Conan the Barbarian (1982): The Real World Behind John Milius's Pulp-Mythology Sermon

The film opens on a black screen. One line appears in white type, with the name under it in plain capitals: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche. John Milius wanted the audience to know the ground under their feet before the first image appeared.

The line is the eighth maxim from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, written in 1888 and published in January 1889. Nietzsche’s German is singular (“Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker”), so the closer sense is “what does not kill me makes me stronger.” The film card turns that into the broader first-person plural that the line has worn in English ever since. Nietzsche put the maxim under the heading Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens, “from the war-school of life.” Months later, on January 3, 1889, he collapsed in the street in Turin, embracing a horse, and never recovered his sanity.

That is the sort of detail the film is built from. Milius did not pick a heroic-sounding quote. He picked the quote. Before a single image of Spain, and before a single note of Basil Poledouris’s score, he tells you that the next two hours are a Nietzschean parable in a fur loincloth.

The Cimmerians on screen were a real people. The god the boy prays to has a real Irish name. The cult he destroys was modeled on a Texas-born preacher who poisoned 909 of his followers in a Guyanese jungle on November 18, 1978. The mountain fortress comes from the fortress of Hassan-i-Sabbah. The man who invented Conan’s world shot himself in the front seat of his car at the age of thirty.

Conan the Barbarian, released on May 14, 1982, with a $20 million budget, is packed with more buried mythology and history than it usually gets credit for. This is the world behind it.

The Cimmerians Were a Real People

Before Robert E. Howard wrote a word about Conan, Assyrian scribes had already put the Cimmerians into the record.

The Neo-Assyrian cuneiform letters of Sargon II, around 714 BCE, name them as the Gimirrāia, a steppe people pressing in from the north. The intelligence that reached Sargon came from his crown prince Sennacherib, who later inherited the throne and kept the file going. Esarhaddon defeated their king Teushpa around 679 BCE and recorded the victory in his royal inscriptions. Their next king, Dugdammê, also called Lygdamis in Greek sources, sacked the Phrygian capital Gordion around 675 BCE and the Lydian capital of Sardis around 644 BCE before dying in 640. His son Sandakšatru held the line for another decade. Herodotus backs the Sardis campaign in Histories book 1, paragraph 15. This is not folklore. It is paperwork.

Herodotus gives the longer version. The Cimmerians, he says, lived on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, north of the Black Sea, until the Scythians pushed them south. They fled across the Caucasus and into Anatolia. There they burned Greek cities and scared the local kingdoms before they were absorbed and disappeared. Histories 4, paragraphs 11 and 12.

Then Homer uses the name in Odyssey book 11, lines 13 to 19. Odysseus sails to the entrance of the underworld and finds the Kimmerioi there, “wrapped in mist and cloud,” a people the sun never reaches. Readers have argued for two thousand years about whether Homer’s Cimmerians are the same historical people the Assyrians knew, or a borrowed name for a shadow-people at the edge of the world. Askold Ivantchik’s standard scholarly monograph, Les Cimmériens au Proche-Orient from 1993, treats Homer’s usage as poetic license laid over real geographic memory.

Howard knew this material. He was writing in West Texas in the early 1930s, with a small library and a habit of soaking up everything he could find about ancient peoples. He gave Conan the Cimmerian people Homer half-remembered and the Assyrians fought.

In his essay “The Hyborian Age,” written around 1932 and serialized in the fan magazine The Phantagraph from February to November 1936, the first part of the essay only (the first complete book edition appeared in 1938), Howard wrote that the survivors of the Cimmerians fled the cataclysms of his fictional pre-history and became the Gaels, the ancestors of the Irish and the Highland Scots. It is pseudo-history, but it rests on a real ethnonym. The film keeps the bones of it. Conan’s village in the snow. Crom on the mountain. Iron and cold. Almería was standing in for the Pontic steppe.

The Hyborian Map: A World That Is Real and Not

Cimmeria is only one country on Howard’s larger map. In the same essay where he traced the Cimmerians forward to the Gaels, Howard drew a complete supercontinent of pre-Atlantean nations. The essay runs sixteen typed pages. It is full of geography, ethnology, and migrations, all set roughly twelve thousand years before the present. The film puts almost none of that directly on screen, but Conan walks through a world built from it.

The trick of the Hyborian Age is what Howard avoided. He did not build his cultures from nothing. He took real ethnonyms and cultural outlines, then dropped them onto a single Pangaea under light disguises.

Aquilonia, the dominant western kingdom, is medieval France with a Roman skeleton. Its capital is Tarantia. Its kings wear sun-shaped crowns. Its knights are Charlemagne’s by another name. Stygia, south of Aquilonia, is Egypt with the names rearranged. It has pyramids, a snake-priesthood, a great river, and dark-robed sorcerers who worship Set. Vanaheim and Asgard, north of Cimmeria, are the Vanir and the Æsir of Norse cosmology, blond raiders coming down through the snow. Hyperborea, in the northeast, takes its name straight from Greek myth, where Pindar’s Olympian 3 placed the people “beyond the north wind.”

The Picts, west of Cimmeria, keep the real ethnonym Roman writers used for the painted Iron-Age peoples of north Britain. Shem, south of Aquilonia, is the land of Semitic city-states, and Howard borrowed his Shemite city names (Asgalun, Pelishtia) from biblical Hebrew. Zamora, east of Aquilonia, is a thieves-and-sorcerers kingdom with Romani and Persian colouring. Vendhya is India. Khitai, even further east, is China, named from the Khitan people, the same root that gave Marco Polo his “Cathay.” Iranistan is Persia under almost its real name. Kush, south of Stygia, is named directly for the historical African kingdom of Kush, attested in Egyptian and biblical sources from the second millennium BCE.

Hyrkania, east of the inland sea, is the Mongol-Scythian steppe. Subotai is Hyrkanian. The name itself comes from real Hyrcania, the Greek and Roman name for the Caspian region of northern Iran, which Howard moved onto a horse-archer culture further east.

When Conan walks into a slave market or a temple, the world feels older than it has any right to. He is moving through every culture Howard had read about, pushed back twelve thousand years and reshuffled. Milius understood the trick. The film never names Hyrkania or Stygia or Aquilonia on screen. It does not need to. The temple of Set reads as Egyptian. The slave merchants read as Levantine. Subotai shoots a bow the way Mongols and Scythians shot bows. The world is real-world memory loaded into a fictional cosmology.

Crom Was a Real God

In the film, Crom is the only god Conan acknowledges, and he does it grudgingly. In the opening scene, Conan’s father tells the boy that no one in the world can be trusted. Crom dwells on a great mountain, and Cimmerians know what to ask of him: courage at birth, then nothing. The god does not love or protect. He does not seem interested.

Before the final battle, Conan kneels in the snow and gives the famous speech. Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that today, two stood against many. That’s what’s important. Valor pleases you, so grant me one request. Grant me revenge. And if you do not listen, then to hell with you.

The grimness is the point. Crom is the shape of the cosmos, without comfort attached.

The name came from a real Iron-Age stone in what is now County Cavan, Ireland.

The 12th-century Metrical Dindshenchas, a collection of place-name poems compiled from older oral material, contains the lay of Magh Slécht, “the Plain of Prostrations.” It describes a stone idol called Crom Cruach, plated in gold, surrounded by twelve smaller stones. The Irish, the poem says, sacrificed the firstborn of every family there to win milk and grain. The 9th-century Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick tells how Patrick toppled the idol with his crozier when he Christianized Ireland. The Killycluggin Stone, a carved Iron-Age boulder now preserved in the Cavan County Museum at Ballyjamesduff with a replica beside the original site, is traditionally identified with Crom Cruach. The identification is plausible rather than certain.

There is also a folkloric figure called Crom Dubh, “Black Crom,” tied to the harvest festival of Lughnasadh and surviving in pilgrimages and folk customs into the modern era. The standard treatment is Máire MacNeill’s 1962 study The Festival of Lughnasa.

Howard’s Crom shares little with the Irish material beyond the name and the bleak tone. Conan’s Crom lives on a mountain. He ignores prayer. He gives one gift, courage at birth, then leaves you alone. No serious source treats them as the same deity. Howard borrowed a name that carried weight in his Celtic-revival reading and built a different god under it.

Milius then pushed Howard’s god further toward Norse and Germanic models, especially the Wagner-influenced version of fate that runs through the Bayreuth productions of the Ring. The cultural historian David Huckvale has noted that the Tree of Woe and the costuming of certain ritual scenes echo the 1876 Bayreuth Ring stagings almost line for line.

So the famous prayer before the final battle has three layers. The speech is Milius’s. The god is Howard’s. The name belongs to a stone Saint Patrick is said to have cracked with a stick.

The Production: A Drug-Fever Script Becomes a Sermon

Oliver Stone wrote the first script for Conan the Barbarian. It was set in a post-apocalyptic future. Conan led an army against ten thousand mutants. There were two rival queens, cloning, DNA manipulation, and a villain named Thoth-Amon. Stone has spoken openly about his cocaine and depressant use during this period, and he was turning out roughly four hours of unfilmable script. Producer Dino De Laurentiis put the shooting cost at $40 million. The studio could not commit.

Milius came in. He kept the crucifixion sequence and a few set pieces from Stone’s draft, then threw out almost everything else. He built a new structure based on, in his own description, Wagner, Nietzsche, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Mongol history, and the Norse sagas. For years, he had wanted to make a Viking film. Conan became the way to do it.

His version sits closer to a samurai film than to a Tolkien adaptation. Critics have noted Milius’s clear distance from the Christian moral frame of The Lord of the Rings. Milius famously called himself a “Zen fascist.” He liked the term. The film’s worldview is closer to the Iliad than to Beowulf. Achilles, not Aragorn.

Schwarzenegger had already been cast when Milius arrived. He trained for eighteen months. He worked five months with the Japanese swordmaster Kiyoshi Yamazaki, two hours a day, three days a week, and swung an eleven-pound broadsword. Yamazaki appears on screen as the Eastern teacher who instructs Conan after the slave merchant buys him. Schwarzenegger trimmed from 240 pounds to 210, which contradicts the old story that he bulked up for the role. He did almost all of his own stunts.

The wolf-attack scene at the burial mound nearly killed him. The animals were German shepherds with wolf bloodlines. On the first take, the trainer released them too early. They tore the loincloth off him, dragged him from the rock, and he fell about ten feet onto sharp stones. He needed about forty stitches in his back, the figure most often given.

The whole film was shot in Spain, beginning January 1981. The Cimmerian village was in the forest of Valsaín. The desert sequences were in Almería. The dramatic rock formations in the interior, around Cuenca, doubled for several mountain passes. The Wheel of Pain stood on a windswept plain. Production designer Ron Cobb, who had just finished the interiors of Alien, designed both swords. The blades themselves were forged by the Burbank, California swordsmith Jody Samson. Cobb’s hand-drawn sketches for the Atlantean sword survive and have been auctioned through Propstore. The runes on the blade are his invention, intended to read as ancient Atlantean rather than as any specific real script.

Thulsa Doom and the Snake Cult

The villain had a long pulp life before he reached the screen.

Thulsa Doom was created by Howard around 1928 for a Kull story alternately titled “Delcardes’ Cat” and “The Cat and the Skull.” The story was rejected in Howard’s lifetime, and the character only reached print posthumously, first in the 1967 Lancer Books collection King Kull. Howard’s Doom is a skull-faced necromancer of unknown origin, an ancient enemy of the Atlantean kingdoms. He is not a snake-cult priest in Howard. That identity is Milius’s, fused with Howard’s Stygian worship of Set from later Conan stories like “The God in the Bowl” and “The Phoenix on the Sword.”

Milius has said plainly, on the 2000 DVD commentary and in interviews around the film’s release, that the cult was modeled on Charles Manson’s Family and on Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple. The Jonestown mass death of November 18, 1978, in which 909 people died after Jones ordered them to drink cyanide-laced grape Flavor Aid, was only four years old when the film was being shot. American audiences did not need an explanation. The mother who walks her daughter into Doom’s compound, smiling and serene, was a recent and recognizable image. The flower-children followers, the charismatic leader who can compel suicide with a word, and the pilgrimage of the broken all come from late-1970s American memory.

The cult’s mountain fortress is the Mountain of Power. Milius, in interviews, has linked it to Alamut, the fortress of Hassan-i-Sabbah’s Nizari Ismaili sect, captured in 1090 and held until the Mongols destroyed it in 1256. The Syrian sister-fortress at Masyaf, briefly recovered by the Nizaris in 1260, finally fell to the Mamluk sultan Baybars in 1270. Hassan’s followers were called hashishin, the source of the European word assassin. Medieval European chronicles claimed Hassan controlled them through hashish, sex, and a simulated paradise garden behind his fortress. Modern scholarship, beginning with Bernard Lewis’s 1967 The Assassins, has shown the drug-and-paradise story is largely European fabrication. The political reality remains real: a small religious sect used devoted assassins to topple sultans. Marco Polo recorded the legend a generation after Alamut fell, and it has been part of Western imagination ever since.

The serpent itself draws on a deep layer of cultural memory. Egyptian Set, the storm-god whose later iconography fuses with the destructive serpent Apep. The Mesopotamian and biblical serpent traditions. Howard mixed these freely. Milius pushed the visual further toward general snake terror: giant snakes coiled around pillars, a giant snake-faced statue, and devotees who hand themselves over to be embraced.

None of the source material gives Milius the riddle of steel. That is his own contribution.

The Riddle of Steel

The riddle of steel is the central spiritual idea of the film, and it is not in Howard.

Before the village burns, the boy’s father tells him that no one in the world can be trusted. No gods. No men. No women. Only steel. The riddle is what makes steel strong. Doom answers the same question decades later when he shows that flesh is stronger than steel. He raises a hand, and a young woman throws herself off a cliff because he said so. The will that wields the steel, he tells Conan, is stronger than the steel itself. This is why he can take the boy’s mother’s head with one stroke and feel nothing. The flesh he cares about is his own will acting on other flesh.

Conan has to turn the answer around to win. The flesh that beats steel is the flesh that endures. The slave learned the blade and refused to die on the Tree of Woe. Doom’s answer is the cult-leader’s answer. Conan’s answer is the survivor’s answer. Both are Nietzschean. Only one gets to walk away.

This is why the Nietzsche epigraph is not decoration. The whole film works through the maxim. The wheel grinds the boy. The cold strips him. The slave-pits sharpen him. He is sold, bought, starved, and crucified, and the script never offers redemption from outside. There is no Christ-figure intervention and no benevolent god. Crom does not answer prayers. The film’s cosmos is the war-school of life that Nietzsche named in his epigraph.

Milius has said, in his commentary, that he wanted Conan framed as a Nietzschean figure and the film as a study in the will to power taught by suffering. Whether or not he ever wrote down one fixed answer to the riddle, the film answers it for him. Steel breaks. Will endures.

The Wizard of the Mounds: Bringing the Dead Back

The film’s strangest sequence is the resurrection. Doom crucifies Conan on the Tree of Woe and leaves him to die. Subotai cuts him down. He carries the body to the wizard called in the script the Wizard of the Mounds, played by the Japanese actor Mako Iwamatsu. The wizard agrees to call back Conan’s spirit, but he warns that the price will be paid later. They paint Conan’s body with marks, light a ring of torches, and the wizard begins to chant. As the night goes on, spirits gather. Subotai and Valeria fight them off with bare blades. By dawn, Conan is alive again.

The crucifixion itself is older than the film. Howard wrote it in 1934 in “A Witch Shall Be Born,” published in Weird Tales in December that year, where Conan is nailed to a desert tree by a Shemite captain and survives through his own animal endurance. The resurrection ritual is Milius’s addition. It follows, almost step by step, a tradition the anthropologist Mircea Eliade documented in his 1951 study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, the standard work on the subject.

Eliade’s argument, drawn from Siberian, Mongol, Tungusic, Inuit, and North American sources, is that shamanic soul-retrieval follows the same basic shape in many places. The shaman enters trance, travels to the spirit world, finds the soul that has been lost or stolen, negotiates its return, and brings it back into the body before sunrise. Body painting is part of the preparation in Yakut, Buryat, and Tungus practice. A circle of fire marks the boundary against intrusive spirits in Buryat séances. Chanting and drumming carry the trance. The soul never returns for free. The spirits demand payment, often blood, often an animal substitute, sometimes a piece of the shaman’s own life-force. Eliade is explicit on this in chapters five and six.

Every element of the screen ritual maps to a documented practice: the body marks, the torch circle, the chant, and the price the spirits demand. Milius compresses the phases into one dramatic night, but the structure holds.

The film also keeps a part of the tradition that does not appear in Eliade’s central material. While the wizard is in trance, the body is vulnerable. Spirits and demons may try to seize it. In Eliade’s Siberian sources, the shaman handles this himself. In the Slavic East, armed defenders guard the corpse. The folklorist Felix Oinas, writing in the Slavic and East European Journal in 1978, documented the East Slavic practice of armed wake-keepers standing over a body during the first nights, especially when revenance was feared. Gogol’s 1835 story “Viy” is the literary distillation: the seminarian Khoma reads psalms inside a chalk circle while demons attack the church for three nights. Subotai and Valeria with their swords are doing what Khoma does with his prayers. They are holding the boundary while the work happens.

The Tree of Woe carries another tradition too, though Milius did not name it in interviews. In Hávamál stanzas 138 to 145, the longest of the wisdom poems in the Poetic Edda, Odin describes how he hung on a windswept tree for nine nights, wounded with a spear, given to himself, and learned the runes from the dead. The Tree of Woe is not exactly Yggdrasil or the Christian cross. It uses the structure both share: a man suspended on a tree, dying, and bringing something back from the other side.

The price the wizard warned about is paid in the next film. Conan the Destroyer opens with Akiro under threat from spirits collecting the debt. Most viewers do not know it is owed.

Robert E. Howard, Cross Plains, Texas

The man who invented this world died in the front seat of his Chevrolet sedan on June 11, 1936, in the driveway of his parents’ house in Cross Plains, Texas. He was thirty years old. His mother, Hester Jane Ervin Howard, had been ill for years with tuberculosis. That morning, she fell into a coma from which the family doctor said she would not wake. Howard walked out to the car, sat down in the driver’s seat, and shot himself in the head with a .380 Colt Automatic he had borrowed from a friend, Lindsey Tyson. He died about eight hours later, before his mother. She died the next day.

He had written most of the Conan stories in the previous five years. Weird Tales, the Chicago pulp magazine that paid him by the word, had been publishing them since “The Phoenix on the Sword” in December 1932. He had also written Solomon Kane stories, Bran Mak Morn stories, the Kull stories that later supplied Thulsa Doom, hundreds of poems, westerns, boxing stories, and a long correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, who fondly called him “Two-Gun Bob” in letters to mutual friends. The two men exchanged around 130 letters between 1930 and 1936. The collected correspondence, edited by S.T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke as A Means to Freedom, runs to two thick volumes (Hippocampus Press, 2009). Howard liked to argue with Lovecraft about civilization versus barbarism. Howard preferred barbarism. Lovecraft, who saw himself as the last gentleman of an extinct New England, did not.

Mark Finn’s biography Blood and Thunder, the standard life, places Howard inside the world he wrote out of. West Texas oil-boom towns. A father who was a country doctor. A mother who was the central love and central wound of his life. A small library of Bulfinch, Plutarch, Gibbon, Harold Lamb’s books on the Mongols, Talbot Mundy, the King James Bible, and the steady noise of pulp fiction. Howard’s essay places the Hyborian Age “after the sinking of Atlantis and before the beginning of recorded history” without giving an absolute date. The familiar “around 10,000 BCE” placement is L. Sprague de Camp’s later editorial gloss, added when Lancer Books began reprinting the Conan stories in 1966.

By the time Howard wrote that essay, he had picked up Madame Blavatsky’s Root Race cosmology secondhand. In a letter to Harold Preece dated October 1928, four years before the first Conan story appeared in Weird Tales, Howard wrote: “The occultists say that we are the fifth — I believe — great sub-race. Two unknown and unnamed races came, then the Lemurians, then the Atlanteans, then we.” The sequence is the Secret Doctrine (1888) Volume II scheme, summarized as faithfully as a West Texas autodidact could manage. The hesitation in the parenthetical “I believe” shows that he was working from a single accessible source rather than from deep Theosophical immersion, but he had read enough to get the order right.

The transmission vector was William Scott-Elliot. Jeffrey Shanks’s 2011 essay Theosophy and the Thurian Age: Robert E. Howard and the Works of William Scott-Elliot in The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies identifies Scott-Elliot’s The Story of Atlantis (Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896) and The Lost Lemuria (1904) as Howard’s likely source. These were accessible English-language popularisations of Blavatsky’s cosmology, in print for thirty years by the time Howard reached them. The 1926 unsold Bran Mak Morn story Men of the Shadows, written when Howard was nineteen or twenty, already uses the five-sub-race scheme of Picts, Lemurians, Atlanteans, Celts, and Aryans. The structural template was in Howard’s head before he had a viable Conan to sell. For the full story of how Donnelly’s 1882 Atlantis: The Antediluvian World got picked up by Blavatsky in 1888 and then popularised through Scott-Elliot into early-twentieth-century pulp, see our Atlantis article.

This is why the Phoenix on the Sword opening line lands the way it does. “Between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of” reads in 2026 as pulp atmosphere. In 1932, it was the literal Fifth Root Race rising after the Fourth. The Lovecraft parallel reinforces the climate. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, published in Weird Tales in February 1928 (eight months before Howard’s letter to Preece, and two years before the Howard-Lovecraft correspondence began), credits the Theosophists directly: “Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents.” Pulp Atlantis in this generation was Theosophical Atlantis, transmitted via Scott-Elliot. Howard absorbed the framework. He did not subscribe to it. He treated Scott-Elliot the same way he treated Bulfinch and Plutarch: as material for the page.

Howard had been writing toward Cimmeria for years before he found Conan. The character emerged whole in the spring of 1932, as Howard later told his correspondents, while he was writing about Conan’s slightly older relative Kull. He wrote in a white heat. He paced the room as he typed, shouting his characters’ lines aloud at full volume. The neighbours, on the other side of thin Cross Plains walls, complained about it. He spent four more years writing Conan stories, and then he was dead.

Milius’s film opens with a quote from Howard before the Nietzsche line, lifted from the very first published Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” in Weird Tales, December 1932. The original begins, Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of. Howard attributed the passage in-universe to “The Nemedian Chronicles.” He had been dead forty-six years when the film used it.

What the Film Holds

Modern viewers often treat Conan the Barbarian as a guilty pleasure. A Reagan-era macho artifact. A film whose real legacy is bodybuilding posters and the meme of crushing your enemies and hearing the lamentations of their women. Some of that is fair. Schwarzenegger is not a great actor, and the film does not always pretend otherwise. Milius’s political register was idiosyncratic and performatively reactionary. Some scenes have aged badly. Critics in 1982 were already divided. Roger Ebert, who liked it, gave it three stars and praised James Earl Jones’s performance, which Ebert read as inspired in equal parts by Hitler, Jim Jones, and Goldfinger. Richard Schickel, who did not, called it “psychopathic Star Wars” in Time.

The film also does something rare. It is one of the only Hollywood productions of its scale to take a pulp-fiction author seriously enough to keep his cosmology intact. Howard’s Cimmerians stay Cimmerian. Crom stays grim and remote. The names of the gods stay borrowed from real Near Eastern pantheons, Set and Mitra and Bel intact. The geographic logic of Hyboria stays roughly in place. Milius then adds the production-design seriousness of Ron Cobb, who designed the swords as if they were museum pieces, and the symphonic seriousness of Poledouris, who conducted his Roman orchestra as if he were scoring a Wagner cycle.

Under the spectacle is a sermon. The sermon is Nietzschean, which means it is uncomfortable. The world owes you nothing. The gods owe you nothing. Pain teaches. Will outlasts steel. There is no Christ in the cosmology, only a memory of how the strong should bear themselves. Doom’s cult preys on people who never accepted that. Conan, thrown into the wheel as a boy and ground there until he was strong, has accepted it.

You can take the sermon or leave it. Many people have left it. Still, few films take any position with this much conviction.

The Cimmerians were a real people. They burned Sardis around 644 BCE. The Assyrians fought them. Homer remembered them at the edge of the world. An Irish stone called Crom stood in a plain in County Cavan and was knocked over by a saint with a stick. A man named Robert Howard shot himself in Texas in 1936. A man named John Milius cast a young Austrian bodybuilder in Almería in 1981 and turned a script Oliver Stone wrote in a fog of cocaine into a Wagner opera with a Texan pulp pedigree and a Persian fortress and a dead philosopher’s line about suffering.

That is the world behind the film. It is older than the film by about four thousand years.

Related Articles

• Crom Cruach (Bestiary): The Pre-Christian Irish God Howard Borrowed for Conan
• Tolkien’s Mythology: The Real Sources Behind Middle-earth
• Mithraism: The Roman Mystery Cult
• Evenki Shamanism and the Original Shaman

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Howard, Robert E. ‘The Phoenix on the Sword.’ Weird Tales, December 1932 (first published Conan story; the opening ‘Know, oh prince’ passage is in-universe attributed to ‘The Nemedian Chronicles’) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_on_the_Sword
• Howard, Robert E. ‘The Hyborian Age’ (essay). Written c. 1932; serialized in The Phantagraph February-November 1936 (first part only); first complete book edition 1938. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hyborian_Age
• Howard, Robert E. ‘A Witch Shall Be Born.’ Weird Tales, December 1934 (the crucifixion-on-tree scene) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Witch_Shall_Be_Born
• Howard, Robert E. ‘Men of the Shadows’ (Bran Mak Morn story, written 1925-26, rejected by Weird Tales; first published in the 1969 Dell collection Bran Mak Morn). The earliest Howard text to deploy a five-sub-race scheme of Picts, Lemurians, Atlanteans, Celts, and Aryans. https://reh.world/stories/men-of-the-shadows/
• Howard, Robert E. Letter to Harold Preece, October 1928. In The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard (Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, 2007-2008), 3 vols., eds. Rob Roehm with Glenn Lord and Rusty Burke. https://rehfpress.com/books/ultimate/tclv1/
• Joshi, S. T., David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke (eds.). A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2009, 2 vols., ~130 letters. https://www.hippocampuspress.com/h.p-lovecraft/collected-letters/means-to-freedom-the-letters-of-h.-p.-lovecraft-and-robert-e-.-howard
• Lovecraft, H. P. ‘The Call of Cthulhu.’ Weird Tales, February 1928 (the passage on Theosophists guessing ’the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle’) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales/Volume_11/Issue_2/The_Call_of_Cthulhu
• Blavatsky, Helena P. The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy. London: Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888, 2 vols. (the Seven Root Races scheme is set out in vol. II, Anthropogenesis; the Aryan is the Fifth Root Race, succeeding the Atlantean Fourth) https://sacred-texts.com/the/sd/index.htm
• Scott-Elliot, William. The Story of Atlantis. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896 (preface by A. P. Sinnett); The Lost Lemuria. London: TPS, 1904; combined edition The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, TPS, 1925. https://sacred-texts.com/atl/soa/index.htm
• Shanks, Jeffrey. ‘Theosophy and the Thurian Age: Robert E. Howard and the Works of William Scott-Elliot.’ The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies, Vol. 6, Nos. 1 & 2 (2011) https://www.academia.edu/87022507/Creating_an_Age_Undreamed_Of_Robert_E_Howard_and_the_Works_of_Lewis_Spence_and_William_Scott_Elliot
• Finn, Mark. Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard. 1st ed. MonkeyBrain Books, 2006; revised 2nd ed. Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, 2013. https://rehfpress.com/books/lulu/blood-thunder/
• Spence, Lewis. The Problem of Atlantis. London: Rider, 1924; The History of Atlantis. London: Rider, 1927 (the stone-age Atlantis Howard worked alongside Scott-Elliot) https://archive.org/details/problemofatlanti0000lewi
• Mundy, Talbot. Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley (1924), The Devil’s Guard (US Ramsden, 1926). Mundy joined the Point Loma Theosophical Society on 1 January 1923; pulp fiction Howard read. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69586
• de Camp, L. Sprague, and Lin Carter (eds.). Conan the Adventurer. New York: Lancer Books, 1966 (first volume of the Lancer Conan reprints; de Camp fixed the popular ‘around 10,000 BCE’ date for the Hyborian Age which is not present in Howard’s own essay) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_(books)
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols (Götzen-Dämmerung). Written 1888, published Naumann, Leipzig, January 1889. The opening film epigraph is from ‘Maxims and Arrows,’ paragraph 8: Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens — was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52263/52263-h/52263-h.htm
• Milius, John, and Oliver Stone. Conan the Barbarian screenplay drafts, 1979-1980. Production correspondence and design materials including Ron Cobb’s sword sketches (auctioned via Propstore) https://cinephiliabeyond.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Conan-the-Barbarian-John-Milius-1980.11.pdf
• Lewis, Bernard. The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967 (the standard modern academic treatment of Hassan-i-Sabbah and the Nizari Ismailis) https://archive.org/details/assassinsradical0000bern