DEATH-SONG OF CONAN THE CIMMERIAN

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.

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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
To cities of silk and sin.
With torch and steel, in blood and flame,
I won what a man may win:"

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
And friends to love and trust:
And crowns to conquer and toss away
And lips to taste with lust:"

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.​