Imagine you’re a Blackfeet kid growing up in the windswept pastures twenty miles east of Midland, with no other Blackfeet around. Like Conan the Wanderer, -the Adventurer, -the Outcast, I was out in the trackless wastelands, far from civilization. The way I saw it, we’d come up the same. Conan’s homeland of Cimmeria was high and lonely? From our back porch in West Texas, I couldn’t see a single light. Cimmeria was packed with formative dangers? Every third step I took, I found myself entangled in barbed wire or jumping back from a rattlesnake. And when I mapped Cimmeria—the land Conan spent decades away from—onto my world, it could have been Montana, where the Blackfeet are.
A Blackfoot Looks at Conan
His experience was very similar.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Probably most boys growing up in a place and an era when children played and roamed outside had a bit of a Conan connection-before chopping a monsters head off with a sword became an intersectional victim puzzle.
Thanks for sharing that article. The author and I had a very similar experience with the Conan novels.
I agree with the article writer. I started writing fiction as a way out of some situations, into a place where the character could win, leave, and go on to greater things. I still write to get away, to an extent.
FWIW, I prefer Solomon Kane to Conan. I don't know if that's because of being a girl, or if I just relate better to a wandering Puritan than to a wandering Cimmerian. Both are very well written adventures.
LittleRed1
Post a Comment