Before Conan was a movie, a comic book, or a cultural punchline, he was a literary creation of extraordinary vitality. Born in the imagination of Robert E. Howard, a young Texan writer who sold his first story at eighteen and was dead by thirty, Conan the Barbarian single-handedly invented the sword and sorcery genre and created a fictional character who has outlived his creator by nearly a century.
The Conan most people picture — Arnold Schwarzenegger in a loincloth — is a pale shadow of Howard's original creation. The literary Conan is something far more interesting: a philosophical barbarian, a natural king, and the vehicle for some of the most ferociously energetic prose in the history of adventure fiction.
Robert E. Howard: The Creator
Robert Ervin Howard was born in 1906 in Peaster, Texas, and spent most of his life in the small oil-boom town of Cross Plains. He was an unlikely literary prodigy — a large, athletic young man in a rough frontier environment who devoured books voraciously and began writing salable fiction while still in his teens.
Howard sold his first professional story to Weird Tales magazine in 1924, at the age of eighteen. Over the next twelve years, he produced an astonishing volume of work across multiple genres: horror, western, boxing stories, historical adventure, detective fiction, and the sword and sorcery tales for which he is best remembered.
He was fast. He was prolific. And he was possessed of a narrative energy that crackled off the page like an electrical discharge. Howard wrote the way a boxer fights — with directness, power, and an instinct for the devastating moment.
The Invention of Sword and Sorcery
Before Howard, fantasy fiction existed primarily in two forms: the high literary tradition of Lord Dunsany and William Morris (elevated, archaic, and distant) and the planetary romance of Edgar Rice Burroughs (adventure on other worlds with a veneer of science). Neither offered what Howard would provide: gritty, violent, sword-swinging adventure set in a secondary world that felt as real and dirty as a frontier saloon.
Howard's innovation was to combine the exotic settings and supernatural elements of fantasy with the brutal directness of the western and the visceral physicality of the boxing ring. His heroes don't contemplate evil from the safety of wizard towers — they wade into it with a sword in each hand and blood on their teeth.
The Hyborian Age
Conan's world is the Hyborian Age — a fictional prehistoric era set roughly twelve thousand years before the present, after the sinking of Atlantis and before the rise of known civilizations. Howard constructed this setting with remarkable care, writing an entire pseudo-historical essay, The Hyborian Age, that traces the migrations, wars, and cultural developments of the peoples who inhabit Conan's world.
The Hyborian Age is not a simple good-versus-evil landscape. It contains civilizations at every stage of development — from the primitive Picts to the decadent empire of Stygia, from the fierce horse-lords of the steppes to the corrupt merchant kingdoms of the coast. Each culture has its own customs, religions, and ambitions. The world feels lived-in, complicated, and dangerous.
Why the Setting Works
Howard's masterstroke was setting his stories in a fictionalized version of the real ancient world. The Hyborian nations map loosely onto historical civilizations — Aquilonia resembles medieval Western Europe, Stygia echoes Egypt, Turan suggests the Ottoman Empire, the eastern kingdoms recall India and China. This gives readers an intuitive sense of the cultures without requiring extensive exposition.
The result is a setting that feels simultaneously fantastical and familiar — strange enough to transport the reader, grounded enough to be immediately understandable.
Conan: The Character
Conan of Cimmeria is far more complex than his popular image suggests. Yes, he is a barbarian warrior of tremendous physical power. But he is also:
- Intelligent. Conan speaks multiple languages, grasps military strategy, understands political intrigue, and displays a cunning that regularly outwits supposedly superior civilized opponents.
- Philosophical. Howard's Conan has a worldview — a consistent set of beliefs about honor, freedom, and the relationship between civilization and barbarism. His most famous observation — that civilized men are more truly barbarous than actual barbarians — runs through the stories as a persistent theme.
- Adaptable. Over the course of Howard's stories, Conan is a thief, a pirate, a mercenary, a general, and a king. He succeeds in each role through a combination of physical prowess, street intelligence, and an unshakable self-confidence that treats every challenge as merely another problem to solve with sufficient force and wit.
- Morally complex. Conan is not a white-knight hero. He steals, kills, and acts in ruthless self-interest. But he also protects the helpless, keeps his word, and refuses to participate in certain evils (slavery, sorcery, cruelty for its own sake). His moral code is personal rather than institutional — he acts according to his own sense of honor rather than any civilization's laws.
Essential Conan Stories on Insomnus
Several of Howard's original Conan stories are available on Insomnus. Here are the essential starting points:
Queen of the Black Coast
Queen of the Black Coast is often considered the finest Conan story Howard wrote. It tells of Conan's alliance with Belit, the pirate queen of the Black Coast — a fierce, passionate woman who is Conan's equal in courage and ferocity. Their relationship is the most fully realized romance in the Conan canon, and the story's climax ranks among the most emotionally powerful passages in pulp fiction.
The story also contains Conan's most famous philosophical speech, in which he articulates his creed. It's a remarkable passage that reveals the depth of thought behind the barbarian exterior.
Shadows in Zamboula
Shadows in Zamboula is a taut, atmospheric thriller set in a desert city where a dark secret lurks behind closed doors after nightfall. It demonstrates Howard's ability to create tension and atmosphere — the story's nighttime setting and creeping dread make it particularly effective as a bedtime listen.
Shadows in the Moonlight
Shadows in the Moonlight takes Conan to a mysterious island where ancient statues guard a terrible secret. The supernatural elements are handled with genuine eeriness, and the story's isolated island setting creates a claustrophobic intensity that builds steadily toward its climax.
The Devil in Iron
The Devil in Iron pits Conan against an ancient demonic entity on a haunted island. It's classic Howard — relentless action, supernatural menace, and a hero whose response to cosmic evil is to hit it with a sword until one of them stops moving.
Howard's Prose: Why It Works as Audio
Robert E. Howard may be the most natural audiobook author in the English language. His prose has qualities that are perfectly suited to oral delivery:
Rhythm
Howard wrote with a drummer's sense of rhythm. His sentences build, accelerate, and crash with a musicality that is enhanced rather than diminished by being read aloud. Action sequences in particular have a percussive quality that drives the listener forward.
Sensory Intensity
Howard's descriptions engage all the senses — the heat of a desert sun, the smell of a jungle swamp, the clash of steel on steel. This sensory richness creates vivid mental imagery that serves the audiobook format beautifully, where the listener's imagination must supply the visuals.
Emotional Directness
There is nothing coy or understated about Howard's emotional range. Joy is exultant, rage is murderous, grief is devastating, and triumph is glorious. This emotional directness translates powerfully to audio, where the narrator can fully inhabit the emotional extremes.
Complete Story Arcs
Most Conan stories are novelettes — 10,000 to 20,000 words — making them perfect for a single bedtime listening session. Each story is complete in itself, with its own setting, conflict, and resolution. You can listen to one story per night and never worry about losing your place in a longer narrative.
The Legacy of Sword and Sorcery
Robert E. Howard died in 1936 at the age of thirty. In his brief career, he created a character and a genre that have proven essentially immortal. Conan has appeared in novels, comics, films, television shows, and video games for nearly a century, and the sword and sorcery genre he invented continues to thrive.
But the truest version of Conan — the most vivid, the most complex, the most electrifying — remains the literary original. Howard's prose has a raw power that no adaptation has fully captured. The stories were written at white heat by a young man who lived in his imagination with an intensity that is palpable on every page.
On Insomnus, we pair Howard's Conan stories with a 174 Hz solfeggio frequency — the deep, grounding tone that provides a stable foundation for the primal energies of the Hyborian Age. Combined with a gentle delta binaural beat, the experience balances Howard's fierce energy with the calming acoustic environment needed for sleep. It's a surprisingly effective combination: the adventures of Conan carry your mind away from daily concerns, while the frequencies guide your body toward rest.
For more on the pulp era that produced Howard, see our articles on the golden age of science fiction magazines and H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror — Howard's contemporary and correspondent, who worked the dark side of the same literary street.