Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine [July Aug 2006] Issue 24

Odnośniki

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It is, perhaps, in Shelley s Ozymandias that we find the Romantic concept of the
triumph of Nature most clearly shown. In it the traveller from an antique land
relates the story of an ancient king whose pride in his achievements made him think
that they would last forever:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Is inscribed on his statue. But nothing remains:
boundless and bare
The Lone and level sands stretch far away.
Nature has, with due patience, worn away the works of the king, his city, his
statue, his world, until only remnants are left. Civilisation is ephemeral, and will rise
and fall at the whim of nature.
Keats, too, was a celebrant of the individual hero and of the natural world. The
very titles of some of his best-know works identify aspects of Nature: On the Sea;
Ode to a Nightingale; Ode to Autumn. Other works which are apparently titled after
works of culture, such as Ode on a Grecian Urn, still investigate the closeness of that
culture to the natural world. The individual as hero is characteristically present in On
First Looking Into Chapman s Homer, with its portrayal of Cortez staring at the Pacific.
In his valorisation of Greek and Roman culture Keats was praising a world that had
remained incorrupt, because it was closer to Nature, to natural values.
Conan as Romantic Hero
Conan the Barbarian was the creation of Robert Ervin Howard of Cross Plains,
Texas, in twenty-one short stories and one shortish novel, all written between 1932
and 1936. Howard wrote a few other drafts and fragments which were found after
his death in 1936. It is unlikely that Howard would have claimed that he was a
Romantic; he saw himself, rather, as a toiler in the commercial workplace: I m
merely one of a huge army, all of whom are bucking the line for meat for their
bellies which is the main basic principle and eventual goal of life. 9 Compare this
with Shelley s concept of the poet:
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of
the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which
express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel
86
Ian Nichols
not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world. 10
Despite this difference of opinion over the concept of the creative writer, it is
possible to judge writers more by what they produce than what they say about
themselves, and the vision of Howard, in terms of his created world of Hyboria and
the character of Conan, was a Romantic one.
Hyboria itself was built on the remains of earlier civilizations11, as was the world
of the Romantics built on the lost worlds of Greece and Rome. The civilizations
of Atlantis, Lemuria, Thuria, the Picts and others vanished in a cataclysm, save for
a few survivors. There are relics of these lost civilizations that exist throughout
Conan s Hyboria, fragments that emerge from the sand as does the broken statue of
Ozymandias in Shelley s poem. However, on Conan s world these are often sinister
rather the remnants of the decayed civilizations represent ancient magic and ancient
evil.
Howard says, of Hyboria:
the kingdoms of the world are clearly defined. The kingdoms of the
Hyborians Aquilonia, Nemedia, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Koth, Ophir, Argos,
Corinthia, and one known as the Border Kingdom dominate the western
world. 12
This is the world where:
Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen eyed, sword in hand,
a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread
the jeweled thrones of the world under his sandaled feet. 13
Conan is, by defininition, a barbarian. He is Cimmerian, which is one of the
northern lands that does not fall in the ambit of the civilized kingdoms listed above.
When he first has contact with civilization is not known, but it is probably on a border
raid or an attack on a border town. In The Tower of the Elephant, chronologically the
first of the Conan stories, although not the first to see publication, he is described [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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