Robert Jordan, “The Conan Chronicles: 2” [“Conan the Magnificent” (1984); “Conan the Triumphant” (1983); “Conan the Victorious” (1984)]

Reading through Robert E Howard's original Conan stories recently I was struck by something. There is, of course, all the adventuring, the hewing and smiting, the superb barbarian strength, the panther-light tread (‘the stranger gazed on his massive breast, and the arm that bore the reddened sword, burned dark by the sun and ridged and corded with muscles. He moved with the dangerous ease of a panther; he was too fiercely supple to be a product of civilization … As silently as a great panther Conan slid over the side and vanished in the bushes’ [Howard, ‘Beyond the Black River’ (1935)]. Conan ranges about, reaving, questing, fighting; the stories move briskly, it's all great fun. But there's something else, a Lovecraftian or Hope-Hodgson-esque dark sublimity, a quality missing from the Schwarzeneggerized movie versions and so from the Conan of popular imagination. It compliments the ingenuousness of his barbarian appetites and vigour:

Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exaltation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content. [Howard, ‘Queen of the Black Coast’ (1934)]

John Holbo talks about this in an old Crooked Timber post: that in addition to battling men, Conan wrestles with the unnerving and the terrifying. He might steal a jewel from a strange temple, battle a giant serpent, or cleave soldiers on the battlefield, but he also endures a desperate night-fight against Thoth-Amon’s demon, and boats upriver on the black waters of the death-river of Zarkheba.

First there was the blackness of an utter void, with the cold winds of cosmic space blowing through it. Then shapes, vague, monstrous and evanescent, rolled in dim panorama through the expanse of nothingness, as if the darkness were taking material form. The winds blew and a vortex formed, a whirling pyramid of roaring blackness. From it grew Shape and Dimension; then suddenly, like clouds dispersing, the darkness rolled away on either hand and a huge city of dark green stone rose on the bank of a wide river, flowing through an illimitable plain. Through this city moved beings of alien configuration. [Howard, ‘Queen of the Black Coast’]

Conan often swears by ‘Crom’, his god; but Crom is a much more Lovecraftian deity than (say) Thor or Ares:

Conan’s gods were simple and understandable; Crom was their chief, and he lived on a great mountain, whence he sent forth dooms and death. It was useless to call on Crom, because he was a gloomy, savage god, and he hated weaklings. But he gave a man courage at birth, and the will and might to kill his enemies, which, in the Cimmerian's mind, was all any god should be expected to do. [Howard, ‘The Tower of the Elephant’ (1933)]

It is splendid, and it lifts the adventuring out of the banality wish-fulfilment. Going through the stories I was struck by how powerful and memorable they are.

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From, as they say, the sublime to the ridiculous. Having read Howard I was curious as to how his various continuers compared. They did not, constant reader, compare well. Take Robert ‘Wheel of Time’ Jordan's half dozen Conan novels, with their bragging, Trumpish titles: Conan the Invincible (1982); Conan the Defender (1982); Conan the Unconquered (1983); Conan the Magnificent (1984); Conan the Triumphant (1983); Conan the Victorious (1984). Boldly, Jordan strips away all the Weird Tales weirdness from the original stories, all the dark sublimity and potency. In its place he instead gives us: spanking.

In an instant Conan had twisted his fistful of cloth, trapping her arms at her sides. He found he had caught a spitting, kicking wildcat. But, he noted, a wildcat who still had the finest, roundest set of breasts he had seen in many a day. Easily he pulled her over to the bed, seated himself, and jerked her across his knees. Easily he controlled her frenzied thrashings. “Oh no!” she gasped. “Not that! Cimmerian, I’ll cut your heart out! I’ll slice your manhood for—” Her diatribe was cut off with a howl as his big hand landed forcefully on her taut-breeched buttocks. [362]

Plenty of this kind of thing in Wheel of Time as well, of course: Jordan's kink is for high-born, powerful or uppity women to be taken down a peg with a bout of hearty bottom smacking, followed by some tearful-grateful-subordinated rumpy-pumpy. One hesitates to kink-shame, but: phew. 

There are lots of breasts in these books. Really, lots and lots: ‘generously rounded breasts’ [31]; ‘heaving breasts’ [223]; ‘full, round breasts exposed to his gaze’ [224]; ‘bouncing breasts’ [323]. Clothing is helpless in the face of such mammaries: ‘the gilded brass breastplates barely contained her heavy breasts’ [41]; ‘her black silk tabard, belted with golden links, left the outer curves of breasts bare’ [293]; ‘her leather jerkin gaped enough at the top to reveal the creamy slopes of her full, heavy breasts’ [495]. Really, many more breasts than I can list here. Confrontational breasts! (‘He found it hard to ignore the heavy, round breasts that confronted him’ [162]). Self-tightening breasts! (‘she sighed in her sleep, tightening the domes of her breasts’ [136]). Breasts to return lost testicles! (‘Shimmering scarlet silk moulded every curve of breasts and thighs, rounded and firm enough to make a eunuch’s mouth water’ [173]). It’s Conan the Bareboobian.

The writing throughout is of the calibre one would expect from the author of The Wheel of Time:

Her melting eyes were bottomless pools into which he could fall forever; his were azure flames. [440]

… together they made: lukewarm water!

With boneless sinuosity Synelle rose and began to dance [229]

Is anything sexier than bonelessness? The more jellyfishlike a woman, the more desirable she is.

She easily read in a language dead a thousand years. She was perhaps the last person in the world capable of reading that extinct tongue, for the scholar who had taught her she had had strangled with his own beard. [350]

Well that's just mean. Enough Jordanian Conan for now, I think.