EXTRACTS: The Complete Conan of Cimmeria Volume 3 © The Book Palace (416 PAGES in Full edition)

iii Introduction This volume completes the Wandering Star collection of Robert E. Howard’s tales of Conan of Cimmeria. Every story, fragment, synopsis, and note that Robert E. Howard ever committed to paper about the Cimmerian (even including some of the drafts) – and only those written by Howard himself – can now be found in the pages of the three volumes comprising this collection. Incredible as it may seem, it is a world premiere: Howard’s complete Conan stories had never before appeared in a uniform collection free from revision, rearrangement, and interpolations by others. For the first time, Howard’s Conan series can be judged on its own merits. It is also the first time the stories are published, not arranged according to the character’s “biography,” but in the order Howard wrote them, as seems to have been his intention: “That’s why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.” Previously, any conclusion one was tempted to draw regarding Howard’s achievement with his Conan series could only be based upon a presentation which not only didn’t show Howard’s growth as a writer, but presented the stories according to Conan’s “career,” in a manner which, I would argue, was meant to bolster an interpretation of that career alien to Howard’s original conception. The interpolation of non–Howard Conan stories into the series, the altering and rewriting of certain passages in Howard’s texts (notably in The Black Stranger ), the adding of introductory paragraphs before every story, and even the retitling of Howard’s novel from the original The Hour of the Dragon to Conan the Conqueror , all worked toward presenting the whole series not as the life of “the average adventurer,” as Howard would have it, but as a cohesive saga, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, a kind of Tolkienesque quest in which each story represented yet another step up a ladder from penniless thief (as depicted in Tower of the Elephant ) to mighty monarch of a civilized empire ( The Hour of the Dragon ). Conan’s haphazard and carefree life was artificially transformed into a “career.” What made the series so wonderful – that intense sentiment of freedom resulting from the complete independence of each story from its predecessor and successor (almost no recurring character other than Conan in these tales!) – was undone, and Conan’s adventurous life became a “manifest destiny,” so to speak. It then became easy enough to see in Conan nothing more than a superman who would rise from poverty to kingship through his physical might (as exemplified in the Hollywood version of the Cimmerian).