THE LAIR OF THE ICE WORM

I'm sighing. You'll have to settle for picturing me sigh.

L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter are really messing with our chronology now, unfortunately. Way back in my first post while reading "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," I noted that de Camp and Robert Jordan but this story at twenty-third and twenty-fifth in their respective chronologies. Most of the chronologies vary a little bit, but one story being twenty-four placements away is uncommon. Now I get why. I don't agree with it, but I get why.

de Camp and Carter clearly intended this story to follow directly after "Frost-Giant." As they often do, they put it in their little prologue blurb at the beginning of the story. The rest of this story has to be at least a few stories into his career as Conan is riding a horse he has acquired in Zamora, he mentions the Hyperborean slavers he was sold to in "Legions of the Dead," he speaks languages he's acquired while traveling. I honestly think I'm going to kind of split the difference. I'm keeping both stories in their placements, and here's why.
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1. Conan seems much older in this story (at least to me) than he does in "Frost-Giant." Conan is unable to resist the temptation of Atalis, the titular daughter of a frost-giant, and kind of stupidly chases after her. Conan makes smarter, more clever decisions here, like not doing a Cimmerian war cry so that he can sneak up on his enemies.
2. "Frost-Giant" implies that he's going to assault Atalis if he is able to get his hands on her, which is very far from how he acts in "Ice Worm." He carefully checks to see if Ilga is willing before they sleep together in his hovel. He's got himself more under control. 
3. It seems weird to me that after spending many months- if not years- thieving, and then two solid years as a mercenary, he stays with the Aesir raiders an extremely short time before moving on. 
4. The story says that he split from the Aesir quickly because he had been brought "hard knocks but no profit," though he frequently has no profit (we're at something like 5 stories where the treasure he's seeking magically disappears) and he's persevered through those setbacks. 
5. Passing through the Border Kingdoms seems like a sensible direction to where he ends up in the next story. Conan is wandering west form Zamora and eventually ends up in Argos. 

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I have to say, there's something about this cover that is just phenomenally off-putting. That Ice Worm is repulsive.

​You are absolutely welcome to disagree with me. I suppose the parts that are confounding our timeline I'm just going to treat as non-canon, but I suppose it all does get cleaned up if we just place "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" directly prior to this story.

The good news for me is that this isn't exactly a big winner of a Conan tale to begin with. There are some fun descriptions in the beginning as Conan swings his axe from his horse to save Ilga, but the rest of the story is mediocre. Part of that comes from the title, which gives far too much away. The best Conan titles are intriguing without revealing too much. "The Hall of the Dead?" Super spooky. "A Witch Shall Be Born?" Sounds ominous. "The Blood-Stained God?" That's rad as fuck.  But we know exactly what we're going to see in "The Lair of the Ice Worm." I bet there will be an ice worm and we'll enter his lair.

Something that doesn't reveal our final enemy would be much more fun here, like "The Lair in the Glacier" or "The Curse of Snow Devil Glacier." We don't know what the Thing in the Crypt will be or what kind of elephant we'll see in the tower, so why give it away here? The way Conan dispatches the ice worm of the title is pretty cool, but it's not enough to save this story from mediocrity. 

​Conan is riding his horse along the slopes of the Eiglophian mountains, which are on the northern reaches of Cimmeria at the beginning of this story. Since he's coming from Zamora, I think it makes sense that he's riding east-to-west.

​Next time, we're headed to Argos where we're going sailing with one of the most famous Conan stories of all time!

★★☆☆​☆