Vindication!

A while back, Jonathan Moeller posted something on romance novels as female wish-fulfillment.  It was an interesting thing, but then I read this passage:

“On the other hand, Conan of Cimmeria boinks a different wench every story, usually after rescuing her from the bloodstained altar a depraved centuries-old sorcerer. So, male wish fulfillment, I guess.”

I see this quite a lot, and given the sheer amount of horrible Conan novels and comics out there, I think there's a definite possibility that the "boink" ratio is considerably high.  What's disturbing is that not only detractors, but fans of Conan cite the old "gets the girl at the end of every story" idea. Nonetheless, I felt the need to defend Howard's original stories. 



Here's my response:

“Conan having sex with a new woman every story is an invention of the unimaginative dreck written by other authors. In the original Howard stories, nubile women only feature in about half of them (a sizeable number of tales don't feature women at all), and of that half, Conan only has sex with about a third of them. Sure, some might be implied as having a sexual relationship later in the story, but it's never stated with any certainty.”

I do this sort of thing occasionally, where I find a blog that's interesting, but might have some outdated/inaccurate view of Howard.  I prefer to enlighten and educate rather than berate and ridicule, and a lot of people are commendably open-minded.  Jonathan, to his credit, is one of them, but he went even further:

But! This prompted one Al Harron to appear in the comments (whom I believe to be the Al Harron of The Cimmerian blog) and argue that:

“Conan having sex with a new woman every story is an invention of the unimaginative dreck written by other authors. In the original Howard stories, nubile women only feature in about half of them (a sizeable number of tales don't feature women at all), and of that half, Conan only has sex with about a third of them. Sure, some might be implied as having a sexual relationship later in the story, but it's never stated with any certainty.”

So, just how often did Conan get the girl at the end of the story?

Fortunately, I have Robert E. Howard’s complete Conan collection readily at hand, and it was easy to determine just how often Conan did, in fact, get the girl. Howard wrote 21 completed Conan stories, and for the purposes of this post, I divided them into three broad categories:

-Stories Where Conan Beds The Girl. Self-explanatory.

-Stories Where Conan Doesn’t Bed The Girl, But Probably Does After The Story Ends. In these stories, Conan doesn’t bed the girl, but it’s strongly implied that he does so in the very near future. Like in “The Hour of the Dragon”, when he promises to make the slave girl Zenobia his queen when he returns to the throne of Aquilonia.

-Stories Where Conan Gets No Romantic Action Whatsoever. Again, self-explanatory.

The stories broke down this way:

Stories Where Conan Gets No Romantic Action Whatsoever:
-The Phoenix on the Sword
-The Scarlet Citadel
-The Tower of the Elephant
-Rogues in the House
-A Witch Shall Be Born
-Beyond the Black River
-The Man-Eaters of Zamboula
-The Frost-Giant’s Daughter
-The God in the Bowl
-The Vale of Lost Women
-The Black Stranger

Stories Where Conan Got The Girl:
-Black Colossus
-Queen of the Black Coast

Stories Where Conan Didn’t Get the Girl, But Probably Did Later:
-Pool of the Black One
-Iron Shadows in the Moon
-The Devil in Iron
-The People of the Black Circle
-Jewels of Gwahlur
-The Hour of the Dragon
-Red Nails
-Xuthal of the Dusk

Mr. Harron has a valid point. While Conan was hardly an abstemious fellow, (while held prisoner in "The Scarlet Citadel", he grimly contemplates the fate that awaits his concubines at the hands of the wicked sorcerer Tsotha-lanti) he only actually got the girl at the end of the story twice, out of 21 stories. Which is interesting because the cliché of sword & sorcery is of the muscle-bound hero tumbling a different wench at the end of every story. (In fact, I’ve written quite a bit for the “Sword & Sorceress” anthology, which was started as a reaction against that cliché.) But as the numbers show, for Conan, at least, that simply was not the case.

This suggests, I believe, that Robert E. Howard was a better writer than many of his followers. 

Man, that's cool.  I can't believe someone's calling me "Mr. Harron."

Now, I could argue with some of Jonathan's points - for instance, I don't think Conan did have sex with Yasmina after "The People of the Black Circle" regardless of their romantic interlude, he technically didn't get Bêlit at the end of "Queen of the Black Coast" and I think the relationship with the punk in "Rogues in the House" is fairly sexual - but I feel immensely vindicated at being taken seriously, so I don't intend to beleaguer the point.

The important thing is somebody took the time to research Howard's work, and came away with a different, more accurate opinion of him, which is all I ask.  Hopefully Jon will go on to explore the other 95% of Howard's stories.