The untold truth of Conan the Barbarian – Looper

By the early 1930s, Robert E.Howard was already writing fantasy stories for pulp magazines like Weird Tales. He had previously created a barbarian hero named Kull, who lived in the legendary kingdom of Atlantis. In a 1931 story called "People of the Dark," which deals with reincarnation, Howard first mentioned a black-haired barbarian named Conan, who worshiped a god named Crom. He expanded on the character in 1932, when he rewrote a rejected Kull story into something new. He changed the title from "By This Ax, I Rule" to "The Phoenix on the Sword" and changed the hero from Kull to Conan.

The two characters were similar in many respects, althoughConan was more interested in women. Also, whereas Kull hailed fromAtlantis and had adventures on that mythical continent, Conan came from a place called Cimmeria, but never visited it in any of Howard's stories.Conan was always a wanderer, an outsider in the kingdoms where he found himself. Even when he became a king, as he did in that first 1932 story, it was through a combination of circumstance and his martial skill, never anything to do with birthright or inheritance. Conan swore by a god named Crom, but didn't exactly worship him, because Crom was a colder, more distant god than that.

Howard would go on to write a total of 17 Conan stories and novellas for Weird Tales, with the latter being serialized across multiple issues. An 18th Conan story by Howard was published in the magazine Fantasy Fan. By 1936, his interests as a writer had largely turned to Westerns, but that same year, upon learning that his mother was dying of tuberculosis and not expected to regain consciousness, Robert E. Howard died by suicide.

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The untold truth of Conan the Barbarian - Looper