CIMMERIA (poem)

Robert E. Howard's poem "Cimmeria" is one of the earliest Conan the Barbarian works. Unlike a lot of Conan stories, which have a publication year or an even-more-general timeframe, like so many that were begun in the 30s by Howard but not published until decades later when they were finished by his collaborators L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, or others, we know that "Cimmeria" was written in February of 1932 while Howard was in Mission, TX. 

I'm an English teacher, but even so, I've never felt very good at writing or judging poetry, but I have to say that "Cimmeria" is a delight to read. Its short five sections do a great job of describing the leaden, depressing, melancholy landscape from which Conan hails. It might be just me, but I feel like a lot of modern fantasy sticks to several well-worn setting types, and hilly forests, like those described in "Cimmeria," are usually described as much happier and more picturesque in tone. It helps set the poem apart and also helps illustrate why Conan becomes a sullen-eyed, curt man.

The most peculiar thing about "Cimmeria" is its two-word introduction, "I remember," implying that this fictional landscape was once real for the poem's speaker, who seems to be remembering it though the haze of a spell of some kind. Whether this speaker is a reincarnation of Conan the Cimmerian many lives on is definitely up to the reader's interpretation, but it feels likely to me.

Howard writing in February of 1932 means that this poem predates any published Conan material, with the earliest story, "The Phoenix on the Sword" being published by Weird Tales in December, 1932. However, as many writers have noted, it's not alone in its characterization of a person remembering a long-forgotten land of high adventure. The previous October, Howard submitted a short story entitled "People of the Dark" to the magazine Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in which a character named John O'Brien remembers a past life as "Conan the reaver." I had never read "People of the Dark" until now, and it makes a great companion piece to the "Cimmeria" poem. Both of these works have Conan emerging, not quite fully formed, but involuntarily from some hidden-away place in the mind. Howard claims that its remarkably similar to how Conan, as a character, came to him:

“I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen—or rather off my typewriter—almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-writing. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn’t do it.”

Conan then truly came into form when Howard got home from Mission, TX and re-wrote a rejected Kull story, "By this Axe I Rule!" into "The Phoenix on the Sword." While people argue whether the Conan of "People of the Dark" is the Conan of the Hyborian age, he's there with his black hair, swearing by Crom, so I'm inclined to believe he is.

What I really don't get is how someone writes a poem like "Cimmeria" on a visit to southern Texas. I've never been as far south in Texas as Mission (today a suburb of McAllen, on the Mexico border), but my experience with Texas is dry, hot, bright, and pretty sparse when it comes to trees. I wonder if Cimmeria felt like a cool opposite of where he was at during that time. Patrice Louinet proposes that Cimmeria is an analogue for Dark Valley, Texas, where Howard was born. His description of Dark Valley in a letter to HP Lovecraft in 1930 sure sounds quite a bit like how he would describe Cimmeria two years later.

“I believe, for instance, that the gloominess in my own nature can be partly traced to the surroundings of a locality in which I spent part of my baby-hood. It was a long, narrow valley, lonesome and isolated, up in the Palo Pinto hill country. It was very sparsely settled and its name, Dark Valley, was highly descriptive. So high were the ridges, so thick and tall the oak trees that it was shadowy even in the daytime, and at night it was as dark as a pine forest—and nothing is darker in this world. The creatures of the night whispered and called to one another, faint night-winds murmured through the leaves and now and then among the slightly waving branches could be glimpsed the gleam of a distant star.”

Funnily enough, Howard apparently thought he was a pretty shit poet, lamenting, "I’m a failure. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Rich aint it? All day I’ve tried to write poetry. I’ve worked. Hell, how I’ve worked. Changing, revising, aw hell! My stuff is so infernally barren, so damnably small. I read the poems of some great author and while they uplift me, they assure me of my failure. Hell, hell, hell." I'm inclined to disagree. "Cimmeria" is the only poem in the Conan canon that I'm currently aware of, but I think it's pretty fantastic. Frank Coffman over at Sprage de Camp Fan explains why.

"Cimmeria" was illustrated in an adaption by Barry Windsor-Smith (one of the best to ever do it) in Savage Tales featuring Conan the Barbarian #2, and was reprinted in volume 3 of the Dark Horse Savage Sword of Conan collections.

With "Cimmeria" out of the way, I'm excited to read our first actual Conan short story, "The Frost-Giant's Daughter."