Crom Your Enthusiasm (19)

By: Joshua Glenn
August 21, 2015

Weird_Tales_1935-12_-_The_Hour_of_the_Dragon

One of 25 installments in a series of posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite fantasy novels from the Thirties (1934–1943). Enjoy!

THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON | ROBERT E. HOWARD | 1935–36

In the original Dungeons & Dragons rulebook, we find Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories listed under Inspirational Source Material. Indeed, in this novel we find every character class (fighters, magic-users, thieves, clerics), not to mention grisly demons and wandering monsters. The plot — Conan’s Aquilonian throne has been usurped, thanks to the sorcery of the resurrected mage Xaltotun; Conan must track down the Heart of Ahriman, a magic gem which alone can defeat Xaltotun, before leading an army of loyal Aquilonians and allies against the usurper — is a picaresque. The gem (a god’s heart? a radioactive meteorite?) is a McGuffin. What truly matters here, even as in a D&D campaign, is one thrilling, atavistic encounter after another.

And what encounters! Conan is paralyzed by an extraterrestrial fiend, and his consciousness is blasted by the advanced technology of Xaltotun. With the help of a beautiful slave girl, he escapes a pitch-black dungeon. Disguised as an executioner, he rescues a countess from an iron tower. Disguised as a slave, he pursues the Heart of Ahriman across Hyboria — from Aquilonia to Stygia. He is shanghaied, only to lead a galley-slave rebellion. He is pursued by relentless Khitanese (Chinese) assassins. He does battle with a Poe-esque murderous ape, a ghoul, a giant snake, and a Haggard-esque vampire queen.

Despite the non-stop action, The Hour of the Dragon, one of the last Conan yarns published before the author’s suicide, has an elegiac quality setting it apart from Howard’s earlier stories. Conan has grown older: His arrow and dagger miss the heart of the usurper, Tarascus; he trips over his spurs, falls from his horse, stumbles over a corpse and gets himself cold-cocked by a bandit. Conan has grown up, too: He beds no wenches, resists a midlife crisis-style temptation to return to his days of “roistering, brawling, guzzling, adventuring,” and laments the fact that Hyboria is inexorably entering a new era — one in which a führer-style tyrant might well conquer the world.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in The Hour of the Dragon. Here, a middle-aged Conan retraces his own development — recounted in two dozen stories published, beginning in 1932, in the pulp magazine Weird Tales — from wanderer to corsair to general to monarch. “I trod again,” Howard has Conan muse, “all the long, weary roads I traveled on my way to the kingship… All the shapes that have been I passed like an endless procession…” We are saying goodbye.

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CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2015): Erik Davis on Jack Williamson’s DARKER THAN YOU THINK | Sara Ryan on T.H. White’s THE SWORD IN THE STONE | Mark Kingwell on C.S. Lewis’s OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET | David Smay on Fritz Leiber’s THIEVES’ HOUSE | Natalie Zutter on Robert E. Howard’s QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST | James Parker on J.R.R. Tolkien’s THE HOBBIT | Adrienne Crew on Dion Fortune’s THE SEA PRIESTESS | Gabriel Boyer on Clark Ashton Smith’s ZOTHIQUE stories | John Hilgart on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD | Barbara Bogaev on William Sloane’s TO WALK THE NIGHT | Rob Wringham on Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN | Dan Fox on Hergé’s THE SEVEN CRYSTAL BALLS | Flourish Klink on C.S. Lewis’s PERELANDRA | Tor Aarestad on L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s THE ROARING TRUMPET | Anthony Miller on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH | Suzanne Fischer on E.R. Eddison’s MISTRESS OF MISTRESSES | Molly Sauter on Herbert Read’s THE GREEN CHILD | Diana Leto on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s TARZAN AND THE LION MAN | Joshua Glenn on Robert E. Howard’s THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON | Andrew Hultkrans on H.P. Lovecraft’s AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS | Lynn Peril on Fritz Leiber’s CONJURE WIFE | Gordon Dahlquist on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME | Adam McGovern on C.L. Moore’s JIREL OF JOIRY stories | Tom Nealon on Fritz Leiber’s TWO SOUGHT ADVENTURE | John Holbo on Robert E. Howard’s CONAN MYTHOS.

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Crom Your Enthusiasm (19)

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