What does Conan the Barbarian mean in 2025?

or, "What have Frankenstein, Mario Kart, and Marvel movies taught me about Conan of Cimmeria?"

Are you familiar with the concept of a frame narrative? There are a few different uses of the term, but the one I mean is essentially a story-within-a-story. Let me illustrate with one of my favorite novels of all time: Frankenstein.

Frankenstein is a great example of frame narrative because it actually nests several together. It doesn't begin with Victor Frankenstein or with his Creature, but instead opens with letters from Captain Robert Walton to his sister, Margaret  Saville. The dates of the letters are redacted, leaving us to see that they're from some undisclosed time in the 18th century. Walton, on an Arctic expedition, has come across a haggard, half-frozen man named Victor Frankenstein on the ice. Victor's searching for someone or something, and as he convalesces, tells Walton the story of creating his Creature.

Within Victor's history, we eventually get to a point at which the perspective switches to the Creature, telling Victor the story of his early life and how he came to hate Frankenstein so much.

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So, to recap, we have the novel Frankenstein. And within that novel is presented several letters, which tell a story. And within that story, another character tells a story to the letter writer. And within that further story, another character tells a story which then gets related to the letter writer. The Creature's story inside Victor's, inside Walton's, inside Mary's.

Not only that, but the letter dates are obfuscated and already from the last century, so who knows when exactly they were written? Furthermore, Margaret Walton Saville has the same three-letter initials as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, drawing a connection there. Is Margaret really Mary and she's publishing her brother's letters? Did all of this really happen?

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Now I'm not a fucking idiot- I know Frankenstein is a work of fiction. But this frame narrative creates a game of telephone, allowing distance that lets you think that maybe it all happened. It reminds me of when I was in the fifth grade and a kid told me that his cousin saw a friend play as Sonic and Tails in Super Smash Bros. Melee. He didn't see it, but maybe his cousin's friend really did...?

​That frame narrative is how reading Conan of Cimmeria feels in 2025.

Almost exactly a year ago, I made my first post on this blog. I had an aspiration to read every Conan story written by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Bjorn Nyberg. I'd read some of the original stories already and maybe the first fifty issues of Savage Sword when I'd set out, but I'd never done it all. I read all of that I planned to and much more (honestly, very quickly. I should've spaced the blog posts out way more than sometimes posting three a week). I wasn't sure if I'd get through it all or lose interest and forget, but Conan's become something of an obsession for me and he's been a constant for the last year.

Weirdly enough, I've always felt like everything tells me I shouldn't like Conan. My favorite books to read have always been really stuffy, admittedly lit-bro books (I am enough of a stereotype that I'm a bearded white guy and David Foster Wallace is my favorite author of all time) and people treat comic books and pulp like they're un-literary garbage. I definitely think Conan readership skews conservative, and I'm very far to the left. I've also never been a lover of escapism- I almost always want to learn something or be able to use information from a book when I read it, but here I am browsing the local antique mall for mass market paperbacks from 1967. Despite all that, something draws me to Conan.

I've been thinking about this for a long time now: despite all of that, what draws me back over and over again to the Hyborian Age? I think a huge part of it is the frame narrative idea I brought up before. I was born in 1991, so Two-Gun Bob had been dead for 55 years before I was even alive. The Conan movie was almost a decade old, and Roy Thomas was publishing Savage Sword #190, his return to the book, just a few days before I was born.

I'm trying to say with some level of tact that this stuff is getting up there in years. The oldest Conan stories are nearly 100 years old, which means that not only is reading the Hyborian Age a trip to the past, but reading Robert E. Howard's work feels like peering into a long-bygone era as well. Book covers do not look anything like Frank Frazetta paintings these days. And I've had so much fun trying to track down digitized or print versions of six-decade-old magazines or essay collections, sometimes getting lucky to find them preserved through scans on the Internet Archive or in some old forum post in which someone transcribed a text.

Conan is so different than modern fantasy that it reads as fresh and interesting as it nears triple-digit ages. In my own estimation, modern fantasy books are frequently trying to be Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. You're reading a blog about Conan right now, so I know that you have heard of these books even if you haven't read them (I haven't, but my wife did, God bless her soul). This series has 3,077 characters, a total of 12,892 chapters, and collectively weigh about as much as a Subaru Forester. Epic fantasy is the name of the game today, with complication being mistaken for complexity, and everything being an aspiring series of at least a handful of books.

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Conan is the exact opposite of those titles. 20 stories, two fragments, and a synopsis, told quickly. One reason why I was able to read so much Conan in the last year is that these stories read like lightning. Howard is a literary workhorse- his work doesn't feel rushed, but it never lingers in one place too long and is economical to a fault in his storytelling. Not all of them abide by Edgar Allan Poe's "unity of effect" in which they have to be short enough to be read in one sitting, but every word certainly contributes to the overall effect.

If modern day fantasy isn't trying to be The Wheel of Time, it's trying to be The Lord of the Rings or D&D, with extremely well-defined systems of magic, complete histories in which you can know everything about every in-world ruler and war and wizard, and world-building that may seem more important than emotion and character growth. It seems to frequently cling so tightly to established tropes that there's much less fantastical about fantasy than ever.

Conan never gives you that. We see every story from over Conan's shoulder or not too far away, small glimpses of hushed conversations and spider-haunted tombs, but we're never shown everything. It lets the world remain shrouded in mystery and fantasy and the fog of your own imagination. If you'll permit me to use a second video game example in a single blog, check out this video from Youtuber Any Austin. Austin examines overlooked and "uninteresting" portions of video games (though he always makes it terribly interesting), and as he recently explored Mario Kart World's open areas, he realized that it was a lot more fun to imagine and wonder what was just beyond reach of the player than to actually get to see it.

The last thing I'll bring up is Hollywood. To me, at least, a majority of mainstream films today feel so workshopped by boardrooms, written by nobody, and focus-grouped until they're essentially nothing. The theater is dominated by tentpoles and megafranchises and reboots. Exploring Howard's imagination feels so far away from that; it feels like stories that poured out of a restless mind because they had to exist, not because a slate of- *shudder*- intellectual properties got announced at a shareholders' meeting three years ago. A singular voice's fingerprints are all over the stories and are unmistakably his. Most of REH's Conan stories are deceptively deep and philosophically pretty interesting which have quite a bit to say, if you're willing to dig.

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There's something very seductive about Conan and his world in 2025, because it's unlike so much of what the modern world gives us. It's hard to be optimistic about the future these days, so instead, I think I'll go down to a little town in Texas where Robert E. Howard likes to claim a whole cycle of stories were given to him, narrated from just out of sight over his shoulder. And I'll allow the power of that frame narrative to take me over. Maybe it really did happen, just like that.

Missed Howard Days, but I ended up going to Texas anyway.

I missed Howard Days this year because my cousin was getting married on the exact same weekend, but I plan to go next year. Who knows what Conan will mean to me a year on from now? It's been a real pleasure in the last months to get to interview Jim Zub, exchange emails with Jeff Shanks, Roy Thomas, and John C. Hocking, and to get to read tons of great writing from Mark Finn, Gary Romeo, Frank Coffman, Vincent Darlage, and more.

This blog was quite a bit more personal and off the cuff than I normally write, but I felt like reflecting on how I spent the last year. Thanks for reading!

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