Why Conan Still Matters

I’ve been kicking around this essay idea for some time. I first read a friend’s Savage Sword of Conan magazine many decades ago. I was a young man when I discovered Conan the Cimmerian—already enlisted in the Army National Guard but still in my early college years. I’d been a comics fan since middle school, but this world of sword-and-sorcery (free from the restrictions of the odious Comics Code Authority stamp of approval) was a whole new world to me. I felt an immediate though inexplicable connection to this material even then. There was something electric about these old stories and beautiful line work that left me craving more, even after I’d exhausted my friend’s limited collection of beat-up old magazines.

As an aside, this same friend was also enthusiastically introducing me to electric blues in those years, so I have a curious connection between the old black-and-white Conan stories of the 70s and the glorious blues of B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and most of all my friend’s favorite electric blues artist: Stevie Ray Vaughn. It occurs to me only now that Conan author Robert E. Howard and Stevie Ray Vaughn are both Texans, so perhaps there is some other mysterious Lone Star State synergy going on there, but I digress.

This essay certainly could’ve been in a similar vein to my last essay on the music of West Berlin in the 70s, specifically about why I’ve felt pulled back into Howard’s Hyborian Age at this particular moment in time. In fact, that is exactly how my idea for the essay started. However, as I thought about what I wanted to write, I realized that for this subject, the scope had to be much larger than just this moment in time (though perhaps the essay will still speak strongly to that aspect, even without explicit reference to the character of this moment in time). I want to address this material more as a general defense of why a character like Conan and the stories Howard told are still worth reading and why they still feel so vital today—maybe even more so than when I was first introduced to this material decades ago. Perhaps this essay will be best experienced with the fiery emotionality of Texas Flood playing in the background, but I leave that in your discerning hands, dear reader. I hope you enjoy it.

There are certain books that seem as though we should have outgrown them. Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are, at first glance, obvious candidates. They are violent, pulpy adventures written nearly a century ago. Their world is unapologetically masculine and brutal. Their depictions of race, gender, and civilization often reflect assumptions that feel foreign, or at least deeply dated, to modern readers. Life, as Howard depicted it in his stories of the Hyborean Age, is very Hobbesian: a state of “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” By almost every measure, these stories are relics of another age.

And yet I continue returning to them.

Curiously, I am not alone. Many of the people I know who most enjoy Conan are hardly reactionaries longing for some imagined barbaric past. They are historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary scholars. Many hold political views quite different from what one might expect of devotees of sword-and-sorcery fiction. They are thoughtful people who have spent their lives studying human culture, institutions, and ideas. Nevertheless, they find themselves drawn to Howard's stories with much the same enthusiasm that I do.

For some time I have wondered why that is, even as I continue to enjoy periodically re-reading Howard’s short stories or the old black-and-white, oversized comic magazines adapted from those stories by Roy Thomas and incredible artists like Barry Windsor-Smith and John Buscema.

Part of the answer, I suspect, is that Conan is frequently misunderstood. Popular culture, if it has any idea of Conan at all, often reduces him to little more than an oversized muscleman who solves every problem with a sword (there are, perhaps, a number of unfortunate movies that have contributed to this idea). Howard's Conan is certainly formidable, but the stories themselves are not simple celebrations of violence or brute strength, nor is the protagonist a brutish simpleton. More often than not, Conan succeeds because he sees through the illusions that civilized societies tell themselves.

Howard was not merely fascinated with barbarism; he was deeply skeptical of civilization. His kingdoms are frequently decadent, his priesthoods corrupt, his rulers vain, and his bureaucracies precariously brittle. Conan enters these societies as an outsider capable of recognizing their hidden weaknesses. Civilization, Howard reminds us, is never as permanent or as virtuous as it imagines itself to be.

Perhaps that is one reason the stories appeal to scholars. Historians and anthropologists spend their careers uncovering the assumptions that cultures take for granted. Howard performs something similar through fiction. Conan becomes an observer moving between societies, exposing contradictions that insiders cannot see.

That said, I do not think this critique of civilization explains the stories' enduring attraction by itself. After all, I remain someone who believes profoundly in civilization. I have devoted much of my professional life to institutions: military organizations, ethical governance, compliance systems, and now the emerging regulatory structures surrounding artificial intelligence. My academic work similarly asks how traditions, institutions, and moral formation shape better people.

Put plainly, I am not looking for civilization to collapse. If anything, I spend much of my time thinking about how to improve the systems that preserve it. So why does Conan still speak to me?

I suspect another answer lies in Howard's understanding of human nature. Modern life often encourages us to think primarily in terms of comfort, efficiency, and optimization. Howard's world strips all of that away. His characters live where danger is immediate, uncertainty is constant, and survival can depend upon courage, judgment, loyalty, or simple endurance. These are not imaginary concerns. They describe the conditions under which much of humanity has actually lived throughout history. Having spent a decent number of years deployed in relatively unstable parts of the world, I can attest that much of the world still lives in these kinds of conditions today.

As someone interested in military ethics and warrior identity, I recognize this immediately. Howard's Hyborian Age is fantasy, but the psychological landscape often feels surprisingly authentic. It asks what sort of person emerges when security disappears. How does fear shape character? What does courage actually look like? What remains when institutions fail? These are not merely questions about fantasy worlds. They are questions about humanity.

Another aspect of Conan that fascinates me, and I suspect others, is his extraordinary agency. Contemporary fiction often celebrates protagonists who are defined by uncertainty, introspection, or paralysis. There is certainly a place for such stories, and they speak to important aspects of modern human experience. Conan, however, does not hesitate for long. He assesses a situation, chooses a course of action, and accepts whatever consequences follow. There is undeniably something refreshing about that decisiveness.

This is not, of course, because decisive people are always right. They certainly are not. Rather, Conan reminds us that agency itself is a virtue worth cultivating. Human flourishing requires more than endless analysis (summed up nicely in the annoyingly rhymey “paralysis by analysis” term). At some point, it becomes a virtue to choose decisively.

Perhaps this resonates precisely because so much of modern professional life rewards perpetual deliberation. The scholar spends years examining questions. The bureaucrat consults procedures. The committee seeks consensus. These are often necessary activities. Yet there remains something deeply human and empowering about watching a character simply shoulder responsibility and act out of deep instinct and well-honed practical wisdom.

Howard also offers something increasingly rare in contemporary literature that speaks to me: a world saturated with meaning. Every ruined city possesses forgotten history. Every ancient temple hints at civilizations older than memory. Every artifact carries stories of peoples long vanished. The past is never dead; it remains embedded within the present, shaping the world in ways that living characters scarcely understand.

As someone who studies history and culture, I find this deeply satisfying. Real civilizations often feel this way. Ancient customs survive in modern rituals. Languages preserve forgotten assumptions. Institutions carry memories of problems long since resolved. Howard's imagined world possesses this same archaeological depth. His stories remind us that the present is always layered atop countless generations that came before us.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable trait of all that I’ll discuss here is a potential virtue is Howard's fascination with excellence. Conan is exceptional, no question about it.

He is stronger than nearly everyone he encounters. He is braver than most and more capable than almost all. Modern societies rightly emphasize equality before the law and equal human dignity. Yet we sometimes struggle to acknowledge that excellence itself remains deeply compelling. We admire master craftsmen, extraordinary athletes, gifted musicians, brilliant scientists, and courageous soldiers not because they diminish our own worth but because they reveal what human beings are capable of becoming.

Howard understood this instinct. Conan is not admirable because he dominates others (which he can generally do quite easily). He is admirable because he embodies competence pushed toward its limits and matched with a kind of practical wisdom.

Finally—and perhaps this is the deepest reason of all—the Conan stories preserve contact with what might simply be called the heroic imagination. Our age excels at criticism, and this has been true for many decades.

We analyze structures of power, expose hidden assumptions, and interrogate traditions. These are valuable habits of mind, and this modern proclivity has led to valuable reconstruction and growth. These habits have corrected genuine injustices and broadened our understanding of the human experience.

However, what we sometimes struggle to do, at least in most areas of modern society, is to speak positively about heroism. Howard never had that difficulty. His stories ask ancient questions that remain stubbornly relevant. What is courage? What kind of life deserves admiration? What is worth risking death to protect? What does greatness actually look like?

These questions have not disappeared simply because modern societies have become more technologically sophisticated. If anything, they have become easier to ignore.

This, I think, finally explains why I continue returning to Conan despite my own commitments to civilization, institutions, and moral formation. I do not read Howard because I wish to abandon civilization for barbarism. Quite the opposite. Howard reminds me what civilization exists to preserve.

Civilization is not merely roads, laws, universities, or bureaucracies. These are achievements of immense value, but they are not ends in themselves. They exist to cultivate human beings capable of courage, wisdom, justice, friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice. They exist because there are goods that cannot flourish amid chaos.

Howard understood and creatively engaged with what happens when civilization forgets those goods. His decadent kingdoms possess wealth without vitality, sophistication without virtue, and power without purpose. Conan exposes those failures not because barbarism is the answer, but because civilization that loses its moral center eventually becomes hollow.

Perhaps that is why thoughtful readers continue to find these stories so compelling. They do not want Conan's world (I certainly do not), but we perhaps instinctively recognize that our own world cannot survive if it forgets the qualities that Conan represents.

Howard’s Conan material does not ask the modern reader to choose between civilization and the nobly savage barbarian. For many readers, his stories implicitly challenges us to build civilizations worthy of preserving: civilizations capable of cultivating the courage, agency, excellence, and depth of character that Howard so vividly imagined, while directing those qualities toward justice rather than mere survival or glory. That, I suspect, is at least a large part of the conversation I and others like me have really been having with Conan all these years.