No into the third of five volumes on the literature of Robert E. Howard, I believe it is time to plumb his heroic subtext and themes in another way. I will begin concentrating on completing a survey and impression of each of Howard’s primary pre-Conan heroes, those heroes which seem to antedate his apex creation: Kull, Kane and Mak Morn.

I will begin these major character studies with King Kull, barbarian usurper of Valusia, a cautionary hero, whose adventures in many ways predicts our current political and social landscape in the early Postmodern Period, the character most like Conan—his truest prototype—a doomed hero king, a character type who had been “swept into eternity” by the tidal scope of human events centuries before Howard’s birth.