Hyborian Age

Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of — when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles, and the proudest of them all was ruled by a black-haired wanderer with sombre eyes and a sword no man could stand against. This is the Hyborian Age: Robert E. Howard's imagined epoch of vanished history, where Aquilonia glitters, Stygia broods over its serpent-gods, and Conan the Cimmerian claws his way from thief and mercenary to a king who took his crown with his own two hands. It begins in the pulp pages of Weird Tales in the 1930s, in the two dozen ferocious short tales and the lone novel Howard set down before his death. Earlier still lies the Thurian Age of Kull of Valusia, brooding forerunner to Conan. What Howard left, other hands enlarged into a vast machinery of continuation — L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter stitching fragments and pastiche, then Robert Jordan, Leonard Carpenter and a legion more spinning fresh sagas of Cimmeria, of Bêlit the pirate queen, of Kern and Stygian heretics. Much of the shelf is posthumous invention; the beating heart remains Howard's own. Its temper is blood-and-thunder made lean and fast: civilization is a thin, corrupt varnish, barbarism the vital thing beneath, and sorcery a cold dread that must be met with steel rather than spells. There is melancholy under the mayhem — every gleaming tower is doomed to dust. Newcomers should ignore the tangle and go straight to the source: the three Del Rey volumes that restore Howard's texts in the order he wrote them — The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, The Bloody Crown of Conan, The Conquering Sword of Conan. Read those, and let the pastiches wait.