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Rating: When we talk about fantasy today, the omnipresent Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and the novels of Terry Brooks and, lately, Christopher Paolini, immediately come to mind: the worlds evoked are delicate Middle-Earth-like lands inhabited by elves and dwarves, where brave warriors with pure emotions face dark Lords of Evil hidden in their towers and pursue the troubled and impossible love of some slender elven maiden with pointed ears. Most forget what the roots of this popular literary genre were and who its first heroes were: the truth is that most forget the role of Texan Robert Erwin Howard (1906 - 1936), epistolary friend of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, creator of characters like Conan, Kull of Valusia, Bran Mac Morn, and many others, as well as being as prolific and versatile as few others, one of the stars of popular press in the '30s and the now-legendary magazine "Weird Tales".
The world that Howard proposes in his "Conan cycle" is that of about 12,000 years ago, "after the submergence of Atlantis and the gleaming cities, but before the rise of the sons of Aryas" (*) which means before the flourishing of the Mediterranean civilizations we know: the world of Hyboria, inhabited by peoples that somehow foreshadow those of historical antiquity (how can one not recognize the Egyptians behind the mysterious Stygians, or the Vikings behind the rough and bloody Aesir of the northern kingdom of Asgard?), and roamed by wizards, wanderers, pirates, mercenaries, and demons tied to even more ancient epochs. It is in this world, among ancient cities, deserts, and steppes, that the adventurous tales of Conan, a barbarian from Cimmeria, almost at the far North of the known world, take place.
"Conan the Conqueror" (a questionable Italian translation of "The Hour Of The Dragon") is the last episode of the saga of the Cimmerian (anti-)hero, who sees himself as the king of Aquilonia (from previous tales we know that, as an indomitable adventurer, he had ascended to the throne after a revolt by some barons against King Numedides), the most powerful kingdom of the Hyborian world, dethroned and imprisoned by a conspiracy conspired by a dissident nobleman, tired of seeing the scepter in the hands of a barbarian, with the support of the enemy kingdom of Nemedia and the help of a sorcerer summoned from the mists of the centuries: Xaltotun, high priest of Set in Python, the ancient capital of the forgotten empire of Acheron, which dominated the land 3000 years earlier. Hence, Conan must free himself, find his few remaining loyal friends, and once more try alone to recover a terrible jewel, the Heart of Ahriman, the only weapon capable of defeating the evil Xaltotun and sending him back to the oblivion from which he was torn, recovering the throne and preventing the resurrection of Acheron.
The novel, perhaps not one of Howard's best efforts, was published shortly before his suicide following the pain of losing his mother in 1936, and more than seventy years later it still manages to make the reader hold their breath and transport them to a compelling and unique world, which like few others manages to revive one of its most successful moments in modern times the concept of the "epic", which here does not arise from a particular way of writing (as in Tolkien, who includes poetic verse passages), but solely from the very fortuitous setting and the character and deeds of the protagonist. But Conan is not at all the prototype of the flawless hero: he indeed does not hesitate to kill and steal when his survival is questioned, and he is as courageous and ready to help those he likes as he is dark and sullen, always ready to sever heads and pierce hearts with his two-handed sword if provoked; the crown and royal garments he wears barely manage to conceal this attitude.
However, Conan is not just a fierce and rabid animal, but also a man capable of feeling and defending values that civilized populations have forgotten, and this is precisely what qualifies him as a "barbarian": he steals and kills to survive but knows how to respect his given word and the deadly blows of his sword seem to the reader as merciless as they are fundamentally just. Conan does not fight for higher ideals, universal ones of good and justice, but for himself and what he deems most appropriate at the moment; free, raw, rugged, and wandering, the brawny warrior moves from one adventure to another displaying a character quite different from that of many characters in later literature, like the wandering yet regal Tolkien's Aragorn, whose actions always reveal a certain majesty: Conan drinks, curses, steals, starts fights, gambles, frequents dives and brothels alongside the worst elements of the cities where he stays, commanding respect with his mere physical presence and feral vitality.
Howard's epic, of which the novel in question is practically the climax, is all this: as also in other of his literary cycles, there is no room for delicate visions of poetry, but only for brutal and instinctive action; there are no psychological stratagems, just sheer violence; there is no love, only the wild animal instinct of mating. His heroes have nothing majestic, sacred, solemn, idealized, or romantic: by the author's own admission, Conan is fundamentally a brute, prefers fighting over negotiating, but in his sincerity and stupidity, in his visceral passions, he manages to best embody the mental projection of our most hidden and deep self, striking chords linked to our more instinctive and animal sphere (or perhaps childish), evoking an almost childish desire to brandish that sword and join him in a slaughter: his deeds, set in an imaginary pseudomythical past, are narrated as Conan himself might have told them, could be passed down forever, were it not fantasy literature... and all of this cannot help but be epic.
(*) According to what we learn from the unknown "Nemedian Chronicles", a passage of which is placed as an epigraph at the beginning of the story "The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932).
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