The popular image of Conan is intrinsically tied to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s portrayal in the 1982 film and its sequel, which pretty much ignores how much Texas influenced the character
It’s not uncommon for fictional characters to overshadow their creators, but few have done so the way Conan the Barbarian has his Texas author, Robert E. Howard. This is a shame because Conan has Texas deep in his DNA.
Born January 22, 1906, Howard lived his entire life in Texas, most of it in the town of Cross Plains, where a small museum holds a festival in his honor every summer. As a very young man, he worked a few outdoor jobs, such as surveyor, but he was already a prolific published pulp writer by 25. Alongside H. P. Lovecraft, his work became the backbone of Weird Tales, and he almost single-handedly birthed the sword and sorcery sub-genre through his characters King Kull and later Conan.
The popular image of Conan is intrinsically tied to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s portrayal in the 1982 film and its sequel. Even today, Conan’s appearance as a guest character in the most recent Mortal Kombat game is directly mimicking Schwarzenegger, not Howard’s original characterization. While an immediate hit and iconic performance, it sadly established Conan as a vaguely European figure tied to that continent’s mythology and culture, dismissing how Texas influenced Conan.
“What Robert Howard created was a thinking, rational individual who is decisive and has his own opinions,” said Willard M. Oliver, author of the biography Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author. “That difference between pop culture and what the author actually created. Usually what the author created is a lot better, and in the case of Howard it’s more Texas-centric, but you don’t see it with watching any of the movies.”
Oliver cited several examples of Texas geography in Conan’s world. “Beyond the Black River” is one of the best and most famous Conan stories, pitting the barbarian against the Picts (loosely inspired by the real-world Celtic people but heavily re-imagined being more like Native Texan tribes). Howard scholars now believe that the titular river is actually the Brazos River, and that the Picts are just renamed Comanches.
Texas is a big place, and though Howard himself explored only a fraction of it, he was well read about his home state. Conan had plenty of proxy piney forests, mountains, rivers, and deserts to wander looking for adventures. The barbarian had a fairly long career a pirate, and Howard drew on the legendary Gulf Coast privateer Jean Lafitte when writing about Conan’s high seas adventures.
The sea-faring tradition continues to modern Conan scribes as well. Texas author Shaun Hammil recently published an official Conan story, “Lethal Assignment” for Titan Books. In Hammil’s story, Conan is essentially working security on a ship hauling a cursed cargo. Once people start dying, Conan has to fight an ancient evil. Hammil drew on the Conan mythos when penning his own sorcery novel The Dissonance. He immediately recognized the Texan aspects on the barbarian.
“I think there’s definitely a lot of the Texan myth of Texas self-reliance, but especially when you grow up sort of roughneck, lower income and have to really scrabble for a living,” said Hammil.
“There is sort of just a mythic dimension to Texas because it is just so big. And especially if you live in rural Texas, there’s so much nothing around you, and it’s impossible not to see that. Also that mistrust of authority, this idea that barbarism is inevitable, but also, in a way, morally superior to civilization, which I think is a very Texan attitude to have for better or worse, you know.”
Howard was a man of contradictions; a strapping amateur boxer who was rarely in good health; a perennial mama’s boy while also fearless when standing up to cruel bosses; a fervent friend and pen pal to the notoriously racist Lovecraft, who also pushed back on Lovecraft’s paranoia about miscegenation by uplifting the nobility of “savage” races.
In other words, he was Texan through and through. Conan has more in common with a gunslinger than, say Michael Moorcok’s Elric or a Tolkien protagonist. The myth of the frontier and the DNA of the cowboy runs through Conan’s veins.
“The character itself was kind of an amalgamation of people he knew, but of course, the people he knew were all Texans,” said Oliver. “Whether it was the roughnecks on the oil rigs, or the regular locals. One of the things he really liked to do was to talk to the older people, because he realized that they lived on the frontier when they were growing up. He would often go listen to their stories, and a lot of those stories got incorporated into his.”
Howard would have been 120 this month. Conan continues to go through a mini-Renaissance, through new stories by authors like Hammil and appearing in Marvel comics again such as a recent run in Savage Avengers. While the character is unlikely to step out from under Schwarzenegger’s considerable shadow any time soon, more people are getting to see the original Texas version.
This is a state that thrives on being bigger than life. It’s time Conan was reclaimed as a part of that.
“Texas is very aware of its [mythos] and wanting to buy into that and this rugged individualism,” said Hammil. “Conan is very Texan in that way because he is the ideal of the stoic but passionate, very self-reliant man who doesn’t trust anybody. The kind of man with no name who rides into town, rights the wrong, and then rides off again.”
Great Job Jef Rouner & the Team @ The Texas Signal for sharing this story.
