Indeed, he has an interesting parallel with Tolkien:
[M]ost people accept the observation that America lacks its own mythology. To the extent the observation has any weight the same could be said of England. In fact, the lack of an indigenous English mythology is what motivated J.R.R. Tolkien to write the Lord of the Rings. Whether or not he accomplished that goal, he created stories that are loved all over the world.I think Joel is quite right; we've discussed Howard's works in this space fairly frequently over the years. My view of the Conan books has changed over time. Once I thought that Howard's race-realism defied evolution, since races like the Picts and the blacks and the Stygians retain recognizable characteristics across millennia. In more recent years I've rediscovered the central role that evolution plays in Howard's works: evolution and natural selection really are at the core of his vision of humanity, and even the race that becomes the Cimmerians is described as having fallen all the way back to animality at one point, only to evolve into men (and barbarians) again. Joel touches on that later in his essay. I would say that the centrality of race -- and its inescapable qualities -- are good evidence for his proposition that the Conan stories are the (or at least an) American mythology. America is also trapped in its racial categories.
However, an American author writing at about the same time as Tolkien did create an American mythology that continues to expand and thrive to the current day. The author was Robert E. Howard and the mythology he created centered on his most famous character, Conan.
Nevertheless, for the most part Joel's essay is not about the issue of race, but about the American virtues, and how they are expressed in Conan stories.
Walter Russell Mead, in his book “Special Providence,” identified five core values that formed the basis of Jacksonian culture created by the Scot-Irish settlers. These values were self-reliance, equality, individualism, financial adventurism, and courage. Unsurprisingly, Howard used these same values to flesh out the personal code of the mythological Conan.Virtue ethics is of course the correct ethics. Naturally, then, I strongly recommend that you read the essay in full, and that we should discuss it here.
4 comments:
Very good points. Thank you for your help with this essay and thank you for your discussion of it here in the Hall.
Southerners respect strength. They don't really listen to anybody if they think they are weak. Even in 1830s when slave aristos put bounties on abolitionists, they still generally thought of abolitionism as being weak, because it was christian pacifism.
This got tied up with other groups and lineages, such as Robert E Lee's war hero record. But the slave aristos did not enlist or fight in the war... that was actually very rare that anyone would leave their plantation to fight. As slave lords were given exemptions. Because the secession was entirely about preserving the power of the ruling class' property and voting power.
Plus some other minor reasons put in the secession documents. But every State had their own interests, but surprisingly they had a lot in common to object against, such as New York nullification of Federal Slave Acts. How did the South somehow tell its descendants that the war was fought for state rights, when in the secession documents, what they were complaining about was nullification, a state right...
Human history is not quite what people thought it was.
Let me add that I also see Conan as an essentially conservative character. Not in any partisan political sense but in a cultural way. Conan constantly finds himself in conflict maintaining his code of conduct, derived from his Cimmerian culture, in the face of decaying and decadent societies grown soft from over-civilization. He is the standard bearer for maintaining the barbarian virtues the “super-civilized” have forgotten. He is the pop culture embodiment of Theodore Roosevelt’s admonition, “Over‐sentimentality, over‐softness, in fact washiness and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and of this people. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.”
Additionally, I can’t think of Conan without being reminded of Stephen Vincent Benet’s description of the Army of Northern Virginia in the poem “John Brown’s Body;” “Army of Northern Virginia, fabulous army, Strange army of ragged individualists, The hunters, the riders, the walkers, the savage pastorals…”
That is Conan, a savage pastoral defying the inexorable march of over-civilization.
That is true. One of the greatest stories is the one about Belit, which opens with Conan storming aboard a departing Argossean ship just ahead of the town guard. Their gripe with him is just the sort you’re describing.
That’s an interesting story on Jacksonian terms. The Argosseans All end up dead, and Conan joins the pirates on a cruise similar to the sort of Filibuster raids that gave us the Senate tradition.
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