ConanQuest, Episode 1: The Phoenix on the Sword
A look at Robert E. Howard's very first Conan story
Hail, Traveler. Be wary, for you have found yourself in a dangerous land. Here, we dive into the secrets of the past, and we gaze upon the truths revealed in the text of yesteryear.
What is this, you ask?
This is ConanQuest.
In ConanQuest, I read and review every one of Robert E. Howard's Weird Tales Conan the Barbarian stories in order of publication, with the aid of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus, edited and annotated by Finn J.D. John.
Today, we kick off ConanQuest with the first published Conan tale: "The Phoenix on the Sword."
Originally published in December of 1932, "The Phoenix on the Sword" began life as a story focused on Howard's earlier pulp hero, Kull. The original version of the story was titled "By This Axe I Rule!"
The story is available for free via Project Gutenberg Australia here: http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600811h.html
Summary
The story is set in Aquilonia, a kingdom recently conquered by a barbarian named Conan. The new kingdom has a number of enemies, who have been assembled by a bandit named Ascalante who seeks the throne of Aquilonia himself. Ascalante plans to assassinate the barbarian king, install a stooge named Dion on the throne, then kill the foolish noble and seize power for himself.
Ascalante is aided by a slave named Thoth-Amon, once a great sorcerer in his native land of Stygia. Thoth-Amon ruled in his homeland with the aid of a magical ring, but was forced to flee when it was stolen from him. In his flight, he was captured by Ascalante.
On the night of the plot, Conan dreams of a black temple, and meets a long-dead sage there named Epemitreus, who warns the barbarian king that his enemies are approaching, and magically marks his sword with an emblem of a phoenix.
Thoth-Amon is assigned to babysit Dion while Ascalante and the other conspirators go to kill the king. He explains his backstory to the baron, but Dion doesn't pay attention. He is, however, reminded of the lucky ring he bought off some thief, and shows it off to the slave. Recognizing it as his lost ring, Thoth-Amon murders Dion and takes it, then summons a demon to go slay Ascalante.
Meanwhile, the conspirators invade Conan's bedchamber, only to discover him awake and armored. They fight, and Conan kills most of them, though he is injured and his sword shattered in the process. Finally, it comes down to Ascalante versus Conan, and it's at that moment the demon arrives.
It kills Ascalante before turning its attention to Conan. Mortal weapons do nothing against it, but as it prepares to kill the king, Conan manages to grab the hilt of his broken sword and stab the shattered blade into the monster. This turns out to be enough to kill it.
Conan's allies arrive and are shocked at the identities of the conspirators. Conan explains what happened, and a priest of the god Mitra is shocked to learn of Conan's dream, and confirms that he did indeed meet the sage Epemitreus when he examines the remains of the blade and finds the sage's phoenix emblem engraved upon it.
My Review
I enjoyed this story. It was no more complicated than it needed to be, and for a tale that essentially both starts and stops in medias res, I was never lost.
What really stood out to me was how different this story was to what I'd been expecting. Popular culture has cultivated a very specific image of what Conan the Barbarian looks like over the last century. Conan is a hulking man with long black hair, his torso oiled up and always bare, dressed only in boots and a loin cloth. He wanders the land with nothing but his blade, battling all sorts of foes and rescuing various wenches.
Well, the black hair is accurate to the original text, at least.
The Conan portrayed in "The Phoenix on the Sword" may have been a wandering adventurer at some point, but in the story itself he's a king, having conquered a kingdom and won the loyalty of its elite guards. He owns armor, lives in luxury, and attends to affairs of state. His enemies are political in nature, and his concerns are more or less what one would expect a new king to be concerned about.
I have to assume that other Conan stories fit the stereotypical mode a bit better. But for a first outing, this is a very different narrative from what one would assume a typical Conan yarn to be.
And here I reach a crossroads. There are a number of elements to this story that I might choose to focus on. I could examine the racial politics present in Howard's work, or how he blends real-world mythology into his fantasy narrative, or how masculinity is presented in Conan and those around him. However, I have a suspicion that I'll have ample opportunity to discuss all of that with later stories. In fact, later stories may prove more fruitful for such discussions than this one.
So instead, I've decided that I want to narrow the focus of this review in on Howard's prose style.
As an example of Howard's prose, let's take the following passage, a short monologue given by Conan to his advisor, Prospero, in chapter 2:
"I wish I might ride with you to Nemedia," said Conan enviously. "It seems ages since I had a horse between my knees—but Publius says that affairs in the city require my presence. Curse him!
"When I overthrew the old dynasty," he continued, speaking with the easy familiarity which existed only between the Poitainian and himself, "it was easy enough, though it seemed bitter hard at the time. Looking back now over the wild path I followed, all those days of toil, intrigue, slaughter and tribulation seem like a dream.
"I did not dream far enough, Prospero. When King Numedides lay dead at my feet and I tore the crown from his gory head and set it on my own, I had reached the ultimate border of my dreams. I had prepared myself to take the crown, not to hold it. In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless.
"When I overthrew Numedides, then I was the Liberator—now they spit at my shadow. They have put a statue of that swine in the temple of Mitra, and people go and wail before it, hailing it as the holy effigy of a saintly monarch who was done to death by a red-handed barbarian. When I led her armies to victory as a mercenary, Aquilonia overlooked the fact that I was a foreigner, but now she can not forgive me.
"Now in Mitra's temple there come to burn incense to Numedides' memory, men whom his hangmen maimed and blinded, men whose sons died in his dungeons, whose wives and daughters were dragged into his seraglio. The fickle fools!"
Howard's characters are not particularly taciturn. Quite the opposite in fact: they will speak in long speeches and soliloquies, boasting of their triumphs and lamenting their woes.
This approach to character dialogue has fallen out of fashion in modern prose-writing, and as such Howard's dialogue can seem flowery and archaic to the modern reader. I'd agree with half of that assessment--Howard's prose never felt flowery to me while reading it. Instead, I felt it was very plain given the vibe it was clearly going for. And what vibe was that?
There's that second half. In this story, Howard seemed to be affecting a deliberately archaic feel. The grandiose speeches put one in mind of a Norse saga or a heroic epic. My mind went to the latter, and I went searching through the text of Beowulf to do a compare and contrast.
Here's a passage from Beowulf, translated by Francis B. Gummere (courtesy of Poetry Foundation):
Beowulf spake, the bairn of Ecgtheow:—
“‘Tis known and unhidden, Hygelac Lord,
to many men, that meeting of ours,
struggle grim between Grendel and me,
which we fought on the field where full too many
sorrows he wrought for the Scylding-Victors,
evils unending. These all I avenged.
No boast can be from breed of Grendel,
any on earth, for that uproar at dawn,
from the longest-lived of the loathsome race
in fleshly fold! — But first I went
Hrothgar to greet in the hall of gifts,
where Healfdene’s kinsman high-renowned,
soon as my purpose was plain to him,
assigned me a seat by his son and heir.
The liegemen were lusty; my life-days never
such merry men over mead in hall
have I heard under heaven! The high-born queen,
people’s peace-bringer, passed through the hall,
cheered the young clansmen, clasps of gold,
ere she sought her seat, to sundry gave.
Oft to the heroes Hrothgar’s daughter,
to earls in turn, the ale-cup tendered, —
she whom I heard these hall-companions
Freawaru name, when fretted gold
she proffered the warriors. Promised is she,
gold-decked maid, to the glad son of Froda.
I chose this passage because, like the one from "The Phoenix on the Sword" above, it features our hero giving a speech about his recent accomplishments. Right away, however, we can see a few differences between Howard and the anonymous poet behind Beowulf.
First and most obviously, "The Phoenix on the Sword" is not a poem. This fundamental difference in style brings about the starkest contrast. Howard didn't need to keep meter by matching a certain number of syllables to each line, and so he can have Conan speak plainly in ways that Beowulf does not.
Another obvious difference is that Beowulf is far more verbose than Conan. Cona's speech lasts only a few paragraphs and largely keeps to a single topic. Beowulf's goes on for many more lines than I quoted, and is full of irrelevant details to the battle he's supposedly recounting.
Rather than direct inspiration, it appears that "The Phoenix on the Sword" is merely attempting to follow in similar storytelling traditions than Beowulf, but more plainly, quickly, and in the form of prose rather than poetry.
Frankly, I thought checking Beowulf had led me to a dead end, but it got me thinking about boasts, laments, and--here's that word again--soliloquies. And hey, Conan's advisor is named Prospero, which is also the name of a character in Shakespeare's play, The Tempest. Here is a passage from Act 1, Scene 2, Prospero's first proper appearance in the story:
MIRANDA
If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek,
Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer! A brave vessel,
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
Dashed all to pieces. O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished.
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere
It should the good ship so have swallowed, and
The fraughting souls within her.
PROSPERO
Be collected.
No more amazement. Tell your piteous heart
There’s no harm done.
MIRANDA
O, woe the day!
PROSPERO
No harm.
I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who
Art ignorant of what thou art, naught knowing
Of whence I am, nor that I am more better
Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,
And thy no greater father.
Again, there is the contrast between prose and poetry to consider, but Prospero's conversation with Miranda does bear a number of stylistic similarities to Conan's monologue to his own Prospero.
Both Conan and Miranda lament what they wish they could do in contrast to their current situation. They lament their situation, and talk at length about their emotional reactions to it. They describe something that has recently happened for the benefit of the audience, even though such a thing isn't actually necessary in the case of Conan--Howard could easily have told us in his descriptions.
And yet there is something to be said about having a character speak exposition in such a way. It creates a grandiose feel. Why? Because that's what characters do in classic dramas, such as the plays of William Shakespeare.
Now, saying that a writer of the English language might have been influenced by the work of William Shakespeare is sort of like saying that the decision to build a dock might have been influenced by the presence of water. I'm not exactly saying anything groundbreaking when I say this. What's surprising to me is less that the influence is there, and more just how obvious of an influence it is.
Despite the fact that Conan and Beowulf are both larger-than-life heroes who came as outsiders to a land they would eventually become king of, there feels like there is far more of The Tempest in "The Phoenix on the Sword" than there is of Beowulf.
But what of the parts of the story that are not dialogue? While Howard's dialogue tags are often simple and unadorned, his physical descriptions tend to be written in much the same style, opting for the same sort of direct faux-grandiosity:
Thoth-amon's eyes narrowed. For all his iron self-control, he was near bursting with long pent-up shame, hate and rage, ready to take any sort of a desperate chance. What he did not reckon on was the fact that Dion saw him, not as a human being with a brain and a wit, but simply a slave, and as such, a creature beneath notice.
As the above passage demonstrates, this directness also does not leave much room for interpretation. Rather than keeping the narrative confined only to Thoth-amon's perspective, this passage instead follows a third-person omniscient style, and outright tells us how Dion sees Thoth-amon, allowing this knowledge to color all the characters' interactions, rather than leaving it to reader to divine their attitudes toward one another.
Where Howard is more willing to write with metaphor and ambiguity is with his action scenes. This lends such scenes a sense of uncertainty that helps to heighten the suspense and dramatic tension. It also results in what might be my favorite line in the whole story:
The red ax lurched up and crashed down and a crimson caricature of a man catapulted back against the legs of the attackers.
I was already enjoying this story, but even if I hadn't been, I doubt I could have ever brought myself to dislike anything that describes a freshly-slain corpse as "a crimson caricature of a man."
And wow; that alliteration! You can tell Howard was proud of that description, since he keeps it going with "crashed down" and "catapulted."
Closing Thoughts
This was, overall, a promising start to my Conan the Barbarian journey. "The Phoenix on the Sword" wasn't a story that held any real surprises, nor was it truly novel in any way, but it was solidly written and entertaining all the way through. It has the sense of fun you expect from a pulp tale, and really, was anyone asking for anything more than that?
I'm curious to see if subsequent stories follow up on Thoth-ammon or the sage Epimitreus, or if they largely take place before this one, or if there even is any real continuity between stories at all. Not gonna lie: I kind of hope it's that last one. It would be fun to see Conan just pop in whatever story Howard felt like telling that day, doing barbarian things.
But for now, I really don't have much to say. I'm extremely out-of-practice when it comes to writing any sort of academic essays, so I didn't even try to do that here, so hopefully my look at Howard's prose didn't come across as too floundering. Hopefully "The Crimson Citadel" will give me something more to sink my teeth into.
That's all for now. Until next time, may glory follow you into battle.
Oh, and Happy Holidays.