2D8HP
2018-04-16, 03:15 PM
"Know, oh prince, that between years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of...."
I just dropped a post on this into the
What are you reading right now? (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?523149-What-are-you-reading-right-now)
thread, but I feel like getting some feedback, so....
"Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. 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 Earth under his sandalled feet."
— The Nemedian Chronicles.
*ahem*
Know, oh Playgrounders, that between the years I got the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons "bluebook" Basic Set, and the 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide, during the waning of the Carter Administration, I would go to the school library and pick through the Science Fiction section.
I would start with Asimov and Bradbury, but I'd skip ahead (I had an ambition to read all of it) to read a title I recognized from comic books:
Conan
The first story I read in the collection wasn't by Robert E Howard, the original author of the Conan stories, but by someone else, and if I remember right, Conan goes into a cave, finds a skeleton with a sword, takes the sword, and then fights the now animated skeleton.
Of course I saw the '82 movie a few years later, but except for Tower of the Elephant (a fine tale, that's in many anthologies), which I've read a few times, I really hadn't te-read the REH Conan stories as much as I have say Clarke, LeGuin, Leiber, Moorcock, or Tolkien, and the last REH story (non-Conan) I read in a decades old anthology, I thought, "This is what Hitler would write, if he became a pulp writer instead of a dictator!", so very "of-I'ts-time" it was (IIRC, it was a re-telling of "Beowulf", in a tropical jungle, with a blonde guy battling a giant snake), and I didn't seek more.
But at a used bookstore this month, I came across some Conan books of the same vintage as the one I read in a school library in the 1970's, one of which is Conan the Usurper, published in 1967
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2d/Conan_usurper.jpg
Among two de Camp "revisions" are two Howard stories, including 1932's
The Phoenix on the Sword (https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_on_the_Sword)
which was the first Conan story, but it leaves out the preamble at the top of this post, and substitutes:
Storming the capital city and slaying King Numedides on the steps of his throne-which he promptly takes for his own-Conan, now in his early or mid-forties, finds himself the king of the greatest of the Hypnotism nations.
.....A king's life, however, proves no bed of houris.
Within the year, the minstrel Ronald is chanting defiant ballads in praise of the "martyred" Numedides. Ascalente, Count of Thrune, is gathering a group of plotters to topple the barbarian from his throne. Conan finds that people have short memories, and that he, too, suffers from the uneasiness of head that goes with a crown.
While the old book fits nicely in my pocket, like paperbacks used to!, unfortunately the small type, fading ink, and yellowed pages make it hard for me to read out of the sun by lamp-light, so I bought 2003's
[I] The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51CWWXfBUwL._SY300_.jpg
.http://www.howardandrewjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/shultz-1-300x208.jpg
http://www.howardandrewjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/schultz-2-219x300.png
which instead of in "character history order" like the old paperbacks, instead goes in order that the stories were written.
After the preamble, Phoenix on the Sword begins with
"Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs before dawn. Into a dim alley, one of a veritable labyrinth of mysterious winding ways, four masked figures came hurriedly from a door which a dusky hand furtively opened. They spoke not but went swiftly into the gloom, cloaks wrapped closely about them; as silently as the ghosts of murdered men they disappeared in the darkness. Behind them a sardonic countenance was framed in the partly opened door; a pair of evil eyes glittered malevolently in the gloom..."
Some conspirarors plot to kill the new King Conan, meanwhile a slave of the lead conspirator, "a somber giant who's dusky skin revealed his Stygian blood", "Thoth-Amon of the Ring" is moaning 'boat how he used to be "a great sorcerer in the south", and "controlled beings from outside which came at my call and did my bidding. By Set, mine enemy knew not the hour when he might awake at midnight to feel the aligned fingers of a nameless horror at his throat! I did dark and terrible magic with the Serpent Ring of Set, which I found in a nighter tomb a league beneath the earth, forgotten before the first man crawled out if the slimy sea.
But a thief stole the Ring and my power was broken. The magicians rose up to slay me, and I fled. Disguised as a camel-driver, I was travelling in a caravan in the land of Koth, when Ascalante's reavers fell upon us. All in the caravan were slain except myself; I saved my life by revealing my identity to Ascalante and swearing to serve him. Bitter has been that bondage!
"To hold me fast, he wrote of me in a manuscript, and sealed it and gave it into the hands of a hermit who dwells on the southern borders of Koth. I dare not strike a dagger into him while he sleeps, or betray him to his enemies, for then the hermit would open the manuscript and read—thus Ascalante instructed him. And he would speak a word in Stygia—"
Again Thoth shuddered and an ashen hue tinged his dusky skin.
"Men knew me not in Aquilonia," he said. "But should my enemies in Stygia learn my whereabouts, not the width of half a world between us would suffice to save me from such a doom as would blast the soul of a bronze statue. Only a king with castles and hosts of swordsmen could protect me. So I have told you my secret, and urge that you make a pact with me. I can aid you with my wisdom, and you can protect me. And some day I will find the Ring—"
So the Baron who Thoth-Amon has been monologging to is all "Ring?",
"That makes me remember—my ring of good fortune. I had it from a Shemitish thief who swore he stole it from a wizard far to the south, and that it would bring me luck. I paid him enough, Mitra knows. By the gods, I need all the luck I can have, what with Volmana and Ascalante dragging me into their bloody plots—I'll see to the ring.", and pulls it out, upon which Thoth is "Dude that's totally mine! Gimme!" (not Howard's words, I'm paraphrasing now).
Meanwhile, Conan is in the castle painting on some northern places on a globe that doesn't have them yet, and moaning 'boat doing king stuff instead of axing people, while his right hand man is "Verily it sucketh to be ye, but your doing great at king-ing. Hey while you sit here, I'm gonna go get drunk and get some time with the ladies, oh by the way I'm totally bummed 'bout that they may be a conspiracy to off you!", and Conan's all, "Nah, no big, I'm totally okay with it, you go party" (not Howard's words).
Conan sleeps, and has a dream in which:
"he saw that he was in a great dark corridor that seemed to be cut in solid black stone. It was unlighted, but by some magic he could see plainly. The floor, ceiling and walls were highly polished and gleamed dull, and they were carved with the figures of ancient heroes and half-forgotten gods. He shuddered to see the vast shadowy outlines of the Nameless Old Ones, and he knew somehow that mortal feet had not traversed the corridor for centuries.
He came upon a wide stair carved in the solid rock, and the sides of the shaft were adorned with esoteric symbols so ancient and horrific that King Conan's skin crawled. The steps were carven each with the abhorrent figure of the Old Serpent, Set, so that at each step he planted his heel on the head of the Snake, as it was intended from old times. But he was none the less at ease for all that.
But the voice called him on, and at last, in darkness that would have been impenetrable to his material eyes, he came into a strange crypt, and saw a vague white-bearded figure sitting on a tomb. Conan's hair rose up and he grasped his sword, but the figure spoke in sepulchral tones....", and bearded ghost king dude tells Conan, "Dude let me touch your sword", and Conan's "Sure, that's cool" (not Howard's actual words, but close). So ghost dude touches Conan's sword and puts a bird symbol on it (the "Phoenix on the Sword"), and Conan's all "whoa, can you monogram all my stuff? " (okay, nowhere near Howard's words).
Conan wakes up, the conspirators rush in, Conan fights them off, breaks his sword, grabs an old ax off the wall, gets cut but fights on, then the lead conspirator:
"..even as he began his charge, there was a strange rushing in the air and a heavy weight struck terrifically between his shoulders. He was dashed headlong and great talons sank agonizingly in his flesh. Writhing desperately beneath his attacker, he twisted his head about and stared into the face of Nightmare and lunacy. Upon him crouched a great black thing which he knew was born in no sane or human world. Its slavering black fangs were near his throat and the glare of its yellow eyes shrivelled his limbs as a killing wind shrivels young corn.
The hideousness of its face transcended mere bestiality. It might have been the face of an ancient, evil mummy, quickened with demoniac life. In those abhorrent features the outlaw's dilated eyes seemed to see, like a shadow in the madness that enveloped him, a faint and terrible resemblance to the slave Thoth-amon. Then Ascalante's cynical and all-sufficient philosophy deserted him, and with a ghastly cry he gave up the ghost before those slavering fangs touched him.
Conan, shaking the blood-drops from his eyes, stared frozen. At first he thought it was a great black hound which stood above Ascalante's distorted body; then as his sight cleared he saw that it was neither a hound nor a baboon...."
Conan, fights the demon-thing with his ax, which doesn't do the job, then he switches to his broken sword that ghost king dude etched, and the demon-thing is killed and disappears like a staked vampire on Buffy, at which point right hand man and guards show up and right hand man says"
"bind the king's wounds. He's like to bleed to death" (https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_on_the_Sword/Chapter_V) while Conan is still conscious.
The End
Okay!
While I don't think it was as good a start as Catherine L. Moore's 1934 first Jirel of Joiry story:
Black God's Kiss (https://www.tor.com/2017/03/22/bad-ways-to-pick-up-barbarians-c-l-moores-black-gods-kiss/)
or Fritz Leiber's first Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, 1939's
Two Sought Adventure/The Jewels in the Forest (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0088/ERBAEN0088___2.htm),
I though "Phoenix on the Sword" was good enough for me to keep re-reading more of the old Conan stories.
So, shall I share more of my impressions, or shall I leave these tales of "ancient heroes and forgotten gods" in peace?
I just dropped a post on this into the
What are you reading right now? (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?523149-What-are-you-reading-right-now)
thread, but I feel like getting some feedback, so....
"Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. 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 Earth under his sandalled feet."
— The Nemedian Chronicles.
*ahem*
Know, oh Playgrounders, that between the years I got the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons "bluebook" Basic Set, and the 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide, during the waning of the Carter Administration, I would go to the school library and pick through the Science Fiction section.
I would start with Asimov and Bradbury, but I'd skip ahead (I had an ambition to read all of it) to read a title I recognized from comic books:
Conan
The first story I read in the collection wasn't by Robert E Howard, the original author of the Conan stories, but by someone else, and if I remember right, Conan goes into a cave, finds a skeleton with a sword, takes the sword, and then fights the now animated skeleton.
Of course I saw the '82 movie a few years later, but except for Tower of the Elephant (a fine tale, that's in many anthologies), which I've read a few times, I really hadn't te-read the REH Conan stories as much as I have say Clarke, LeGuin, Leiber, Moorcock, or Tolkien, and the last REH story (non-Conan) I read in a decades old anthology, I thought, "This is what Hitler would write, if he became a pulp writer instead of a dictator!", so very "of-I'ts-time" it was (IIRC, it was a re-telling of "Beowulf", in a tropical jungle, with a blonde guy battling a giant snake), and I didn't seek more.
But at a used bookstore this month, I came across some Conan books of the same vintage as the one I read in a school library in the 1970's, one of which is Conan the Usurper, published in 1967
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2d/Conan_usurper.jpg
Among two de Camp "revisions" are two Howard stories, including 1932's
The Phoenix on the Sword (https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_on_the_Sword)
which was the first Conan story, but it leaves out the preamble at the top of this post, and substitutes:
Storming the capital city and slaying King Numedides on the steps of his throne-which he promptly takes for his own-Conan, now in his early or mid-forties, finds himself the king of the greatest of the Hypnotism nations.
.....A king's life, however, proves no bed of houris.
Within the year, the minstrel Ronald is chanting defiant ballads in praise of the "martyred" Numedides. Ascalente, Count of Thrune, is gathering a group of plotters to topple the barbarian from his throne. Conan finds that people have short memories, and that he, too, suffers from the uneasiness of head that goes with a crown.
While the old book fits nicely in my pocket, like paperbacks used to!, unfortunately the small type, fading ink, and yellowed pages make it hard for me to read out of the sun by lamp-light, so I bought 2003's
[I] The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51CWWXfBUwL._SY300_.jpg
.http://www.howardandrewjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/shultz-1-300x208.jpg
http://www.howardandrewjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/schultz-2-219x300.png
which instead of in "character history order" like the old paperbacks, instead goes in order that the stories were written.
After the preamble, Phoenix on the Sword begins with
"Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs before dawn. Into a dim alley, one of a veritable labyrinth of mysterious winding ways, four masked figures came hurriedly from a door which a dusky hand furtively opened. They spoke not but went swiftly into the gloom, cloaks wrapped closely about them; as silently as the ghosts of murdered men they disappeared in the darkness. Behind them a sardonic countenance was framed in the partly opened door; a pair of evil eyes glittered malevolently in the gloom..."
Some conspirarors plot to kill the new King Conan, meanwhile a slave of the lead conspirator, "a somber giant who's dusky skin revealed his Stygian blood", "Thoth-Amon of the Ring" is moaning 'boat how he used to be "a great sorcerer in the south", and "controlled beings from outside which came at my call and did my bidding. By Set, mine enemy knew not the hour when he might awake at midnight to feel the aligned fingers of a nameless horror at his throat! I did dark and terrible magic with the Serpent Ring of Set, which I found in a nighter tomb a league beneath the earth, forgotten before the first man crawled out if the slimy sea.
But a thief stole the Ring and my power was broken. The magicians rose up to slay me, and I fled. Disguised as a camel-driver, I was travelling in a caravan in the land of Koth, when Ascalante's reavers fell upon us. All in the caravan were slain except myself; I saved my life by revealing my identity to Ascalante and swearing to serve him. Bitter has been that bondage!
"To hold me fast, he wrote of me in a manuscript, and sealed it and gave it into the hands of a hermit who dwells on the southern borders of Koth. I dare not strike a dagger into him while he sleeps, or betray him to his enemies, for then the hermit would open the manuscript and read—thus Ascalante instructed him. And he would speak a word in Stygia—"
Again Thoth shuddered and an ashen hue tinged his dusky skin.
"Men knew me not in Aquilonia," he said. "But should my enemies in Stygia learn my whereabouts, not the width of half a world between us would suffice to save me from such a doom as would blast the soul of a bronze statue. Only a king with castles and hosts of swordsmen could protect me. So I have told you my secret, and urge that you make a pact with me. I can aid you with my wisdom, and you can protect me. And some day I will find the Ring—"
So the Baron who Thoth-Amon has been monologging to is all "Ring?",
"That makes me remember—my ring of good fortune. I had it from a Shemitish thief who swore he stole it from a wizard far to the south, and that it would bring me luck. I paid him enough, Mitra knows. By the gods, I need all the luck I can have, what with Volmana and Ascalante dragging me into their bloody plots—I'll see to the ring.", and pulls it out, upon which Thoth is "Dude that's totally mine! Gimme!" (not Howard's words, I'm paraphrasing now).
Meanwhile, Conan is in the castle painting on some northern places on a globe that doesn't have them yet, and moaning 'boat doing king stuff instead of axing people, while his right hand man is "Verily it sucketh to be ye, but your doing great at king-ing. Hey while you sit here, I'm gonna go get drunk and get some time with the ladies, oh by the way I'm totally bummed 'bout that they may be a conspiracy to off you!", and Conan's all, "Nah, no big, I'm totally okay with it, you go party" (not Howard's words).
Conan sleeps, and has a dream in which:
"he saw that he was in a great dark corridor that seemed to be cut in solid black stone. It was unlighted, but by some magic he could see plainly. The floor, ceiling and walls were highly polished and gleamed dull, and they were carved with the figures of ancient heroes and half-forgotten gods. He shuddered to see the vast shadowy outlines of the Nameless Old Ones, and he knew somehow that mortal feet had not traversed the corridor for centuries.
He came upon a wide stair carved in the solid rock, and the sides of the shaft were adorned with esoteric symbols so ancient and horrific that King Conan's skin crawled. The steps were carven each with the abhorrent figure of the Old Serpent, Set, so that at each step he planted his heel on the head of the Snake, as it was intended from old times. But he was none the less at ease for all that.
But the voice called him on, and at last, in darkness that would have been impenetrable to his material eyes, he came into a strange crypt, and saw a vague white-bearded figure sitting on a tomb. Conan's hair rose up and he grasped his sword, but the figure spoke in sepulchral tones....", and bearded ghost king dude tells Conan, "Dude let me touch your sword", and Conan's "Sure, that's cool" (not Howard's actual words, but close). So ghost dude touches Conan's sword and puts a bird symbol on it (the "Phoenix on the Sword"), and Conan's all "whoa, can you monogram all my stuff? " (okay, nowhere near Howard's words).
Conan wakes up, the conspirators rush in, Conan fights them off, breaks his sword, grabs an old ax off the wall, gets cut but fights on, then the lead conspirator:
"..even as he began his charge, there was a strange rushing in the air and a heavy weight struck terrifically between his shoulders. He was dashed headlong and great talons sank agonizingly in his flesh. Writhing desperately beneath his attacker, he twisted his head about and stared into the face of Nightmare and lunacy. Upon him crouched a great black thing which he knew was born in no sane or human world. Its slavering black fangs were near his throat and the glare of its yellow eyes shrivelled his limbs as a killing wind shrivels young corn.
The hideousness of its face transcended mere bestiality. It might have been the face of an ancient, evil mummy, quickened with demoniac life. In those abhorrent features the outlaw's dilated eyes seemed to see, like a shadow in the madness that enveloped him, a faint and terrible resemblance to the slave Thoth-amon. Then Ascalante's cynical and all-sufficient philosophy deserted him, and with a ghastly cry he gave up the ghost before those slavering fangs touched him.
Conan, shaking the blood-drops from his eyes, stared frozen. At first he thought it was a great black hound which stood above Ascalante's distorted body; then as his sight cleared he saw that it was neither a hound nor a baboon...."
Conan, fights the demon-thing with his ax, which doesn't do the job, then he switches to his broken sword that ghost king dude etched, and the demon-thing is killed and disappears like a staked vampire on Buffy, at which point right hand man and guards show up and right hand man says"
"bind the king's wounds. He's like to bleed to death" (https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_on_the_Sword/Chapter_V) while Conan is still conscious.
The End
Okay!
While I don't think it was as good a start as Catherine L. Moore's 1934 first Jirel of Joiry story:
Black God's Kiss (https://www.tor.com/2017/03/22/bad-ways-to-pick-up-barbarians-c-l-moores-black-gods-kiss/)
or Fritz Leiber's first Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, 1939's
Two Sought Adventure/The Jewels in the Forest (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0088/ERBAEN0088___2.htm),
I though "Phoenix on the Sword" was good enough for me to keep re-reading more of the old Conan stories.
So, shall I share more of my impressions, or shall I leave these tales of "ancient heroes and forgotten gods" in peace?