Conan and Outlawry

[Attribution in graphic: text by Robert E. Howard, from "The Phoenix on the Sword," art by Frank Frazetta.]

This essay aims to explore the issues of outlawry and civilization, topics broached in AVI's post and in the addenda post. 

Robert E. Howard [REH], the author of the Conan stories, set up the mythos in a way that makes Conan a kind of original or essential outlaw: Conan is born in Cimmeria, a wilderness apparently without a government, which is never visited in the stories and always described in wild terms. He therefore appears to arise from no civilization or even family with a code of its own, contra Aristotle: rather, Conan thus enters civilization as an outsider, and in the stories about his youth he remains one: a solitary thief in Zamora during the story "Tower of the Elephant," or in Corinthia in "Rogues in the House."

After his youthful career as a thief, though, Conan finds exactly the "the importance of 'having a flag to sail under,' whether national or piratical," as mentioned in the addenda post. [Maybe; or maybe the Viking-style story I'm about to discuss came first. Several attempts have been made to work out the timeline (here is one for reference); REH wrote the stories as they came to him, and not in a chronological order.] 

I will only consider REH's stories, and not those added by other authors. It appears that Conan went north and joined a Viking-style warband ("The Frost Giant's Daughter"), the first of several such bands that he joins. Each of these has its own independent code of conduct. Later, he comes into the service of formal ("legitimate"?) nations as a mercenary; eventually he uses that status to conquer and rule the nation of Aquilonia. There he commands as the king the formal armies as well as the mercenaries of that nation, and deals with the laws and customs of the nation as he had earlier dealt with the different warbands.

We don't learn anything helpful about the Viking-style warband, its terms of membership or codes. Conan is a Cimmerian and they are Aesir (ancestors to Norwegians, as the Cimmerians are ancestors to the Highland Scots and Gaels of Ireland), so like a true Viking band it is not a matter of ancestry alone. He joined them for whatever reason (also unclear from the story, the initial fight of which happens in a frozen wasteland nowhere near anything of value), and leaves them at some point for reasons that aren't explored. Are they outlaws? There doesn't appear to be much law, but they are a kind of band that has come together to assert its will and define a set of results. In spite of the lack of blood relations, Conan fights as one of them to the death, which he barely avoids; and the second part of the band comes after him for hours through the snow after they don't find his body. There is a kind of heroic loyalty engaged in this sort of warband. 

In "Queen of the Black Coast," Conan joins a pirate band sort of by accident; he jumps aboard a departing Argossean (Greek ancestors) merchant, which is later set upon by pirates led by a Shemite woman named Belit. (The Shemites are Semite ancestors; it's never clear to me if they are meant to be more like Jews or Arabs, or if both are intended.) Belit seduces Conan to avoid having to have her crew kill him, and he turns out to like sailing and pirating with her just fine. I think this story, though beloved, is not very useful as an analog because it is really an erotic story as much as anything else. Perhaps Bonnie & Clyde are analogous, but it's not really about how bands of masterless men form.

Of much greater interest in this inquiry is "Iron Shadows in the Moon," which has two examples. At the beginning of the story, Conan is the survivor of a band of kozak "Free Companions" who have been destroyed by the local 'legitimate' government in an act of complete slaughter. (Perhaps they wrote the Shah a letter similar to this one by their real-world analogs.) Clearly Conan had enjoyed the life and been well-suited towards its union of companionship and freebooting. The Shah, meanwhile, clearly considers the entire band to be out of the protection of his laws, and subject to slaughter (a fate that meets himself, instead, through a narrative twist). 

At the end of the story, Conan and a woman he has rescued from the Shah's rapes and tortures come across a band of pirates called the Red Brotherhood. Conan states his intention of joining them, and fights a duel with the captain (whom he proves to know). He wins the duel, and demands to be recognized as the new captain in accordance with the laws of the Brotherhood. There is significant debate about this, however, as he had not been a member -- and the law only said that a member could duel for the captaincy, not perhaps a declared aspirant to membership. On the other hand, the captain had accepted the duel. The pirates divide on the legality of the question.

I take that to be an interesting example of how these kinds of bands work. They did come up with a law, which binds no one but their own members. There may be questions of how it applies, which have to be worked out democratically or otherwise. In this fictional instance, Conan conjures a tactical position that allows him to persuade the holdouts to accept his authority, and then they sail merrily away for adventure. It's exactly the sort of thing that would really arise, though, and the sort of thing we see portrayed in e.g. the Icelandic society of Burnt Njal. The laws need to be interpreted, arguments need to be made, some kind of consensus needs to be reached, but it is possible for a free band of men or a democratic group to do this. One does not need Divine Authority, a Shah or a King, to manage it. 

Nor does the fact that these men are outlaws in a sense mean that they are outside of every kind of law: they have made their own. They are outlaws then only on the terms of the 'legitimate' society, such as the torturous Shah; they are well within their own law. They are, in fact, careful about it: no one says, "Forget the law of the Brotherhood," but rather offers an interpretation of the law. 

The final example I want to explore comes from "The Phoenix on the Sword," which is a rewrite of an earlier story called "By This Axe I Rule," featuring not Conan but his ancestor Kull of Atlantis. (There was a demand for more Conan stories, so...) Conan is now the King of Aquilonia, greatest of the nations of the West (and analog for France). He came to Aquilonia as one of its mercenaries, and slew the king with his own hands. This is definitely not the regular way to ascend the throne, unlike with the Red Brotherhood, so the story attends to a plot by a band led by one of the more regular aspirants to replace Conan with a 'legitimate' king. Conan proves to have the loyalty of the fighting men of the kingdom, however (as well as a magical assist from a sage), and ultimately wins the contest. In this way, not so very different from the way in which he became a captain within the Red Brotherhood, he remains King of Aquilonia. 

When I think of real-world analogs for this story, a clear-cut case is the Norman Conquest of England. There was a family candidate, who had been endorsed by the council of elders who customarily blessed the choice of kings (the Witenagemot, or 'moot of the Wise.') The Pope, a distant foreign leader but one who claimed religious authority, blessed William the Bastard's claim. A Norse king, Harald Hardrada, was endorsed by a family member of the deceased king who persuaded him to come and rule in England. The issue was not decided by any of these legal forms, but by the wager of battle. 

Another example is the Scottish War of Independence, following a later Norman Conquest by Edward I "Longshanks." The Scots repelled the conquerors and then defended themselves against decades of war. The Battle of the Bannockburn was in 1314, but was far from the end of the business; the Declaration of Arbroath, a letter to the Pope appealing for his blessing, was not the end either. It was about a decade after the Declaration that the English finally abandoned their hopes and made a peace with Robert the Bruce, King of Scots. 

So too our own Revolution, which proposed a standard for legitimate government that appealed to neither bloodline claims nor the Pope but on the consent of the governed to a system that exists solely to protect their natural rights. It was fought by free militias and privateers until they won enough time to train a regular force at Valley Forge; and even after, free militias called into central service were the backbone of the fighting force for a long time. Privateers went on to play a big role in the War of 1812 (more successfully than the regulars), and even pirates as noted in the addenda post. 

Conan was an American myth, as our friend Joel Leggett has argued, and you can see the influence of the American story on him. Conan fights "Picts" who wear feathers and buckskin leggings, not very much like actual Picts but a lot like the frontier warriors who featured in American Westerns. The wild is much wilder than it ever is in European stories: REH speaks of his scenes sometimes as being 'hundreds' or even 'a thousand' miles from civilization. You can see the tropical islands of the Gulf Coast in many of his descriptions. 

Yet he was also a very capable antiquarian for his youth, extremely well-read of ancient sources. What he put together is a set of stories, but it is a set of stories rooted in the raw and real world. When he notices the differences between Conan the King and Conan the pirate, it is that a king has grown old enough to respect poets and art. The civilization of Aquilonia aspires to support such things, and Conan accepts his duty as king to do so even though it means letting himself be criticized by street poets who mean to undermine him.

For all of that, though, there proves to be much less difference between the legitimate governments pictured and the outlaw ones. The outlaw ones look a lot more like our own systems than the kings and princes and Shahs, with their ranks and privileges over 'common' humanity. In the end, they often prove to have no better claim than the outlaw chief to his rule; and they are often worse-behaved. Not all of them do as Conan did, honoring the arts and protecting the weak; more often they enslave or ravage them. 

"Many a king on a first-class throne, if he wants to call his crown his own/ must manage somehow to get through more dirty work than ever I do." So it would appear, when art imitates life.