Robert E. Howard’s Warriors
“To grow up hard and lean and wolfish and living the hard, barren life of a barbarian.”
Few authors get to create an archetypal hero. The pantheon of classic fictional characters of the past 140 years includes Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Sam Spade, Superman, James Bond, and Conan of Cimmeria.
Robert E. Howard had a definite pattern for his characters that culminated in his wandering barbarian in an age undreamed of. He distilled some ideas that percolated in popular fiction during the Progressive Era.
Jack London had the transformation of a soft modern man, Humphrey Van Weyden, through hard manual labor and fighting in The Sea-Wolf. The struggle for survival was a recurring theme with London.
“The history of civilisation is a history of wandering, sword in hand, in search of food. In the misty younger world, we catch glimpses of phantom races, rising, slaying, finding food, building rude civilisations, decaying, falling under the swords of stronger hands, and passing utterly away.”
Edgar Rice Burroughs had John Clayton, son of an English noble, raised by apes as Tarzan. As a result, Tarzan is near superhuman in strength and reflexes. Burroughs would transform David Innes physically in At the Earth’s Core to a self-made ruler of a stone age empire.
Robert E. Howard had more “prehistoric” and historic series characters than modern day ones. His characters are hard men who grew up in hard environments. A process of survival of the fittest over generations creates barbarian tribes physically superior to city dwellers. As he wrote in “A Witch Shall be Born,” “It takes oppression and hardship to stiffen a man’s guts and put the fire of hell into their thews.”
“Barbarian” has a traditional connotation of crude, stupid, and clumsy. Robert E. Howard inverted the concept. Natural selection of humans, leaving only the fittest, creates men that are conquerors. Howard viewed a state of barbarism as necessary for achieving peak physical condition.
Howard was an outsider and he identified with the historical outsiders. “My sense of placement, as I've mentioned, is always with the barbarians outside the walls.” In dreams, “Always I am the barbarian.”
In a letter to H. P. Lovecraft in 1933, he wrote:
“What constitutes the barbarian? The Grecians called the Persians barbarians, yet the Persians were as highly developed as the Greeks, in their own particular way. The Romans called the Gallic and German tribes barbarians, yet these races were superior to the later Romans in courage, honor and honesty. The Saxons that destroyed the British-Roman civilization of Britain were called barbarians, yet they were better armed, better trained, and knew more about the arts of war and voyaging than the “civilized” people they dispossessed.”
He was under no illusions. “I have no patience with the depiction of the barbarian of any race as a stately, god-like child of Nature, endowed with strange wisdom and speaking in measured and sonorous phrases.”
Howard knew humans have a plasticity that allows for adaptation. Cold climates create superior men. In his essay “The Hyborian Age,” Bori leads his people into the north during the great cataclysm. The process is repeated when the Cimmerians and Nordheimer are forced to move due to an oncoming ice age. They sweep all before them: Gunderland, the Pictish Empire, Nemedia, Turan. Eventually they settle in the steppes around what would become the Caspian Sea.
Robert E. Howard had a story, “Two Against Tyre,” featuring Eithriall the Gaul. He describes Eithriall thusly:
“But the hard, almost wolfish, lines of his mighty frame were not Grecian. Here was a man who is akin to the original Hellenes, but who was much nearer the pristine Nordic stem–a man whose life had been spent, not in marble cities or fertile agricultural valleys, but in savage conflict with nature in her wildest form. This fact showed in his strong moody face, in the hard economy of his form–his heavy arms, broad shoulders, and lean loins.”
James Allison remembers his past lives as a Nordheimer. In “The Valley of the Worm,” he remembers “That northern homeland of blinding white snow plains and ice fields.”
While harsh, cold climates can modify genetics to the point of physical perfection, conversely, living in swamps and jungles produces physical and mental degeneracy. The fall of the winged people in “Queen of the Black Coast” takes place when their home turns into a swampy jungle. They devolve from angelic beings to “pinioned demons” from drinking contaminated water and a change of environment.
Leaving the ice fields to the north, the Cimmerians, Vanir, and Aesir go on to inhabit the plains and steppes to the east. There, they are known as Aryans. They had regressed to hunters following wild cattle, bison, and horses. Some drifted west, becoming horsemen. The clan that moved west in oxen drawn wagons were called Kelts. Howard has been proven correct. Analysis shows a massive DNA change in Europe around 4,000 years ago. Indo-European speaking, lactose tolerant, horse-taming Yamnaya culture came off the steppes and swept through Europe all the way to Ireland.
Howard had great respect for the Mongols and had mixed feelings regarding the Turks, who came from the steppes later on.
“The Turk never built anything. The Turanian has always, it seemed to me, been the man of action rather than the man of study and art. He has been, and still is, bold, adventuresome, capable and unsentimental, brutal and domineering.”
Howard’s barbarians are not supermen. They are not created with super-serums or radiation and do not go around wearing spandex costumes at night. They are not aliens with superior powers like Superman. They are tough bastards who can endure more than the civilized man, living by strength and wit. They are natural Spartans. His warriors are more akin in attitude to the hard-boiled private eyes and detectives found in the pages of the pulp magazines Black Mask and Dime Detective. They take a beating but get back up. It can be summed up in the scene where Conan takes control of the Zuagirs from Olgerd Vladislav in “A Witch Shall be Born”:
“Though it was for your own ends that you took me down from the cross. It was a bitter test you gave me then; you couldn’t have endured it; neither could anyone but a western barbarian.”
Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Conan the Reiver, Cormac MacArt, and Conan of Cimmeria are all barbarians. Turlogh O’Brien is essentially a barbarian. Cormac FitzGeoffrey and the other Crusaders are from harsh backgrounds in comparison to the Levant. Esau Cairn and Kirby O’Donnell are atavists. Cairn does not fit in with the modern world. He undergoes tempering on the planet Almuric for months, surviving on his own before joining the humans there.
Howard’s literary hook was using hard men who physically dominated situations they were placed in, especially in civilized realms. He also knew that decline begins with the moment of triumph. The barbarian is easily corrupted, as he wrote to H. P. Lovecraft regarding the Persians:
“To me there is a strange and powerful fascination about this wayward branch on the Aryan tree; it stirs my imagination to contemplate those proud, half-naked blond savages riding down out of their mountain fastnesses to ravage the rich lands of the plains – their whirlwind conquests and appallingly swift moral and physical disintegration. Indeed Croesus might say he conquered his conquerors, for Lydia’s looted wealth played havoc with those hardy barbarians.”
The idea of a hard environment creating a physically superior human has been used in science fiction. Tom Godwin’s novel The Survivors has humans on a spaceship captured by an enemy. They are marooned on a planet which is habitable but merciless. They learn to adapt and overcome, producing ever stronger progeny each generation. The sequel was entitled The Space Barbarians. Poul Anderson examined the idea of an austere culture on another planet in his story “Among Thieves,” which is called “Die Barbaren” in German. Lastly, Frank Herbert’s Fremen in Dune are tougher than the Emperor’s Sardaukar Imperial Guard. The frontier tradition of a people living in the wilderness, producing a people and culture that is rude but virile, is an underlying concept used by authors ranging from Jack London, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard to Frank Herbert.
Morgan Holmes first discovered sword & sorcery when he read his brother's copy of the anthology The Ghoul Keepers, which contained Henry Kuttner's "Spawn of Dagon." He’s been collecting pulps for 38 years. He blogs at Castaliahouse.com, and was nominated for a Hugo in 2016 in the Best Fan Writer category.