might, magic, and monsters. 26. Conan: The Road of Kings - ★★★☆☆Don't let this single city-set adventure fool you: it is imaginative and fun, even if it isn't written anything like how REH would have penned it. 25. "The God in the Bowl" - ★★★☆☆"Let's have Conan fight the cops and a serpent deity in a museum with a dead body on the floor and just see what happens." 24. "Legions of the Dead" - ★★★☆☆There should be more zombies in Conan stories. 23. "Shadows in the Dark" - ★★★★☆Like the best D&D session your party ever had, this is a funny and well-paced, if inconsequential, adventure. 22. Conan and the Emerald Lotus - ★★★★☆The rare Conan story in which the supporting cast are the real stars. 21. "The People of the Summit" - ★★★★☆A story that's creepy, exciting, and has a killer setting that makes for a pretty underrated story. 20. Conan and the Sorcerer - ★★★★☆A ton of fun that takes Conan all over the place with his very soul at stake. 19. Conan and the Spider God - ★★★★☆L. Sprague de Camp's only solo work on Conan proves that he can put together a really fun adventure novel by himself (or do I mean his wife can?). 18. "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" - ★★★★☆An excellent opening and an excellent ending with a magically good time in the middle, representing the earliest story in our chronology. 17. "The Thing in the Crypt" - ★★★★☆Is this the scariest of all Conan stories? 16. "The Star of Khorala" - ★★★★☆The absolute best work of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter working without building off of the existing work of Howard. 15. The Hour of the Dragon - ★★★★☆A few minor flaws hold this totally epic adventure back from being one of the very best of the bunch. 14. The Flame Knife - ★★★★☆This novella that probably isn't quite as tight as it could be has a handful of excellent episodes and the return of one of Conan's all-time best villains. 13. "The Hall of the Dead" - ★★★★☆"The Thing in the Crypt" meets "The Tower of the Elephant" and the quality meets somewhere between the two. 12. "The Blood-Stained God" - ★★★★☆A tomb-plundering adventure that puts Conan in his most Indiana Jones-like position. 11. "The Road of the Eagles" (AKA "Conan, Man of Destiny") - ★★★★☆This thrilling adventure is by far the best of the Conanless stories that de Camp and Carter turned into Conan tales: its setting, villains, and fantasy creatures are all spot-on. 10. "The Phoenix on the Sword" - ★★★★☆The first-ever Conan story is paced well and so exciting even as it's confined mostly to the king's chambers that it makes me want to start a metal band and call it "Golamira." 9. "The Scarlet Citadel" - ★★★★★The best dungeon crawl that Howard ever put to paper. 8. "The Treasure of Tranicos" (AKA "The Black Stranger") - ★★★★★The most tightly-plotted Conan story that's full of double-crossing, a buccaneering good time, and swarthy dialogue. 7. "The People of the Black Circle" - ★★★★★I've read nothing else quite like this jam-packed adventure that goes from the gleaming cities of Vendhya to the highest peaks of the Hyborian world. 6. "Rogues in the House" - ★★★★★There's a reason why the fight with Thak in this story has yielded so much art: it's fucking awesome. 5. "Queen of the Black Coast" - ★★★★★As Conan burns with life, loves, and slays in this tale, we are all more than content. 4. "Red Nails" - ★★★★★Not only is this story exciting and imaginative, but philosophical to the point that I'd argue it counts as literature. 3. "Beyond the Black River" - ★★★★★On some days, I think this western-styled adventure may be the best Conan story ever. 2. "Black Colossus" - ★★★★★"Black Colossus" has an epic adventure, a ripping opening, a good villain, loving, and tomb-raiding all rendered beautifully in one compact package. 1. "The Tower of the Elephant" - ★★★★★What more could you ever ask for in an adventure story? 
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Between 1932 and 1936, Robert E. Howard wrote 21 Conan the Barbarian stories, 17 of which had been published in his lifetime. All 21 of those original stories would eventually see publication in one form or another, even though some of them took decades to make it to the public.  In addition to those 21 stories completed by Howard, writers L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Bjorn Nyberg would add an additional 9 stories by completing fragments from Howard's files or editing Howard's stories that didn't involve Conan to become tales of the Cimmerian. Most of these stories are good, some are genre-defining, and a select few are not worth the paper they're printed on. I realized once I started reading every Conan story that I would eventually feel the need to rank them all since ranking things is fun. Below is my own personal ranking of every Conan story- first just the Robert E. Howard originals, followed by every Conan story that Howard had a hand in, including those edited or finished by others. Ranking the original Robert. E Howard Conan stories
 16. A Witch Shall Be Born For how iconic this story is, it's one of the most disjointed stories in the whole canon. There are certainly excellent aspects to it. I think the opening scene in which Salome and Taramis fight is pretty compelling. Olgerd Vladislav is a great foil for Conan. He acts like a slightly less charming, slightly less fair version of the Cimmerian and we see that it doesn't work out well for him most of the time. It's like a cautionary tale, showing us what Conan could have been if he was a little less heroic. Of course, the Tree of Death scene is an all-timer, maybe in the top 3 best individual scenes that Howard ever wrote, and even made it into the movie. However, I just don't think the rest of the story compares. The epistle in the middle feels random, like Howard couldn't figure out a way to bring the reader up to speed in a more elegant way. The ending recovers a little bit, but I've seen even just fans present ideas that feel more fleshed-out and tighter than what Howard wrote. "A Witch Shall Be Born" might be the Conan story that lives up to its potential the least.
 13. The Devil in Iron This story does what many others do, but it does them slightly better. There's a one-off woman companion for Conan named Octavia, and she's a much more enjoyable character than Olivia or Muriela. There's a thousand-year-old lost city, but it's got more going on than those in "The Pool of the Black One" or "Iron Shadows in the Moon." There are creepy wizard bad guys, but the setup is a little more unique and the stakes are more clear. It's also got a really banging introduction with a Yuetshi fisherman exploring the city of Xapur right before getting his shit rocked mysteriously. Howard's descriptions of the city of Dagon really do this story a service, too, as they're far more immersive than some of his other passages about lost cities. Conan sneaking around the city when he first arrives was full of intrigue and suspense.  12. The God in the Bowl Man, if not a lot happens in "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" as I argue below, even less actually happens in "The God in the Bowl." But I actually think that's pretty cool. Conan is cornered in a temple (that is also a museum?) by guards after the slaying of a prominent citizen and is essentially forced to talk his way out of his situation, which he's not very good at during this early point in his career. This story is unique, though. It's all paranoia and tension as we try to figure out the real way that Kallian Publico died. I wouldn't say that Robert E. Howard is ultimately a gifted detective story author, as it's pretty clear from the very beginning that Conan isn't the assailant and he leaves too-obvious clues as to who or what the murderer really is, but the story's good. It's really supported by its horrifying ending and is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe (I'm not even talking "Murders in the Rue Morgue" this time, I'm thinking more like "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" here) in how it finishes with a real bang. It's a fun time.  11. The Frost-Giant's Daughter I think I'm alone in putting this story so low. It's a good story! I like it! I just don't like it as much as some of the other ones to follow. Its opening on a bloody battlefield in which Conan and one other combatant are the only men standing is a pretty stellar way to start us off. The snowy wastes of Nordheim set this story apart from many of the others that more commonly are set in jungles, deserts, or at sea. Atali, the daughter in the title, is an interesting villain, too. It's not affecting my ranking, but there's lots of good art of this story. I'd say this is one of the simplest Conan stories in existence, at least in regards to plot construction. Not a ton actually happens, though it's an enjoyable, creative ride through Conan getting bewitched by a frost giant.  10. The Hour of the Dragon (AKA "Conan the Conqueror") This is without a doubt the most epic story in Conan's life. It takes us all over the map and has Conan fit himself back into the roles he's taken over the course of his career. He's once again a thief, a pirate, a commander, a king. It has a lot going for it like its really compelling villain and a great romp through an ancient Stygian pyramid's guts, but the story is a little hamstrung by being too long. It's four or five times longer than most Conan stories and it makes you realize that one thing Howard is very adept at usually is trimming the fat from his narratives. They're usually spartan to a fault. The pacing is a little off in this story as some characters disappear for chapters at a time, not to be mentioned for large lengths of the novel, only to be casually mentioned again many pages later. It's also a little held back by the fact that in the epic moment of the evil wizard's defeat, Conan isn't even there. The whole climax of the story takes place with one-off characters and Conan's like a mile away, unaware of any of it happening. Similar to how "Drums of Tombalku" and "The Slithering Shadow" feel largely like retreads of one another, The Hour of the Dragon has certain times it mirrors "The Scarlet Citadel." Whereas "Scarlet Citadel" focuses more on Conan's capture and escape with an abbreviated battle at the end, Hour of the Dragon speeds through a capture and escape to focus on the military campaign afterward. It's a good story, but its faults keep it from being one of the best.
 7. The People of the Black Circle From this placement on, every single one of these stories is a solid five-star ripper. I might even have to change a few of the placements depending on how I'm feeling day-to-day, but they're all ultimately just about everything you could ask for from a fantasy story. "The People of the Black Circle" is phenomenal. Like The Hour of the Dragon, its scope is appropriately epic. It takes us from the cities of Vendhya (which we've never had the privilege of spending time in yet) into the Himelian Mountains. Conan is fun and heroic throughout this adventure which takes us from one action scene to another with little wait time- the pacing is excellent. What really pushes it into top-tier territory is its climactic battle between Conan and the wizards of the Black Circle on Mount Yimsha. There are so many great moments in this extended battle that are so much fun to read, like when the wizards send evil bubbles after Conan's crew, or when they're escaping and have to be careful of where they breathe because of incantations that eliminate air in certain spots. As an adventure story, it's breathless, and you'll feel like you've been away from your world for about a month once you put it down. Excellent escapism.
 5. Queen of the Black Coast "Queen of the Black Coast" has a lot of firsts in it. It's the first story in which we see Conan at sea, the first in which he has a love interest on equal footing, it's the first time we go really far south on the Hyborian map. As I noted in my post on the story, I still think Everett F. Blieler was on to something when he said "Queen of the Black Coast" was "probably the best of the Conan stories, perhaps because it is the only one based on another emotion than lust, greed, or hatred." Bêlit is such an awesome foil for Conan. Several other Robert E. Howard characters have gotten spinoffs in the following decades, and Bêlit is one of the only ones that I think I would like to continue her adventures with. This story is supported by the smaller moments: a conversation between Bêlit and Conan is its heart. We so seldom get to see Conan open up to someone of his own free will that it's really charming. Howard does some of his best writing in this story, and it makes it an undisputed classic.  4. Red Nails "Red Nails" feels like a tour de force in speculative fiction for Howard. The central pillar of his whole personal philosophy is the battle between civilization and barbarism, and Hoard takes a reliance on civilization to its natural endpoint here. He always says that barbarism beats civilization every time, and he makes a great case for that idea here. We see a decaying culture that has hobbled along for too long, unnatural in most ways, threatening to destroy itself at any minute. The cities and people he creates in this story are indelible not only for their entertainment but for the philosophical conversations they inspire. It has a fun one-off mate for Conan with Valeria, whose entrance kicks the story off right. There's little padding in this one as Conan and Valeria are introduced constantly to confounding and crazy characters, locations, and situations. In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, Howard got it exactly right: "Sent a three-part serial to Wright yesterday: 'Red Nails,' which I devoutly hope he'll like. After Conan yarn, and the grimmest, bloodiest, and most merciless story of the series so far. Too much raw meat, maybe, but I merely portrayed what I honestly believe would be the reactions of certain types of people in the situations on which the plot of the story hung..." It's a great story. As the last Conan story to hit the page before Howard's suicide, it was an excellent final hurrah.  3. Beyond the Black River I wrote in my post about this story that it's probably the most philosophically-rich of all Howard's Conan stories, so I'll try to not just repeat myself here. "Beyond the Black River" is a "weird western" that makes it super unique for Conan. Transporting the American frontier to the Hyborian Age allows Howard to play with all kinds of tropes in new ways. It comprises a perfect pair when teamed up with "Red Nails." The story is action-packed, sure, but I think the thing that makes it so excellent is Conan's new friends Balthus and Slasher. I happen to really like when Conan gets paired up with someone for a story. Sometimes he's in a tenuous pact with a would-be enemy. Sometimes he's rescuing a damsel in distress. But here, Conan is paired up with a prairie kid who seems much like a young version of Conan himself, as well as the loyal dog Slasher. There's a certain wide-eyed purity to Balthus and Slasher that gives the story a fun lightness, and the plotting is some of Howard's best ever. On certain days, I think of "Beyond the Black River" as my personal favorite Conan story, but I think it's probably more appropriately ranked here.  2. Black Colossus Eat your heart out, The Hour of the Dragon. This is what a Conan epic can truly be. This one stands up there with other all-timers of fantasy fiction like The Lord of the Rings and shows why Robert E. Howard is the greatest sword-and-sorcery author of all time. "Black Colossus" opens with one of the best openings in any of Conan's stories and never lets up once it introduces everyone's favorite barbarian. It's a huge turning point in Conan's life as he begins to step away from isolated adventures and commands hordes of soldiers for the first time, defending a country against an evil sorcerer. But this story's greatest strength isn't it's plotting. Every word of Howard's prose here pulses with life. His descriptions shimmer on the page so much that it becomes the most engrossing writing he would ever do. There's really a little bit of everything in this story. Tomb-raiding, military campaigns, politicking, evil wizards, creepy monsters... what more could you ever want? The battles are cinematic to a point that I'm dying to see this get adapted to the big screen, and I don't usually desire filmed adaptions of books or comics very much. If you haven't read this story and you have even the slightest interest in Conan, close this website and go read it now.  1. The Tower of the Elephant I'm not usually your escapism guy. I really like talking about themes of stories and how they're constructed and trying to figure out what they mean on a human level. But every now and then, there's escapist fiction that is just so fucking good that you don't even have time to stop and read between the lines because the lines themselves are so engrossing. These are the kinds of stories that make you want to live in another time, on another world, and completely detach yourself from reality. This is the kind of story that "The Tower of the Elephant" is. At one of the earliest points in Conan's life, he's not the large, invincible superhero we'll see him become later, so it's easier to cast yourself as Conan as you go on a brief but engrossing adventure with him. The Zamorian City of Thieves is an excellent setting- there's danger, but also the promise of gold around every corner. The tower of the elephant itself is such a great location too, completely inundated with monsters and guards and animals, all the while having this mysteriously smooth exterior that promises so much on the inside. It never disappoints. Yag-Kosha, the ancient elephant alien, is a wonderful twist toward the end of the story and whisks you even further into escapism. It's full of pathos and imagination that you don't even mind when the tower falls and Conan walks away empty-handed. There's nothing else quite this good that Howard put to paper. It's what all adventure stories could aspire to. Ranking Howard's original Conan stories PLUS the additionsBelow is my ranking of not only REH's original Conan stories, but also those that were edited or finished by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. The new additions I have added their own short paragraphs to. 30. The Vale of Lost Women 29. Shadows in Zamboula 28. Wolves Beyond the Border "Wolves Beyond the Border" just wasn't that compelling. I went in hoping that it would be interesting seeing the Hyborian Age from a more mortal perspective, but we actually get that fairly frequently in small bursts, so this story felt very disposable. 27. Iron Shadows in the Moon 26. The Hand of Nergal "The Hand of Nergal" is just lacking in anything making it great. It was entertaining enough, but feels like a very skippable chapter in Conan's life, even though it's his first chapter as a Turanian mercenary. It began its life in the 1930s as a Conan story, but it was unfinished at the time of Howard's death, so Lin Carter finished it in the 60s. As I noted in my post about this story, some of the prose is a little weird and random, too. Ultimately, it's just okay. 25. Drums of Tombalku 24. Xuthal of the Dusk 23. A Witch Shall Be Born 22. Jewels of Gwahlur 21. Hawks Over Shem I liked "Hawks Over Shem," but this story frankly felt a little different, and not in a good way, like how "Rogues in the House" or "Beyond the Black River" stand out. Unlike the 3 other stories REH published without Conan that de Camp and Carter would later write Conan into, this one is the one where you really feel that. I know I'm more of a fan of those three others than most, but I feel like it's because the others blended quite a bit better. There are fewer Howard fingerprints on this story in my estimation. 20. The Pool of the Black One 19. The Devil in Iron 18. The Snout in the Dark "The Snout in the Dark" is a story that I felt was underrated when I finished it, but have gradually forgotten what I liked so much about it. I do think that it's better than most people give it credit for (nobody ever talks about this story), but somehow feels more like a de Camp / Carter creation than a Robert E. Howard original. It was based on an untitled fragment of Howard's, but I'm wondering how much Howard actually wrote and how much was added by the later collaborators. 17. The God in the Bowl 16. The Frost-Giant's Daughter 15. The Hour of the Dragon 14. The Flame Knife The Flame Knife is really fun. It's got a good sense of adventure to it and takes us to parts of the Hyborian world we hadn't ever been to before. It's definitely helped by bringing back Olgerd Vladislav, who might be second or third in line to the title of Conan's arch-nemesis. 13. The Hall of the Dead I really dig "The Hall of the Dead." There's so much fun to be had with the giant slug creature, the ancient city of Larsha is really fun, and the hall of the dead itself is phenomenally creepy. Conan's single-serving friend Nestor is a fun addition to the story and I'm glad to see that he makes it out alive since most of Conan's companions meet their ends in the stories in which they're introduced. This one deserves more recognition than it gets. 12. The Blood-Stained God What a fun tomb-plunderer. I don't get why more people don't like this story. The 1930s Afghanistan setting of the original "Trail of the Blood-Stained God" transfers perfectly to the Hyborian Age. Additionally, the actual temple of the blood-stained god makes for an unpredictable ending, as Conan has to think his way out of a trap instead of just burying his sword in everyone's neck. It's tons of fun! 11. The Road of the Eagles Do not @ me for putting this one so high. This story is great. Honestly, the castle nestled in the mountains with its sheer walls and the one, treacherous path to it is one of the best story conceits that Howard ever dreamed up. It's not incredibly thematically-rich or anything, but it's a hell of a good time and very imaginative. 10. The Phoenix on the Sword 9. The Scarlet Citadel 8. The Treasure of Tranicos (AKA "The Black Stranger") "The Treasure of Tranicos" followed kind of a strange path to get where it sits now. It began as "The Black Stranger," a Conan story. When it got rejected for publication, it was re-written to be just a pirate story. When that also got rejected, it was shelved. de Camp re-introduced Conan to it and retitled it to "The Treasure of Tranicos" and we should all be so glad he did. This story rocks. It's got some of the tightest plotting Howard ever did, some truly wonderful characterization scenes, and excellent stakes. The fact that there are so many competing interests working together toward a goal makes it so that you always feel someone is about to betray another. It's definitely the best L. Sprague de Camp or Lin Carter-influenced addition to the canon. 7. The People of the Black Circle 6. Rogues in the House 5. Queen of the Black Coast 4. Red Nails 3. Beyond the Black River 2. Black Colossus 1. The Tower of the Elephant I always have fun ranking things. Let me know your own rankings in the comments if you've got them! At the very least, what are your own top 5?   How does Conan of Cimmeria die? If you're an author envisioning the end, a better question might be: How do you kill Conan the fucking Barbarian? He's gone toe-to-toe with gods, wizards, monsters, the greatest warriors in all of history. He's been a thief, a reaver, a slayer, a pirate, an Avenger... How do you possibly tell a story of his death that is satisfying? Well, maybe you don't tell one. Lin Carter didn't, and I think it was the right move. The Hyborian world entered ours through a poem, describing Conan's homeland of Cimmeria, and our final work in that universe is a poem as well: "Death-Song of Conan the Cimmerian." "Death-Song of Conan the Cimmerian" is a decently good narrative poem (though not as good as most of Robert E. Howard's poetry) and while I'm not about to put it up there with Hughes and Coleridge, it does a decent enough job in that it acts as a sort of retrospective and final act for Conan, while avoiding the problem of competing with his greatest stories for a satisfying ending. It was first published in 1972 in the zine The Howard Collector which was run by REH's publisher Glenn Lord. I first came across it in Savage Sword 1, which was printed in the Dark Horse omnis that I love so much. Throughout the poem, we get general references to the events of Conan's life. Since it was written in 1972 by one of the architects of the post-Howard Conan apparatus, I'm assuming that Carter considered all of the material he, L. Sprague de Camp, and Bjorn Nyberg had written to be canon, so I suppose it's looking back on all the Conan material up until that point, not just Howard's writing. The first two stanzas refer pretty generally to Conan's adventures and how he lived life to the fullest, unconcerned with the difficulties that would have ended another, weaker, man's adventures. It gets a little more specific in the third stanza, as Conan's youth is recounted: "A boy, from the savage north I came  Pretty much direct references to the first three chronological Conan stories that take place in the "savage north:" "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," "Legions of the Dead," and "The Thing in the Crypt," as well as the poem "Cimmeria." The cities of "silk and sin" at the very least refer to Zamora's city of thieves in "The Tower of the Elephant," and probably places like Xuthal, Zamboula, Xuchotl, and Tarantia, seeing as he might mean silk and/or sin. Stanza four alludes to some supporting characters in the whole saga. "And there were foeman to fight and slay Foemen: Thoth-Amon, Olgerd Vladislav, Nahtohk, Xaltotun? Friends: Juma, Prospero, Jamal, Balthus, Nestor? Crowns: Aquilonia... that's it, right? Lips: Belit's, Zenobia's, Valeria's, Yasmela's? It does note in stanza five that many of the gems and gold crumble into "clods," which is a great inclusions seeing as many of the treasures Conan seeks either end up to be whole-cloth lies, Conan abandons them to accomplish another goal, or they literally crumble in his hands. Within the poem, I really appreciate that Conan's devil-may-care attitude to death is in tact: he knows that it is all part of life, and he has eaten, he has slain, he is content to go into that good night, albeit not gently. That brings me to the last line of the poem, which ends with an all-caps "The road which endeth HERE!" I really like that touch since it implies that Conan's going out with some fire. If something's taking him down, he's not going without a fight, whatever it may be. Having now read all the Conan material I set out to read (and a whole heck of a lot more that I didn't), I'm going to start processing my placements in the timeline and where everything sits in my mind.   This is the last map of Conan's movements I'll be making. Check them all out over on the Maps page. As I make my final edits to the chronology, some of them will become out of date.
1. Conan begins "The Witch of the Mists" on a hunting trip in Gunderland with Conn and Prospero. 2. Following the kidnapped Conn, Conan heads into the Border Kingdoms. It takes him about three days to cross after which he enters Hyperborea at a very cool gate adorned with a mammoth skull. He heads to the city of Pohiola. The rest of the story, including Conan's reunification with Thoth-Amon, takes place there. I can't find any existing maps that place Pohiola, but I figure it can't be too far into Hyperborea because of Conan's time to get there only being three days. 3. Conan returns to Tarantia, capital of Aquilonia to raise his forces. 4. At the start of "Black Sphinx of Nebthu," Conan is said to lead his military south through Zingara, Argos, and Shem before entering Stygia and attacking the black sphinx in Nebthu. 5. In "Red Moon of Zembabwei," Conan leads the Aquilonian army southeast across the Black Kingdoms into Zembabwei, specifically to the ancient city of Old Zembabwei. 6. Conan marches even further south, to the southern coast of the world, where he finds the skull-shaped fortress of the serpent people. Here, in "Shadows in the Skull," he fights Thoth-Amon one last time on a beach nearby.  Well, we've come to the final story for our chronology. The further I've gotten into Conan's late life, the more I kind of wish that I had stopped at The Hour of the Dragon, which would have been such a fitting end to everything. "The Witch of the Mists" was painfully mediocre, "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" was hot, boiled ass, and "Red Moon of Zembabwei" had far too few good ideas. Weirdly enough, I've gotten the feeling as I've been reading this set of stories (that clearly de Camp and Carter envisioned as a novel-in-pieces, and a follow-up to Conan the Buccaneer), it feels like writers whose gas tanks have run dry, and they're trying to fill out the end of Conan's life long after they should've stopped writing the guy. But they did really good work after these stories: decent-to-good Conan tales "Legions of the Dead," "Shadows in the Dark," "The People of the Summit," "The Star of Khorala," "The Gem in the Tower," "The Ivory Goddess," and "Moon of Blood" were all written after this boresome foursome, and they are all leagues better than the Old Man Conan stories. So I don't really get what happened here. Along with the three previous tales, this one was adapted into the King Conan Marvel comic in the early 80s. Since it was written by Roy Thomas and penciled by John Buscema, both of whom are Conan comic greats, it might be better than the original. I stared at back issues of King Conan 1-4 at my local comic shop the other day and couldn't bring myself to spend the $16 to get all four of them, so for now, I'll have to imagine they're the better versions. Like the others that came directly before "Shadows in the Skull," there are numerous references to previous events in Conan's life, and several that surprised me. I don't think we've had a single mention of Juma or the events of "The City of Skulls" in any story since. "None surpasses them in manhood; my old comrade Juma could take on three of your Aquilonian knights with his bare hands and come out grinning."  We get a reference to Conan's Turanian mercenary days and even to "The Curse of the Monolith," and of course to Conan the Buccaneer. Conan is still chasing Thoth-Amon south across the Hyborian continent, to the edge of the known world. There's probably a little bit too much time at the beginning spent on documenting that journey- it feels like padding and doesn't amount to much in either terms of plot development or sharp writing, but we get there eventually. Conan, riding one the of the wyverns from "Red Moon of Zembabwei," arrives at a gigantic skull set into the side of a mountain, which, when viewed from ground level, is actually an opulent palace. Unsurprisingly, not all is kosher in this skull-shaped palace and Thoth-Amon is not far away. Conan ultimately fights the green-clad wizard on a beach on the southernmost tip of the continent, farther away from Cimmeria than he's ever been. There are some interesting callbacks to King Kull of Atlantis in "Shadows in the Skull," and I think it's one of the better ideas the narrative has. The serpent people of the edge of the world had fought against Kull in Valusia and they fled to the farthest reaches of the continent. It provides kind of a nice bookending to the vibe: some of the last foes Conan fights are some of the oldest there are. This isn't exactly important or anything, but this story has one unimaginably bad line within it in which Conan is talking about the black warriors of the southern kingdoms: "I've lived amongst them, fought with them, and fought against them, until they call me 'the black king with a white skin.'"  Nobody calls you that, Conan. To quote one of my favorite Youtubers, Dan Olson, "Cringe. This makes me cringe. There's no other word for it. It's embarrassing." It reminds me of that picture of the white guy standing in front of the MLK memorial in DC. I do appreciate that there are some vague gestures toward the over-arching themes of the Conan saga in this story. Thoth-Amon, relying on the power of others, on the complication and cost of wizardry, is rapidly draining life out of himself and ultimately needs to complete rituals in which he gains the serpent god Set's favor to have power. Conan, on the other hand, needs nobody's help and gets the job done himself. Unfortunately, this is a little muddied by de Camp and Carter, framing the story slightly differently with Conan as an agent of "Mitra the Light-Bringer," rather than Crom's smashing-and-grabbing barbarian. The fact that Conn ultimately kills Thoth rather than Conan is just a little bit anticlimactic. Thus ends the final short story that I'm reading for this chronology. Conan does eventually apparently decide that he's done with his kingship and ships off to the western ocean with some Barachan pirates in Conan of the Isles, but that novel has pretty mediocre reviews. That means our final entry in the chronology will be the poem "Death-Song of Conan the Cimmerian." ★★☆☆☆   Man, it was kind of rough coming off of "Black Sphinx of Nebthu." I know it's impossible to tell since I post one of these every couple of days (I read a lot pretty quickly back in late summer and early fall, so I've usually read about 15 or 20 stories ahead of whatever I'm posing at the moment), but that story just kind of bummed me out. I didn't read or write anything for like a week and a half after I read it in the last days of September (and I'm currently writing this October 6th). It's hard to shake the feeling that Conan's real finale was The Hour of the Dragon and these King Conan stories written by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter in the 70s for Fantastic just feel like unnecessary addendums. Like "Black Sphinx," there are plenty of allusions to previous Conan stories in "Red Moon of Zembabwei," and it all shakes out a little better than that previous story. Our narrative specifically says that Conan is still in his late 50s, which I think is interesting since I've been considering him to be in his 60s by now. It's a small thing, but was a little surprising. "Although the ruler of Aquilonia was in his late fifties, age and the civilized life of court and castle had softened his rugged physique but little. Time had streaked with gray the thick, square-cut mane of coarse black hair and the heavy mustache that swept out from his upper lip like bull's horns." One thing that's been vexing me is that on page 107 in Conan of Aquilonia, where I read this story, Conan makes reference to "penetrati[ng] the kingdom of Zembabwei" twenty years prior. He mentions "the twin kings' northern capital" that he became a guard at and went north with a caravan, but I can't for the life of me figure out what story he's talking about. Because of the dual kings, I thought it might be a reference to "Drums of Tombalku," but that took place in Darfar, way to the northwest of here. I figured it might be in a de Camp and Carter novel that had been previously published and I hadn't read at the time, like Conan the Buccaneer, but I can't find anything that matches that description. If anyone is reading this and has insight, I'd love for you to leave a comment below helping me out. [EDIT: A commenter named Ed down below has helped out! He says the reference to the kings of Zembabwei is from "Jewels of Gwahlur" and I think he's right! I've included a section of "Jewels of Gwahlur" below:] "The benevolent kings of Zembabwei desired only a monopoly of the trade of Keshan and her tributaries—and, as a pledge of good faith, some of the Teeth of Gwahlur. These would be put to no base usage, Thutmekri hastened to explain to the suspicious chieftains; they would be placed in the temple of Zembabwei beside the squat gold idols of Dagon and Derketo, sacred guests in the holy shrine of the kingdom, to seal the covenant between Keshan and Zembabwei. This statement brought a savage grin to Conan's hard lips." In an absolute wild turn of events, one of the least-impactful Conan stories ever gets a shoutout here. As Conan looks at the architecture of Old Zembabwei, "The Forbidden City," he makes a mental note that he had seen that style twice before in his career: "...once in a ruined castle on the grassy plains of Kush; and again years later, on the Nameless Isle in the uncharted Western Ocean, far to the south of the usual tracks of merchant men, naval fleets, and piratical marauders."  That's right: we've got a "Castle of Terror" mention! That brief little Conan interlude was so quick, so inconsequential, and so seldom-remembered that I didn't think I'd ever see a piece of Conan media make note of it ever again. So I suppose that means that the castle of "The Castle of Terror" is some kind of ancient, abandoned, relic of Old Zembabwei? Kind of cool. The other reference here is to the nameless isle in "The Gem in the Tower," in which the sorcerer Siptah sits dead in a tower with no doors or windows, much like the towers in Old Zembabwei. Whether this is a connection the writer's set out to make or if they realized their idea for this city sounded like what they had written for "Gem" is beyond me. I did think it was funny that when the wyvern creatures were first mentioned, I thought, These sound a lot like either the bat things from "The Hand of Nergal" or the monster in Siptah's tower from "The Gem in the Tower." Those flying wyverns, by the way? Pretty nifty. Probably one of the best parts of the story. There are a few more references contained in "Red Moon," and I'm sure you won't be surprised to see that once again de Camp and Carter have a callback to their then-recent novel Conan the Buccaneer, including the character Murzio, who is apparently the son of Ninus in that novel. He's pretty inconsequential to the plot, though, and seems like he's mostly there to get you to wonder what happened in that story so that you'll go buy it. "Red Moon of Zembabwei" is a little bit better than its two predecessors, but is still pretty lackluster. L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's plotting has seriously suffered in these stories- they add lots of elements that don't ultimately amount to anything, and much of the story feels like padding. Now that I'm three-fourths of the way through this quadrilogy, it seems like they were trying to write their own epic a la The Hour of the Dragon and just fell way short. At least Conn isn't a total nothingburger this time.  One of my biggest gripes with these stories is how manufactured it feels that Thoth-Amon is Conan's "greatest enemy." It's like how people want to retire Charlie Blackmon's number for the Colorado Rockies: the only reason to do it is because there isn't anyone better. Yes, I am from Denver, how could you guess? Conan foes are so often one-and-done that nobody usually sticks around long enough to become an "archenemy." Olgerd Vladislav is in a few, but they're mostly comics published later. King Yezdigerd of Turan is mentioned all over the place, but he's really an unseen character who is Conan's repeated victim. I know I mentioned something similar with "The Witch of the Mists" but I feel compelled to again. Page 99 of this story literally says that Conan is happy to be off to Zembabwei to fight a "lifelong foe," but Thoth-Amon is hardly the Joker to Conan's Batman. Prior to this little late-life series of four stories, here is the sum total of Thoth-Amon's appearances in Conan's life:
It's just a hard sell when Conan's "lifelong archenemy" is mentioned in two whole stories before Conan's kingship and is then a minor character in a few of his adventures as king of Aquilonia. They seem really eager to almost backfill their history together to make this feel like a bigger fight. While I think Thoth definitely seems to be Conan's biggest foe, that's mostly due to comics which were published after this.
Next time, we'll see the epic(?) conclusion to this four-parter, and the last canonical Conan story for my chronology. See you for "Shadows in the Skull!" ★★☆☆☆  Finally! A Conan story that's as obsessed with Conan continuity as I am! ...but it sucks? I thought of tempering my criticism in this post to say that, "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" is a seriously minor Conan story, but I've decided that's too kind. In terms of narrative, it's weak. I mentioned last time when we read "The Witch of the Mists" that it felt like the first part of a story rather than the whole thing, and I now see that we're definitely in a four-part arc masterminded by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. Rather than feeling like separate stories, "Mists" was part one, and "Nebthu" feels like part two, and it's a lifeless part two. Conan's marching south to take the fight to Thoth-Amon, the villain of the last tale, and parts of the story feel kind of random. Because it's clear that this is just part two to an overarching narrative, there's functionally no inciting incident. There's not much reason for the white priest Diviatix of Pictland to show up other than "the gods told him to be there." Conan's son Conn has literally nothing to do in the story other than make a big entrance and then be useless for the rest of the runtime. There's not really a turning point, either- Conan just kind of manages to evade the hyena beast that Thoth-Amon summons at the climax long enough for it to go away, not through any doing of his own. There's one passage in particular that kind of pissed me off in just how divorced from the rest of Conan's stories it felt. In the copy of Conan of Aquilonia on the Internet Archive, it's on page 56. Conan's forces are marching south through Argos, Kush, and Shem toward Stygia. "A token of tribute of good Aquilonian silver was paid over... the kinglets beamed graciously and waved the Aquilonian host on with their blessings.  I have no bones to pick with the actual events depicted in this passage, just the way it's phrased and justified. "But the law is the law?" What a shitty justification in a Conan story- a collection of stories that are almost entirely about how justifications like "The law is the law" are meaningless and inadequate. Sure, it's advantageous for Conan to enforce laws that are for the betterment of everyone, but phrase it that way, not through trite platitudes that essentially negate the thesis statement of this entire series. "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" obviously takes place in Conan's late kingship and after "The Witch of the Mists" in our chronology. Conn is now 13 when he was 12 in "Mists" and mentions the events of that story as having happened "last year," so a year or maybe a little less has elapsed since they fought the witch up in those mists of Hyperborea. Now, as far as continuity goes, there are tons of callbacks and references to previous Conan stories throughout this story. Let's see what we've got!  On page 49, when looking at a map of the territory south of Aquilonia, Conan points out a river and says "I followed it to here when I fled from Xaltotun's sorcery." This is an allusion to when Conan fled by boat out of Aquilonia in The Hour of the Dragon. On page 54, Conan mentions Princess Chabela from Conan the Buccaneer, which I didn't actually read until I was otherwise done with the chronology. While Buccaneer takes place about 25 years before this story, it had hit the presses only a few real years before this one in 1971, so perhaps de Camp and Carter were hoping to move a few more copies of their new novel off the shelf. Page 65 contains a pretty detailed account of the sorcerous goings-on of The Hour of the Dragon, including the infighting between the wizard Thutothmes and Thoth. It mentions how the four Khitan magicians attacked as well. Thoth-Amon makes a long, villain-monologue speech on page 78 that actually mentions tons of moments in Conan's career. Not only do these evoke those stories, they also imply that Thoth-Amon was the antagonist behind many of Conan's adventures.
Conan, too, makes a rather throwaway allusion to his earlier career leading the Zuagir raiders, saying: "Of course I know how to ride a camel! ... Wasn't I once a chief of the Zuagir nomads of the eastern deserts?" The Heart of Ahriman is back from Hour of the Dragon, too. There are a few entertaining moments in this story, like where they're swearing at the beginning. Conan stories have always had colorful moments of taking gods' names in vain. Conan's favorite is just "Crom!" but also sometimes uses variations like "Crom's thunder!" and if he's really in the shit, he might say "Crom and Mitra!" We see a character named Amric say "Fires of Moloch!" which is fun, but we get a strange description a moment later: "Amric swore heartily, invoking the nether organs of several of the disreputable eastern demon-gods." Is this like the Hyborian equivalent of something like saying "Satan's asshole!" "By Beelzebub's taint!"? I wish I liked this one more. I just don't think it has anything going on. In terms of both the ideas behind the story and the way the narrative's constructed, it feels totally inert. All of the callbacks to previous Conan material feel like Star Wars since The Mandalorian: empty gesturing at things from the past that we all liked more. Sadly, the more I think about it, the more I think it might be one of my least favorite Conan stories of all time. Even though it hass all these references for me to examine on my blog specifically about the chronology of Conan the Barbarian, I think I have to give this one the lowest-possible marks. There's an interesting article over on Black Gate about how the artist for the story in Fantastic, Billy Graham, got fired for his revved-up comic book style (shown below) that appeared in the pages. He would go onto do some great stuff at Marvel. I guess we'll see if part three in de Camp and Carter's not-so-epic (thus far) finale fares any better next time in "Red Moon of Zembabwei." ★☆☆☆☆  [EDIT: I decided to pick up the King Conan comic version of this story to see if it's any better. I picked it up for $5 at the comic shop today and I'm sad to say it's only marginally better. The fact that it's illustrated by John Buscema and Ernie Chan is always a good sign, and they keep things exciting through their dynamic art. But the plotting isn't changed one iota by Roy Thomas, and a lot of the dialogue is ripped straight from de Camp and Carter's pages, so it ends up with two stars out of five as opposed to a measly one. Did I waste my five bucks? Yeah, probably.]
Thanks to my brother Jake over at Yergs Brand Design, I've got a logo now! I didn't even ask for it, he just made me one. (You may remember when he provided his thoughts about Conan artists). Check it out below! 
 By 1972, Conan the Barbarian was 40 years old, and his creator, Robert E. Howard, had been dead for 36 of them. While I wasn't alive to personally corroborate this, Conan's popularity continued to increase over the late 1950s and 1960s as L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Bjorn Nyberg started dreaming up the further adventures of Conan of Cimmeria. While other pulp heroes faded into the past, Conan managed to stick around in our minds. I'm not usually the kind of person to praise corporations, but it definitely seems that we owe at least a bit of that to Lancer Books. Lancer had been diligently collecting and reprinting Conan material into collections of short stories and novellas. These comprised both the original Robert E. Howard texts as well as the supplemental stuff written by de Camp & crew. Like all good Conan stuff, they were published wildly out of order. Altogether, there are 12 of these:
I kept confusing myself about their order, so I decided to make a little chart to compare their publication order and chronological order, but the second I was done with it I felt ridiculous because it was really not very helpful and now I'm going to share it here so you can laugh at me too:   Some of these stories vary from their original publications, and you could do a lot worse with your time than checking out Gary Romeo's posts about each one, as he has meticulously catalogued the changes Lancer made to each text. And can I just say how much I love the 70s stylings of the Conan of Aquilonia cover at the top? The red and purple of the "CONAN" text, the 3D lettering effect, the Boris Vallejo painting with Conan and Conn... L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter had written Conan of the Isles in 1968, which takes place very late in Conan's life after he has abdicated the throne of Aquilonia. It serves as a swan song for Conan's life, and while I'm not going to read it for this chronology, it seems as if the fellas intended it as the final chapter. [Uh-oh! I did end up reading it for this chronology and you can find my post about it here!] However, there was a decent chunk of Conan's life left unexplored between the period in his early kingship of The Hour of the Dragon and Conan of the Isles, so enter the next four stories we'll read to fill in the gaps: "The Witch of the Mists," "Black Sphinx of Nebthu," "Red Moon of Zembabwei," and "Shadows in the Skull." These were published one a year between 1972 and 1975, starting with "The Witch of the Mists" in the ailing SF / fantasy mag, Fantastic. Oddly enough, the version I read on the Internet Archive didn't have one of de Camp's patented prologues which usually set the intended chronology, but it's not hard to figure out. Chronologically speaking, "The Witch of the Mists" picks up about 15 years after Hour of the Dragon. Conan is approaching his sixties and has, against all odds, settled down into a happy marriage with Zenobia. If we're being honest with ourselves, Zenobia was little more than a bit player in Hour of the Dragon, so his long domestic bliss feels a little unearned, but at least she's one of Conan's better love interests. (Also, now that I'm thinking back to this story, do we ever even see Zenobia, or is she just mentioned?) This story is the first with a drastic change in Conan's life: Conan now has a few kids, most of whom go unnamed, but his oldest is a 12 year-old boy named Conan II, and nicknamed "Conn." I was really worried that Conn would be an annoying character; it frequently seems hard for writers to write the children of iconic characters. I honestly predicted that he would be an annoying-yet-hard-as-nails brat like Batman's son Damian Wayne (dude, I hated Damian for about ten solid years), but he isn't. Honestly, Conn doesn't have a very strong characterization either way: he's really just a mini Conan who's not quite as savage as his father. The other drastic change for this story is- get this- Conan has a mustache now! Did we all collectively miss the opportunity to have a King Conan movie starring Lemmy in the title role? Yes, we did. Will I ever be able to be happy again? No, I wont.  In this adventure, Conan is tracking his son Conn on a hunting trip, but the boy has gotten separated from the rest of the party. After Conn is kidnapped by Hyperboreans, Conan follows him alone across the Border Kingdoms and into Hyperborea where they have a showdown at the city of Pohiola. de Camp and Carter baked quite a few callbacks to previous Conan adventures into this story with references to the Khitan sorcerer Yah-Chieng from the novel The Return of Conan and Thutothmes from The Hour of the Dragon. Conan also makes a verbal allusion to "Legions of the Dead," which was only our second story! "I was a captive in Hyperborea once. What I suffered at their hands gave me no cause to love those bony devils; and what I did there, ere I took my leave of their hospitality, gave them little cause to love me!"  A page from Fantastic, complete with handlebar-mustache Lemmy Conan. The skull gate Conan passes through upon his entrance to Hyperborea is pretty fucking cool, but the story as a whole is lackluster. It often feels like fanfiction, and at that, feels more like the first chapter of a story than an entire story. Prospero (another returning character! Cool!) brings up a serious deus ex machina ending to bring the story to a bit of a thud. It is nice to have some more time with Conan and Thoth-Amon, and I'm glad he'll be sticking around for a few more stories!
After first appearing in Fantastic, "Mists" was printed in Conan of Aquilonia in 1977 and was adapted into Marvel's King Conan series as its first issue. For as mediocre of a story as this is, it really has some great art surrounding it, like the Boris Vallejo painting on the Lancer cover and the Jeffrey Catherine Jones cover done for Fantastic's August 1972 issue. Next time, we're reading "Black Sphinx of Nebthu," which means I think we're headed to Stygia! ★★☆☆☆  I wasn't originally planning on reading this novel at all. Most sources online didn't like it, and I wasn't super eager to read Conan novels since I feel he works best in short story form (or "novelettes," as so many Howard-focused pages call them). But I had a snow day off of the school I teach at and I had nothing to do, so I found myself navigating to the copy of Conan the Avenger on the Internet Archive and reading the whole thing in one day. That's not meant to sound like a brag or anything- this novel is lean. Outside of L. Sprague de Camp's lengthy intro and the pretty superfluous prologue and epilogue, this thing's crossing the finish line at barely 150 pages, and it's not exactly deep reading. I'm sad to report that those online sources who don't like this book are pretty much right. It's the worst of Bjorn Nyberg's work on the character, at least. The Return of Conan is a 1957 novel written by Bjorn Nyberg, and from what I can tell, pretty heavily edited by L. Sprague de Camp. Unless I'm mistaken, I'm pretty sure this is the first wholly original Conan story to come out of the Conan bullpen of de Camp, Carter, and Nyberg as they continued Howard's work in the 50s through the 70s. I mean, pigeonholed Howard material was still coming out at this point: "The Black Stranger" and the original version of "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" had been released four years earlier, with de Camp's edits of Howard stories like "Hawks Over Shem," "The Blood-Stained God," "The Road of the Eagles," and "The Flame Knife" had been released just two years before. "The Snout in the Dark" wouldn't even come out for another 12 years! It's just interesting to me at how early this is in our real-life timeline of Conan as a fiction product.  Why do artists prior to the 70s never draw Conan with his long, "square-cut" black hair? As far as the chronology of this story, there's no mystery, but there are some fun inclusions that spice up the runtime a bit. The Return of Conan happens explicitly one year after the conclusion of The Hour of the Dragon, during the coronation of Zenobia as Conan's queen. Interestingly, this story places "The Scarlet Citadel" as five years prior to it, meaning "Citadel" is set four years prior to Dragon, so that helps build out the timeline a little bit. Conan goes to visit the wizard Pelias from his dungeon crawl in the citadel for help. There are quite a few other callbacks- throwaway mentions of Conan's adventures in the Himelian mountains and his time as a pirate. Many of the early parts of this story that ring strangely hollow to me. They sort of make plot sense but don't feel emotionally true for Conan or the philosophy of these stories. Conan, for the first time we've ever seen on the page, actually prays to his Cimmerian god Crom. This unsettled me the moment it happened: Conan speaks of Crom as an indifferent god, one who will not lift a finger for his parishioners and Conan wouldn't usually have it any other way. But not only does Conan lift a prayer to his heretofore utterly silent god whose name he takes in vain all the time, but Crom immediately answers. This just seemed really off to me. Crom has always been described as being seated on a great mountain, far away from the reaches of anyone, even the Cimmerians, but here he is at Conan's beck and call. This strikes me as fundamentally opposed to Conan's ethos: sorcerers and weaker men ask to borrow the power of the gods. Specifically, they need to take someone else's. But Conan, throughout all of his adventures, takes it for himself. He doesn't need to wait until a god or magical item grants it to him- he'll do it himself. Additionally, Conan is cast as a sort of agent of civilization fighting against the "magic of darkness," which is antithetical to Conan's ethos. "Some of the most evil spells would now hardly succeed at all in the Western realms. This resistance of civilization to the magic of darkness is concentrated in the barbarian king of Aquilonia. You have long been the center of mighty happenings, and the gods look favorably upon you. And so things will continue to change until, with another turn of the cosmic wheel, enlightenment shall perish and magic shall rise again to power in a new cycle."  This characterization of the civilization of the west being a light against the evils of the east rings hollow in Conan's constant "civilization vs. barbarism" theme. Keeping in mind that this novel was written during the Cold War and in the aftermath of World War II, was it influenced by that? Was Nyberg looking east of the US to the (real or perceived) threats of Russia, China, and Vietnam, writing them into a Conan story? I mean, Conan goes to Khitai (Howard's ancient ancestor to China) in this one, only the second time he's made that journey. Notably, he goes farther east into Khitai than ever before. I haven't even gotten to the most literal, obvious deus ex machina I've ever seen in a fantasy book. It ends with a thud. The above are really my biggest gripes with the story, but it's not a banger of an adventure, either. Like Hour of the Dragon, The Return of Conan is a romp back through the roles of Conan's younger days. Whereas the earlier novel shows Conan returning to being a thief, a corsair of the Black Coast, and commander of armies, Nyberg's novel looks to his more eastern adventures. This one returns Conan to the Zuagirs, the pirates of the Red Brotherhood, and the Afghuli hillmen. In fact, we get to visit Yasmina, the Devi of Vendhya 13 years on from "The People of the Black Circle" and some original characters like Rolf of Aesgard and Artus the pirate. Seeing as de Camp and Carter frequently based their Conan pastiches on the alluded-to-but-not-shown portions of Conan's career, wrapping up hanging threads, I think it would be interesting to see someone tackle the same thing for Rolf and Artus, both of whom are said to have had fun-sounding adventures with Conan in the past. Heck, maybe someone has and I'm just not aware of it. I reference musical moments quite a bit on this blog and I'm going to do it again. The Misfits were my first favorite band, and they had a few releases recorded live over the years with their original singer Glenn Danzig, like "Evilive." The Misfits changed singers a couple of times and in 2013 they released a new live album, clunkily titled "DeA.D. Alive," which featured absolutely none of their material from their first (and best-received) period as a band. That's a little bit about how The Return of Conan feels to me: I get the impulse to basically do The Hour of the Dragon again with different callbacks, but in much less-deft hands, it lands with a thud. If in this metaphor Robert E. Howard is Glenn Danzig and Bjorn Nyberg is Jerry Only, that feels a little bit mean.
Next time, we move into Conan's old age with "The Witch of the Mists." ★☆☆☆☆ So much happens in The Hour of the Dragon that it became clear about halfway through reading it that it would require its own map of Conan's movements. To that end, here it is.  1. The novel opens with Conan in a military encampment at Valkia, in eastern Aquilonia. That's not marked on my map, but since they're at war with Nemedia, I've put it near the Nemedian border.
2. Conan is poisoned / bewitched into being immobile, causing him to be captured at the battle of Valkia. Conan is taken to Belverus, the capital of Nemedia. He eventually escapes. 3. Crossing the border into Aquilonia, Conan meets a witch who changes his plans. 4. Conan heads west, almost to Aquilonia, where he stops at the estate of his loyal friend, Servius Galannus. 5. Conan does a whole lot while sneaking around Tarantia. He decides that he needs to find the Heart of Ahriman. 6. Conan heads south to Poitain with his companion Albonia to the castle belonging to Count Trocero. He and Albonia are traveling by boat. 7. From Trocero's castle, Conan rides a horse south into Zingara, where he ends up at the castle of Count Valbroso in the Forest of Ghouls. 8. After escaping Valbroso's castle, Conan rides to the port city of Messantia in Argos and meets with an old acquaintance named Publio. 9. Conan takes a ship from Messantia south to the river Styx and the Stygian port city Khemi. While there, he disguises himself as a priest of Set. 10. Conan follows a group of priests of Set to a black pyramid away from the city. 11. With the Heart of Ahriman in hand, Conan returns to the ship on which he sailed to Stygia. They head north back toward Aquilonia. 12. From here, exact placement of Conan's movements get harder. We know he is approaching "from the south" with a large force of men. However, the narrative is very unclear about where the ending takes place. We know it is at a hill called the King's Altar, but that hill is surrounded by rolling plains and its location is pretty generic.  When I set out to read every Conan story in timeline order, I thought it might vastly change the reader experience. I hope I'm not disappointing you when I say that it hasn't really changed that much. It's certainly enhanced the reading experience in some ways: I have much more context for each story, it makes them easier to remember because I can place them in order, and it's been interesting to see Conan grow from an northern yokel with a propensity for violence into a clever, powerful, no-less-violent ruler. However, other than that, it hasn't changed a ton. I mean, does it make a huge difference if you read "The Castle of Terror" before or after "The Devil in Iron?" Not one bit. I say all that to say this: reading everything in timeline order absolutely does impact how The Hour of the Dragon reads. The Hour of the Dragon, when read at the end of Conan's life, feels like a victory lap. It really wasn't meant to be that as Howard was writing it. In mid-1933, about a year into writing Conan stories, Howard was approached by a publishing agent in England about possibly putting out some of his work in the UK. Howard was always looking for how to earn more with his writing, so he sent off a package of 8 stories to the firm. There were 8 stories included, including two Conan bangers "The Tower of the Elephant" and "The Scarlet Citadel." As Patrice Louinet notes in his essay "Hyborian Genesis," Weird Tales had first publication rights to his Conan serials, so Howard wasn't able to submit most of his Conan stuff for publication anywhere else. I love the details that Louinet includes about Howard's submissions. Whereas you and I would send a link to a Google Doc or a copy of a PDF, Howard actually had to re-type all of "The Scarlet Citadel," which he used as an opportunity to change a few things in the story, and then he actually sent ripped-out Weird Tales pages to provide "The Tower of the Elephant" for them. A whopping seven months after submitting those eight stories, the publisher sent a letter rejecting all eight stories, but suggested that Howard try writing a novel instead. "The difficulty that arises about publication in book form, is the prejudice that is very strong over here just now against collections of short stories, and I find myself very reluctantly forced to return the stories to you. With this suggestion, however, that any time you find yourself able to produce a full-length novel of about 70,000-75,000 words along the lines of the stories, my allied company, Pawling and Ness Ltd., who deal with the lending libraries, and are able to sell a first edition of 5,000 copies, will be very willing to publish it." REH hadn't ever written a novel before, but he had just finished the comparatively long-as-shit "The People of the Black Circle," so he may have been feeling good about his ability to write something even longer.  Howard had a few false starts in getting his novel together. The draft he banged out of "Drums of Tombalku" was probably one abandoned attempt at a novel-length story. And while Howard frequently said (bragged?) that Conan stories just flowed out of him, unaided and in just a single draft or two The Hour of the Dragon was a drafty slog for him, evidently. There are 620 existing draft pages for this story that runs about 170 pages in my copy of The Complete Chronicles of Conan, with Patrice Louinet estimating that hundreds more could have been lost over the decades. Howard rewrote it at least five times, making huge changes that were quite unlike him. Howard wrote The Hour of the Dragon over the course of two months: from March to May 1934, frequently writing 5000 words a day, every day of the week. After sending the manuscript to the publisher in the UK, Howard took a few days off. The novel, though, never saw publication as he intended it. The publisher went out of business and the novel was returned. With his English venture over, Howard packaged up the pages and sent them to good ol' Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales, who bought them and scheduled them to published in a serial of five parts. "Mr. Wright says it's my best Conan story so far," Howard penned. So clearly, The Hour of the Dragon is not a triumphant victory lap that looks back on all the fun times we've had with Conan. Rather, the novel feels that way because Howard was tempted to cannibalize parts of other Conan stories that hadn't yet been published in England. He built out or re-used ideas, characters, and situations that he'd played with before in order to reach that 70,000-word length the publisher was asking for. In his essay "Robert E. Howard: Professional Writer," printed in the book The Dark Barbarian, Glenn Lord himself borrows Raymond Chandler's term "cannibalizing" to describe this practice: "a writer taking certain characters and elements from separate earlier works of his own and weaving them together in a single narrative." I can see why he would do it- I've done the same thing with musical ideas in bands I've played in. Lord gives a few critical opinions on Howard cannibalizing other works to create The Hour of the Dragon. From Fred Blosser: "['The Scarlet Citadel' bears such an] extensive resemblance to Conan the Conqueror... that it is possible that Howard first planned the novel as an elaboration on the earlier novelette... Perhaps Howard felt he could write a tigether, more powerful novel by constructing it on the foundation of... tried-and-true concepts. Or perhaps he felt he hadn't done the themes justice in the space limitations of the...earlier shorter works." And from Karl Edward Wagner: "The transformation is carried through extremely well. Characters and plot devices borrowed from other Conan tales are here presented more richly, developed with greater care... Considering the speed with which Howard wrote the novel (and he had other projects to complete in those same four months), The Hour of the Dragon is a remarkably polished work."  Honestly, I disagree with Wagner on this: I think "The Scarlet Citadel" is a lot stronger than the novel. The good news is that when you read this story in context of the rest of Conan's career, it doesn't feel like he's re-heating old story ideas in the microwave. Instead, The Hour of the Dragon feels like the most epic Conan story yet, at least in terms of its scope. There's a good deal of fun to be had on this adventure! It opens with an excellent scene in which an evil cabal resurrects a 3000 year-old wizard from Acheron, the kingdom that once stretched over Aquilonia, Ophir, Brythunia, and Koth. It's atmospheric as hell. We also get a fun, hair-raising romp through the undercroft of an ancient Stygian pyramid which was the height of the story for me. I loved that I didn't know what was beyond each corner and the vampire Akivasha was a great character. I'm always down for a vampire. There's a good variety of questing to be done as Conan goes all over the map here- my next map tracking Conan's adventures is literally just this one story and it covers about as many locations as the 5-10 stories I usually do for each one of those. He goes from castles to deserts to rivers to prairies to pyramids; it helps move that he's never in one place for long. Unfortunately for us, it does kind of feel that the novel was written quickly in order to make a pile of cash from a foreign publisher, because there's a lot that's holding this novel back from being on the top of the pile. The most obvious of these is its length. My copy of The Hour of the Dragon is about 170 pages, which isn't exactly Infinite Jest here, but I've noticed frequently that Conan works best when his stories are compact. The Flame Knife, while good, was a bit long in the tooth at 100 pages and it was astonishing to feel how much tighter and smoother "The People of the Black Circle" felt right afterword since that story is 30 pages leaner. The Hour of the Dragon is yet a full 70 pages longer than The Flame Knife, and it really suffers for it. The pacing is frequently off as you feel that Howard has never had to write a story of this length and doesn't quite know what to do with his runtime. If we had a little bit more quality time with some of the episodes, I think it could have come together much better. Conan too-quickly dispatches a number of his foes, making quick work of this man-ape thing in a dungeon. Hilariously, the text makes a big deal about Conan running into a Nemedian Adventure, making him sound like he's part of the Seal Team Six of the Hyborian Age, only for Conan to end his life in the space of a short paragraph with one single stroke. Do you know about "the Worf Effect" from Star Trek: The Next Generation? Commander Worf is huge and tough, so if you want a bad guy to be really threatening, you have him beat up Worf. I can't help but wish something like that had happened here. Don't just tell me this guy's a tough customer! Have him delay Conan's escape a bit and rough him up, only for Conan to win in a dramatic fashion! Instead, Conan slices the dude up mid-sentence, without ever breaking a sweat. Additionally, major characters disappear for huge sections of text, so much so that one night when I picked the story back up, it was a few chapters before Xaltotun reared his head again and I thought to myself, Oh yeah, he's the villain in this. I'd forgotten.  Maybe the worst thing, though, is that Conan isn't even there at the final, climactic battle. Conan crosses almost an entire continent to find the Heart of Ahriman, which is a good McGuffin that fits with Conan's kingship. Xaltotun has hidden the Heart, not so that he can keep it, but so that nobody can use it against him. Xaltotun wants to rule by force, but Conan rules by winning people's trust and respect. Since the Heart of Ahriman is essentially a clump of pure goodness, it's very much thematically connected to Conan's reign. So when the Heart is finally presented to Xaltotun, smiting him with a blue lightning bolt and turning him back into his wretched mummified form... Conan's like a half-mile away, fighting normal guys. It's a little disappointing. Many of the elements of the novel have simply been done better in other Conan stories, most notably "The Scarlet Citadel." While Howard wasn't writing a grand finale for Conan's kingship, it at least feels like somewhat of a grand finale. There are a few callbacks to Conan's life that hit much harder since I'd just read through his entire life story in the last few months. "Pallantides knew that Conan had walked many strange roads in his wild, eventful life, and had been many things before a twist of Fate set him on the throne of Aquilonia. That kind of rules. Additionally, Conan sort of goes back through all the stages of his life in this story. He's a king in Aqilonia. He's a commander of groups of armed men. He disguises himself and stalks through streets like his thief days. He becomes a pirate again in a chapter literally titled "Return of the Corsair." I think Howard was content to play the hits. The Hour of the Dragon adds a little bit to our ongoing conversation about civilization vs. barbarism and some of the ways that Conan's kingship is benefitted by his barbarism. As Conan's a man of the hills, it seems that his preference for the simple life and the most straightforward way of viewing things is continuing to help him. He- without really meaning to- increases religious freedom in Aquilonia by refusing to outlaw the worship of Asura. "But Conan's was the broad tolerance of the barbarian, and he had refused to persecute the followers of Asura or to allow the people to do so on no better evidence than was presented against them, rumors and accusations that could not be proven. 'If they are black magicians,' he had said, 'how will they suffer you to harry them? If they are not, there is no evil in them. Crom's devils! Let men worship what gods they will.'" Conan's not making speeches quoting Voltaire or anything, but the effect is the same. I also really liked the part where Conan proudly eschews what "ought" to be done for what he knows he can, spitting back that he is nothing but a commoner, but still king. "'The battle is lost! It were the part of majesty to yield with the dignity becoming one of royal blood!' Fuck yes. Even as Conan is king, he still has no respect for royalty. Robert E. Howard has never felt like more of a Texan than right now.
I think Howard was going for the easy A with this story and ultimately earned a solid B. We revisited some of the greatest hits of Conan's life and had his biggest adventure ever. It feels like the end of things. Instead, we still have a few stories to go. The next time we see Conan, it'll be in Bjorn Nyberg's purposeless and mediocre The Return of Conan. Then, we'll have the largest time-skip between any two Conan stories ever- about 15 years. Conan's about his mid-forties in The Hour of the Dragon, and we'll next see him eligible for AARP / getting his free small coffee at McDonald's / putting a reverse mortgage on his house in "The Witch of the Mists," a de Camp / Carter joint that I know nothing about. ★★★☆☆ Can I give this one three and a half stars? I don't have a half-star icon.  1. "Beyond the Black River" begins with Conan in the Pictish Wilderness, eventually going to Fort Tuscalan with Balthus.
2. Conan and Balthus defend Velitrium during the end of "Beyond the Black River." 3. In "Moon of Blood," Conan and some Aquilonian soliders attack the Pictish village of Gwawela. 4. "Moon of Blood's" climax happens at Massacre Meadow, near South Creek. 5. Between stories, Conan goes to Tarantia, capital of Aquilonia, for the first time and pisses off King Numedides. He flees back west. 6."The Treasure of Tranicos" opens with Conan fleeing Picts through the Pictish Wilderness, noted several times that he is deeper into Pict territory than any non-Pitcish person has ever been. He ends up going to Korvala Bay, far to the north. For some reason, the map I'm using refers to it as "Korvela" with an E. I'm not adding Conan the Liberator to my map since I read the Savage Sword adaption just as a bonus, the same way I left Conan and the Sorcerer off my early maps. Additionally, Wolves Beyond the Border doesn't appear here because Conan's not in it! It sure would be hard to track his movements in a story in which he's only mentioned. 7. "The Phoenix on the Sword" keeps Conan entirely in Tarantia, the capital of Aquilonia. However, he does sort of astrally-project / have a dream which takes him to the tomb of Epemitreus the Sage, underneath the mountain of Golamira, far in the north of Aquilonia. He doesn't actually, physically move there, though. 8. "The Scarlet Citadel" begins on the plains of Shemu, with Conan leading his army. Because my map doesn't have anywhere with this name marked, I'm placing it in northern Ophir, near Shamar, where Koth is laying siege. 9. After a betrayal, Conan is brought to the citadel at the center of Khorshemish, the capital city of Koth. Most of the story takes place here in the dungeons. 10. Flown back to Tarantia by a giant bat creature summoned by Pelias, Conan re-takes control of his country by throwing Arpello off the castle wall. 11. Once again leading Aquilonia, Conan and his army march to Shamar, where Conan defeats the wizard Tsotha.  "The Scarlet Citadel" is the second of the chapters featuring Conan as king of Aquilonia. As such, it's impossible to place this story anywhere but late in Conan's life. According to the Lancer book series where L. Sprague de Camp added his own prologues to each story in order to better connect them, this story takes place quickly after "The Phoenix on the Sword." "A Probable Outline of Conan's Career" agrees. Honestly, it feels like this story should take place a little after that, at least to me. Conan appears to have kind of settled into his role as king, so I could see this happening as much as a year after "Phoenix." It has to still be taking place during this civil conflict that allowed Conan to take the Aquilonian throne, though. Conan is about 41 years old, so he's a little past his prime, but he could still kill you or me with just his pinky finger. Interestingly, there's one chronological marker in this story that reaches back, way back, to Conan's pirate days on the Black Coast. Sneaking into Conan's cell in the citadel is a Kushite who recognizes him from long ago as "Amra, the Lion." "Long have I wished to meet you, Amra," the black gave Conan the name—Amra, the Lion—by which the Cimmerian had been known to the Kushites in his piratical days... "I know you from of old, since the days when I was a chief among a free people, before the Stygians took me and sold me into the north. Do you not remember the sack of Abombi, when your sea-wolves swarmed in? Before the palace of King Ajaga you slew a chief and a chief fled from you. It was my brother who died; it was I who fled. I demand of you a blood-price, Amra!" "The Scarlet Citadel" was only the second Conan story published, hitting the pages of Weird Tales number 21 on the first day of January, 1933, only a month after Conan made his debut in "The Phoenix on the Sword." "Queen of the Black Coast," the story in which Conan would earn his pseudonym Amra, wouldn't be published for nearly two more years.  The story strikes me as a second consecutive meditation on power. The theme is a little bit murky, though. Conan has seized the power of the throne, and refuses to give it up by dishonorable means. In that way, Conan is following his own moral code and somewhat justifies having his own power, while every other ruler is a power-hungry asshole or total dipshit. Is Howard saying that power should inherently be looked upon with suspicion? Is he hinting at that age-old saying that those who desire power are the ones who should have the least of it? Is he saying that the only ones who should have power are those who are not born into it? Is he saying, rather troublingly, that power earned through might and conquering is inherently more legitimate than power gained through treachery, blood or tradition? I'm not sure. When looking at the first Conan stories published, it makes sense that Howard would start in Conan's kingly days. What better way to present the differences between civilization and barbarism than by imagining a barbarian in the highest position in the land. What an incongruity! I wonder if he felt like he should go to the opposite end of society next, when "The Tower of the Elephant" was published just two months after "Scarlet Citadel." Take your barbarian, put him in the cushiest position a man could occupy. Then, throw him into the dregs of society. See how he likes either one. In "The Scarlet Citadel," Conan is ripped from his throne by a sorcerer and tossed in the dungeon of the titular scarlet citadel. Making his way out of his prison, we get an absolutely excellent dungeon crawl. Seriously, this is some of Howard's most atmospheric, creative, creepy writing. Conan creeps through the cells, snuffing his torch and then blowing back into the embers to pass unnoticed. In this dungeon gapes a hideous well which even Conan does not dare to gaze down. He knows something evil is inside it. Misty figures and dark shadows loom above and around him. Is Conan's barbarian suspicion playing tricks on his senses? I liked to picture beings draped above him, letting him pass for one reason or another. The horrifying plant which Conan rescues a sorcerer named Pelias from is some of Howard's best work. Emerging from the stone floor, there's a large vine which wraps around a naked man, lowly moaning but otherwise completely absent. The plant, seemingly sentient, is apparently torturing this guy with its creepy petals.  "Now the great crimson blossom dipped and pressed its petals over the writhing lips. The limbs of the wretch twisted in anguish; the tendrils of the plant quivered as if in ecstasy, vibrating their full snaky lengths. Waves of changing hues surged over them; their color grew deeper, more venomous. Conan ends up rescuing Pelias, who is a sorcerer "not entirely from the earth" and has a smarmy charm about him. It seems like Conan's really lucky to be on Pelias's good side, because there's definitely an air of danger and deceit about him. I loved spending time with the guy. Conan's return to Aquilonia is pretty great, leading to an awesome ending, but the last few lines of the story feel pretty stock, so it kind of kneecaps itself in the end. The next story in the chronology is The Hour of the Dragon, AKA Conan the Conqueror, which I understand has almost the exact same plot as this one. We'll see how it goes seeing as it's Howard's only Conan novel. Whereas this story was the second Hyborian story published, Hour of the Dragon is the second-to-last. ★★★★☆  |
AuthorHey, I'm Dan. This is my project reading through the career of everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character, Conan the Cimmerian, in chronological order. 
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