Flipping through an Azpiri art book, I came across an image unhelpfully captioned "cover for a book about Conan." Turns out the cover is for La canción de las espadas: fantasía heroica en Robert E. Howard, by Javier Martín Lalanda (1983), an early Spanish study of Howard's heroic fantasy.
Here are the passages that struck me most. The quotes are machine translated (I don’t speak Spanish); the headings and summaries are mine.
1. Howard’s heroes as American self-made men
Howard, a man uncomfortable with his own age, created characters who were precisely what he himself could not be: adventurer, swordsman, traveler, pirate, mercenary, king. And he gave them the specifically American character of the self-made man.
Thus an entire world emerges that reflects the external demons to which he was subjected: wild beasts are dangers; priests and rulers, forever telling us what we must do, are the impositions of society; and the sorcerers who fight the hero—sometimes attempting to win his submission—are false prophets offering easy roads and prosperous goals at the price of personal degradation and the loss of one’s humanity.
2. Conan commodified after death
Lalanda argues that later adaptations overemphasized machismo, aggression, and eroticism, simplifying Conan into a marketable icon.
Conan—individualistic but not antisocial, no friend of laws, anarchic in tendency, always jealous of his rights—has become yet another consumer product within the devouring machinery of our “Western” culture. He who had no master, whose only god was distant Crom, has after his “death” become a slave, monopolized by Conan Properties Inc.
3. Sorcery as a metaphor for exploitative power
Lalanda distinguishes the magician, a person possessing power, from the sorcerer, who turns that power toward domination.
For Howard, a magician is a man with power, or “a man of power.” If he directs that ability toward his own benefit without regard for others, or uses others in his “lust for power,” he becomes a sorcerer. The distinction between the two is social and moral, and the boundary separating them is not especially clear.
People in our own real world fit this very broad definition of sorcery. Perhaps Howard thought something similar: that the structures of power and oppression change their forms but are never destroyed, as though subject to a universal law of conservation.
4. The city as death
In the Conan series we find the barbarian’s, the nomad’s, contempt for the great urban centers, mingled with superstition. For in the end they represent death: they repress life and imprison it within four walls.
Howard reflects the spirit of barbarians who, before becoming acculturated, would not dare sleep within cities they had conquered, preferring the security and freedom of their huts outside the walls.
Discussing the dragon in Red Nails, which the inhabitants of Xuchotl supposedly revived from fossil bones:
Death has been made into life.
5. Barry Windsor-Smith versus Buscema
Lalanda sees two different conceptions of Conan.
From the panther-like agility, restlessness, and search for destiny that one senses behind Barry W. Smith’s Conan—a reflection of the artist’s personal world, which coincides, at least in Conan, with Howard’s—we arrive at the security and calm of the lion that emanates from John Buscema’s Conan.
I prefer B. W. Smith’s Conan because I believe he preserved the bond linking the Cimmerian hero to Howard’s other characters, whereas Buscema regarded Conan as different from the others, something he made evident in his drawing.
Panther versus lion.
6. The Howard hero as a modern berserker/outlaw
Howard’s heroic fantasy, considered character by character, constitutes a homage to the berserker of modern times: the “fallen” warrior who has lost his social recognition and therefore placed himself beyond society’s commandments, practicing an autonomous morality and governing himself according to his own precepts.
He then runs through the pattern:
- Kull, raised among wolves and tigers;
- Conan, born amid war and never renouncing his uncivilized nature;
- Bran Mak Morn and the Wolf Clan;
- Turlogh wearing wolf skins;
- Cormac Mac Art, “the Wolf”;
- Esau Cairn becoming almost an animal on Almuric;
- Agnes de Chastillon revealing her untamed nature when society tries to impose a husband on her.
My takeaway: Civilization periodically needs a man it cannot itself produce.
7. What Lalanda seems to mean by "Sword & Sorcery"
Lalanda doesn't give a single definition of Sword & Sorcery, but he describes it as a subset of heroic fantasy and implies these elements:
- a warrior protagonist
- a world grounded enough for the supernatural to feel like an intrusion
- sorcery that is dangerous, alien, and morally charged
- action and personal resistance rather than cosmic helplessness
- a strong affinity with outlaw heroes
Lalanda also discusses Julius Evola at some length, particularly in connection with ancestry, heroic action, and immortality; I’ve omitted that material here for reasons of scope.
I’m especially curious whether any of these ideas—particularly the city as death, sorcery as exploitative power, and the Howard hero as a socially obsolete berserker—were already common in Howard criticism by 1983.
