2003, the Coming of Conan The Cimmerian, Del Ray, Miscellanea, pages 375-398

These two undated manuscripts, probably typed in 1933, provide the aspiring writer of adventure fiction of any genre with tips from a master of the craft. Howard’s Conan character was a shallowly sketched, yet passionate hero; a speeding carriage of fury that carried the reader along through the depths of human subterfuge and primal terror like a bloody-handed tour guide of some insane world; a world whose very evils so mirrored Howard’s own, and now ours as well, for he wrote on the human condition through a prism of dark adventure.

Howard approaches his Notes on Various Peoples of the Hyborian Age from a eugenics perspective, in keeping with the ethical bent of his age, which was one of racial hierarchy. We are taught that notions of racial supremacy are entirely white and European in origin. But, as illuminated by Lothrop Stoddard, Howard's non-fiction contemporary on issues of racial identity, every race of man has identified strongly with its ancestors, up until our current age of cultural dissipation, in which one-world corporate concerns frown upon humanity identifying with anything non-material and inward looking. And, just as Howard's races of formally dominant, now decadent ancients committed slow suicide as they were separated from their ancestral heritage by the ages, Howard's and Conan's [racial-spiritual] descendants, now separated from their ancestral heritage by the Media and the State, commit mass suicide according to the most passive means. Just as the last members of Howard's dissipated races lay beneath the dreaming lotus flowers breathing in their oblivious poison, the descendants of another race-based empire now dissolve into drug-induced oblivion.

We are the dying races of Xuthal and Xapur, the feral remnants of the Atlanteans, the figurines arrayed about the Well of the Black Ones...

Young men of European descent, Robert E. Howard was your prophet—awaken from your racial slumber!

On a literary note these long discarded manuscripts are primarily a guide to race relations for Howard's fantasy world. This was largely responsible for the ‘real feel’ of Howard’s admittedly superficial construct. Alone among modern American heroes Conan is a racist. I find this so refreshing in light of the decades of recent sci-fi vintage where the dynamic heroes all tend to have an almost godlike lack of prejudice, or espouse some intellectual ethos of the likes that are generally beyond a genuine man of action.

In The Hyborian Age, the main item of interest is the italicized preface in which Howard states that this is no “attempt to advance any theory in opposition to accepted history.” Remember that Howard wrote at a time when dozens of theologians, cult leaders, mystics, and just plain kooks were essentially writing science-fiction [much of it referencing the Atlantis fad] and trying to pass it off as either science or religion, or both.

Howard intentionally and simplistically goes on to do an overlay of known history, and adjusts geography to correspond to the continental shelf. This is convenient for him as a writer and keeps the reader in familiar cultural territory, with all of his fantasy races being ancestral to the Eurasian/African distributions known from the historical record. George R.R. Martin essentially did the same thing with A Song of Fire and Ice, with similar good results, as it is easier for readers to follow, there being no extreme alternative reality like found in Dune. This approach is not that different in spirit from Tolkien’s folklore based Middle Earth construct, but has the appeal of a lack of cultural minutia to bog down the non-geek reader.

Howard burns his introductory paragraph most instructively on why one must have a fictional construct in which to place one’s character, primarily to provide a consistent set of parameters for the writer to abide by.

If you are building a fictional world—even if just a fictional corporate structure in which your military contractor protagonist exists in a ‘current’ earth—than reading Howard’s notes is a good first step.