Michael Martinez wrote:
> I don't recall anyone ever showing that
> Howard actually sat down and planned out his pseudo-history. Maybe I'm
> just too sleepy right now. :)
>
> The Hyborian Age essay was mostly an afterthought, was it not? I mean,
> some of the Conan stories were rehashes of earlier stories, including
> Kull. But the connections were all sort of mapped out after Howard had a
> fairly large set of stories, right?
Patrice can answer this question with a great deal more authority than
anyone. His essay (in The Dark Man #4) on "The Birth of Conan," goes into the
initial creation of Conan and the first several stories, and he has since done
a lot more work on the subject. In as brief a nutshell as I can put it,
though, Howard conceived of Conan very early in 1932; the writing of "The
Phoenix on the Sword," "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," "Cimmeria," and "The
Hyborian Age" is all very intertwined, seems to all have been during the month
of February, possibly into March, and Howard also at this time prepared two
maps and a page of names (both people and places) for the series. After
sending "Phoenix" and "Frost-Giant's" to Weird Tales, he continued writing,
including "The Tower of the Elephant," and when the first two stories were
returned to him, he revised "Phoenix" further. I believe he may also have
written the first page (of two) of the "essay" later published as "Notes on
Various Peoples of the Hyborian Age" at this time. All of this shows that he
was trying to clearly systematize the world of Conan for himself. It was
certainly an act of "world-creation," and while I disagree with the
redoubtable Joe Marek on just how detailed Howard's conception of Conan's
*life* was (I believe he had a rather general framework in mind and made up
significant parts of it as they occurred to him, hence the stories ramble
about in what appears to be a very random way, but when we look at what *else*
Howard was writing or trying out at the time, and when we consider that
certain stories are clearly rewrites of earlier ones [as, for example, "The
Devil in Iron" being largely an exploration, better written, of ideas first
worked into "Iron Shadows in the Moon"], we see -- I see -- that Howard did
not have a *detailed* outline of Conan's career from the outset), I certainly
think he had a pretty detailed conception of Conan's world, from a very early
stage of the series.
Rusty
King of the Parenthetical Remark
