It’s hard to believe it is the end of the month and I still haven’t posted a Forgotten Realm yet. Perhaps even more damning is the fact that this particular Forgotten Realm has been on my mind since June, when I realized how perfect it was.
Throughout the northern hemisphere, summer is at its mid stride, at least in terms of high temperatures. When it gets so hot outside that all you want to do is find a shady corner to crawl into and sip on something cold, I tend to find that I don’t want to tax my mind too much either. Probably from all of that excess heat the brain generates when thinking or something. At any rate, as the movie industry has long since noted, summer time is ripe for the mind candy gluttony of cheap thrills.
Which, in some ways, makes Howard’s works a step away from the norm in that regard, despite the fact that derivatives of his work are the fodder for such mindless entertainment. I won’t sit here and tell you that Howard’s works are mentally challenging masterpieces, but to the uninitiated, I think you’ll find yourself pleasantly surprised.
When I say the name “Conan the Barbarian,” what immediately springs to mind? More than likely you will immediately think of Governor Schwarzenegger in his early film role playing the character. From this memorable example, you will assume you know the shallow character of Conan quite well. A barbarian, more interested in fighting than thinking, more than likely not full of any great or deep insights. To be fair, as an early role in Schwarzenegger’s career, when his English fluency was still at its infancy, he was going to be able to give great monologues. That, and let’s face it, Hollywood was more interested in making a brawny action film than they were of of necessarily being true to Howard’s writings.
Forget everything you think you know about Conan (the Barbarian, not the O’Brien)(Long live Coco!).
I recommend reading these stories in the order in which they were published/written, versus an arbitrary arrangement made by later anthology editors. The first story you will read, then, is The Phoenix on the Sword, a story that actually takes place near the end of Conan’s adventures, when he is enjoying life as a King in retirement. Reading this story, its easy to see two things: first, that the argument that Howard, a friend of that other genre trendsetter H.P.Lovecraft, may very well have invented the pulp genre of sword and sorcery stories (at least of the second world variety); secondly, that the Conan you grew up watching on cable late night is a mere caricature of the real thing.
It isn’t just the drastically different physical description from what you’ve come to know. Its the fact that this man is as much a thinker as a brute, that he isn’t someone that stabs mindlessly and asks questions later but someone that really is a well thought out protagonist. Yes, his later exploits are sometimes extreme, and the writing of the women in the stories will never earn Howard a mention as a feminist, but for pulp it is well beyond the standards I’ve come to expect from the 1930’s.
Which is why I’ve included Howard in this review of Forgotten Realms. Not because his characters are forgotten, but because the characters as he originally wrote them have been forgotten. These aren’t the shallow brutes that the small and big screen have portrayed them to be. There’s something more to them that I think is worthy of you all taking the time and reading through a few. Just be sure its an original Howard before you start – while he too became repetitive in later stories, when licensing let others write Conan stories in the 70’s and 80’s they tended to focus on the mindless action and womanizing and less on the depth of the original character.
Go on, read. Enjoy. Its summer time.