Name: Robert E. Howard’s The Hyborian Age
Author: Robert E. Howard

The first map of Hyboria in this collection is the one to be found in 1938 in a large octavo mimeograph titled The Hyborian Age. This was published by ‘LANY Cooperative Publishers of Los Angeles’, a group of fans including Forrest J. Ackerman (1916–2008), who went on to become a magazine editor and a collector of what became ‘the world’s largest personal collection of science-fiction and fantasy memorabilia’. Among the contents is a letter from Howard’s friend H. P. Lovecraft and an essay by the editors titled ‘A Probably Outline of Conan’s Career’. The map itself – ‘prepared by Robert E. Howard’ – is printed across two pages and is presented as the formative regions of Europe, Africa, and parts of Asia, as they were 12,000 years ago (the exact dating remains contested). It is quite minimal, with borders of different realms represented by simple black lines, with no geographical features mentioned beyond a few major rivers. Significant settlements are identified with black dots and their names, the principle one being Tarantia, sprawling capital of Aquilona. Some of the realms have strikingly rectilinear and one commentator has suggested this is a result of Howard’s American-focused frame of reference, imitating orderly state lines.

These bare bones, provided by Howard, are fleshed out in significantly more detail by David Kyle (1919–2016) who designed the map for the Gnome Press edition of the novel Conan the Conqueror in 1950. This was the first appearance of Conan under hardcover, under the imprint co-founded by Kyle – a major figure in US science fiction and fantasy fandom – and Martin Greenberg. As well as extending the 1938 map eastwards to encompass Vilayet Sea and the realms of Turan and Hyrkania, a map of modern Europe is cleverly superimposed, which helps the viewer orient themselves in this ancient, unfamiliar landscape. Thus we see, for example, that the Pictish Wilderness and Cimmeria (the northerly realm from which Conan originates) encompassed what is now the British Isles. Kyle’s map includes a written note claiming that this iteration of Hyboria is designed ‘according to the actual notes of R. E. Howard’, principally the expanded map drawn by Howard in 1936 but never published. Kyle’s adjustments and additions quietly became canon when they were absorbed into the Marvel Comics iteration of Hyboria for their Conan the Barbarian series, which ran from 1970 to 1993.166 When Gollancz started publishing their canon-forming Fantasy Masterworks series in 2000, the eighth book in the series was The Conan 

s Volume 1: The People of the Black Circle (Gollancz, 2000). The collection opened with ‘The Hyborian Age’, preceded with yet another version of Kyle’s 1950 iteration of Howard’s original 1930s map.

It is difficult to overstate the impact and continuing influence of Howard’s creation on contemporary fantasy and genre media. Conan and the rough-hewn world of Hyboria are in someways the antithesis of Tolkien’s lofty vision, but appeals precisely due to its grittiness and cynicism. Between them, Hyboria and Middle-earth inspired two, often complementary strains of fantasy: the ‘High Fantasy’ sweep of The Lord of the Rings and Conan-inspired ‘sword and sorcery’. While Tolkien’s epic story arcs relate to spiritual struggles of good versus evil and the fate of entire peoples, sword and sorcery concerns lowly rogues, sell-swords and thieves, embroiled in often quite sordid and venal intrigues rather than noble quests. Dungeons & Dragons drew on both approaches and provided scope for players to create narratives calibrate in either direction, or combinations of both. Much fantasy cinema also drew as much from Howard’s work as from Tolkien’s and the direct adaptation of the Conan character for John Milius’s (1944–) Conan the Barbarian (1982) introduced the source material directly to a new generation. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s performance fused him with character in many people’s minds, though its failure to stick rigidly to Howard’s vision attracted some criticism. A 2011 adaptation staring Jason Momoa (1979–) as Conan failed to replicate the impact of Melius’s film.

In the gaming world, TSR released Conan Role-Playing Game in 1984 as well as Dungeons & Dragons supplements allowing players of that game to adventure in Hyboria, featuring stills from the Milius film on the cover. The UK company Mongoose released Conan: the Roleplaying Game in 2004, which featured several pages of detailed maps of different Hyborian regions in its rulebook. In 2008, Funcom and Eidos Interactive published Age of Conan, a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) that enjoyed several years of popularity and high sales, spawning other Hyborian-set video games.

Ex Carta

Robert E. Howard’s The Hyborian Age (1938) includes the author’s own sketch map of the prehistoric world inhabited by Conan the Cimmerian. Conceived as a pseudo-historical framework for his sword-and-sorcery tales, the map anchors Howard’s imagined civilizations within a distorted prehistoric geography loosely based on Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Robert Ervin Howard (1906–1936) spent most of his all-too-brief life in the small town of Cross Plains, Texas. His parents’ marriage was a troubled one. His father was a travelling doctor who spent long periods away from the family home, leaving his only son to care for his wife, Hester, who suffered from tuberculosis. Naturally, they developed an extremely close bond, further intensified by Howard’s isolation and mental health struggles. When she finally succumbed to her illness, Howard committed suicide, shooting himself immediately after learning that she was in a coma and not expected to revive. He was 30 years old. While the facts of his tragic life and death might seem parochial, Howard’s imagination was anything but. His writing for the pulp magazines – a hugely popular publishing market in the 1920s and 1930s – spanned continents and aeons. He told stories of Atlantean kings, seventeenth-century puritan swordsmen, eleventh-century Irish warriors, sinister Lovecraftian horrors, and, or course, the mighty Conan the Cimmerian.

He was just 18 years old when a new pulp title, Weird Tales, accepted his story of warring prehistoric men, ‘Spear and Fang’, for publication. It was the beginning of an iconic working relationship, with Howard now considered one of the triumvirate of classic Weird Tales authors, alongside H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft remarks in a letter, reproduced in this 1938 chapbook The Hyborian Age, that Howard as ‘without question the most vigorous and spontaneous writer now contributing to the pulps’.

Although Howard certainly experimented with more straightforward historic fiction, his need to produce stories in a fast and furious fashion for the pulps led to him adopting a more flexible approach, one which would allow his imagination to take full flight. ‘Howard decided to write a series of prehistoric adventure fantasies […] for such a setting would eliminate the need for accurate historical research.’

Nevertheless, he did need some sort of framework, and this resulted in the essay ‘The Hyborian Age’ as well as the accompanying map, sketched by the author. He opens the essay with the following explanation: ‘When I began writing the Conan stories a few years ago, I prepared this ‘history’ of his age and the peoples of that age, in order to lend him and his sagas a greater aspect of realness.’

Although Howard’s Hyborian Age was free from the constraints of real history, it did not emerge from a vacuum. To inform his conceit, Howard drew upon a plethora of pseudoscientific and occult literature speculating about the fate of Atlantis and the existence of prehistorical civilizations, often accompanied by elaborate theories concerning ‘lost’ technological and spiritual knowledge. Books by authors such as the American writer Ignatius L. Donnelly established a whole genre in which an antediluvian world civilisation was lost, yet persists in various world mythological and religious traditions.

Howard similarly borrows from existing mythical and historical terminology – Asgard, the Picts, Ophir, Kush – in labelling his map and describing Hyboria’s peoples. He explained in a 1932 letter to Lovecraft that, although ‘men have forgotten’ the Hyborian Age, it persists ‘in classical names, and distorted myths’

The first map of Hyboria in this collection is the one to be found in 1938 in a large octavo mimeograph titled The Hyborian Age. This was published by ‘LANY Cooperative Publishers of Los Angeles’, a group of fans including Forrest J. Ackerman (1916–2008), who went on to become a magazine editor and a collector of what became ‘the world’s largest personal collection of science-fiction and fantasy memorabilia’. Among the contents is a letter from Howard’s friend H. P. Lovecraft and an essay by the editors titled ‘A Probably Outline of Conan’s Career’. The map itself – ‘prepared by Robert E. Howard’ – is printed across two pages and is presented as the formative regions of Europe, Africa, and parts of Asia, as they were 12,000 years ago (the exact dating remains contested). It is quite minimal, with borders of different realms represented by simple black lines, with no geographical features mentioned beyond a few major rivers. Significant settlements are identified with black dots and their names, the principle one being Tarantia, sprawling capital of Aquilona. Some of the realms have strikingly rectilinear and one commentator has suggested this is a result of Howard’s American-focused frame of reference, imitating orderly state lines.