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

That Conan eventually became king of Aquilonia is not in question, of course: he was king in the very first story Howard wrote about him. But nowhere in the stories as Howard wrote them do we detect a hint of a plan to become king one day. In Beyond the Black River , Conan comments: “I’ve been a mercenary captain, a corsair, a kozak, a penniless vagabond, a general – hell, I’ve been everything except a king, and I may be that, before I die.” In Red Nails , he is no more precise: “I’ve never been king of an Hyborian kingdom. . . . But I’ve dreamed of being even that. I may be too, some day. Why shouldn’t I?” Conan became a king simply because the situation presented itself to him at a particular moment of his life, not because of any predetermined plan. As to Howard’s conception of kingship, it was not an imperialistic one, but rather an Arthurian one, in which the king is first and foremost at the service of his people and not the reverse, so much so that in fact King Conan’s only ambition at times would be not to be a king anymore: “Prospero . . . these matters of statecraft weary me as all the fighting I have done never did. . . . I wish I might ride with you to Nemedia. . . . It seems ages since I had a horse between my knees – but Publius says that affairs in the city require my presence. Curse him! . . . I did not dream far enough, Prospero. When King Numedides lay dead at my feet and I tore the crown from his gory head and set it on my own, I had reached the ultimate border of my dreams. I had prepared myself to take the crown, not to hold it. In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless.” When his supporters propose that he conquer another kingdom after having been dispossessed of Aquilonia, in The Hour of the Dragon , Conan’s answer is unequivocal: “Let others dream imperial dreams. I but wish to hold what is mine. I have no desire to rule an empire welded together by blood and fire. It’s one thing to seize a throne with the aid of its subjects and rule them with their consent. It’s another to subjugate a foreign realm and rule it by fear. I don’t wish to be another Valerius. No, Trocero, I’ll rule all Aquilonia and no more, or I’ll rule nothing.” We are here very far from the perception the general public has of Conan, that of a fur-clad, semi-illiterate brute (for Conan in the media suffered the same fate as Burroughs’ Tarzan: both mysteriously lost their ability for articulate speech), bent only on raping, slaying, and conquering. The tales of Conan as a king, the last ones chronologically speaking, should thus in no way be considered as the culmination of a lifelong saga that leads to becoming the most powerful ruler of the Hyborian Age. After all, these tales of King Conan were penned rather early in the history of the series ( The Phoenix on the Sword and The Scarlet Citadel were among the very first Conan stories written by Howard in 1932, and The Hour of the Dragon , written in 1934, was essentially a cannibalization of earlier efforts). All the tales in this third volume were written well after The Hour of the Dragon . iv Conan of Cimmeria Volume 3