Conan Of The Isles

Since then, in company with my colleagues Bjorn Ny-berg and Lin Carter, I have been engaged in completing the incomplete Conan stories and in writing several pastiches, based upon hints in Howard's notes and letters, to fill the gaps in the saga. The present story, by Carter and me, is based upon a paragraph in a letter that Howard wrote, three months before his untimely death, to the educator and science-fiction writer P. Schuyler Miller, an old Conan fan. Howard wrote:

[Conan] travelled widely, not only before his kingship, but after he was king. He travelled in Khitai and Hyrkania, and to the even less known regions north of the latter and south of the former. He even visited a nameless continent in the western hemisphere, and roamed among the islands adjacent to it. How much of this roaming will get into print., I cannot foretell with any accuracy...

(The entire letter is printed in the volume Conan of the present Lancer series, pp. 16-20.)

Of the present Lancer series, six volumes have already been published, with several more to come. Because of legal complications, it was not possible to issue these volumes in chronological order; Conan, the first volume chronologically, was the fifth to appear. Present plans call for a total of at least twelve volumes, of which this one will be chronologically the last.

Readers who want to know more about Conan, Howard, or heroic fantasy generally are referred, first to the list of other Conan books, and other books by Howard published by Lancer, on the page preceding the title page, and further to two periodicals and one book. One periodical is Amra, published by George H. Scithers, Box 9120, Chicago, Illinois, 60690; this is the organ of the Hyborian Legion, a loose group of admirers of heroic fantasy and of the Conan stories in particular. The other periodical is The Howard Collector, published by Glenn Lord, literary agent for the Howard estate, Box 775, Pasadena, Texas, 77501; this is given to articles, stories, and poems by and about Howard. The book is The Conan Reader., by the present author, published by Jack L. Chalker, 5111 Liberty Heights Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, 21207; this consists of articles on Howard, Conan, and heroic fantasy previously published in Amra. I also listed many works by Howard and sword-and-sorcery stories by other writers in my introduction to the volume Conan in the present series.

Conan lived, loved, and fought about twelve thousand years ago, eight thousand years after the sinking of Atlantis and seven thousand years before the beginnings of recorded history. In this time (according to Howard) the western parts of the main continent were occupied by the Hyborian kingdoms. These comprised a galaxy of states set up by northern invaders, the Hyborians, three thousand years before on the ruins of the evil empire of Acheron. South of the Hyborian kingdoms lay the quarreling city-states of Shem. Beyond Shem slumbered the ancient, sinister kingdom of Stygia, the rival and partner of Acheron in the days of the latter's bloodstained glory. Further south yet, beyond deserts and veldts, were barbarous black kingdoms.

North of the Hyborians lay the barbarian lands of Cim-meria, Hyperborea, Vanaheim, and Asgard. West, along the ocean, were the fierce Picts. To the east glittered the Hyrkanian kingdoms, of which the mightiest was Turan.

Conan was a gigantic barbarian adventurer who roistered and brawled and battled his way across half the prehistoric world to rise at last to the kingship of a mighty realm. The son of a blacksmith in the bleak, backward northern land of Cimmeria, Conan was born on a battlefield in that land of rugged hills and somber skies. As a youth, he took part in the sack of the Aquilonian frontier post of Venarium.

Subsequently, joining in a raid with a band of Æsir into Hyperborea, Conan was captured by the Hyperboreans. Escaping from the Hyperborean slave pen, he wandered south into the kingdom of Zamora. For several years, he made a precarious living there and in the adjacent lands of Corinthia and Nemedia as a thief. (See the map.) Green to civilization and quite lawless by nature, he made up for his lack of subtlety and sophistication by natural shrewdness and by the herculean physique he had inherited from his father.

Growing tired of this starveling existence, Conan enlisted as a mercenary soldier in the armies of Turan. For the next two years he traveled widely, as far east as the fabled lands of Meru and Khitai. He also refined his archery and horsemanship, both of which had been at best indifferent up to the time of his joining the Turanians,