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#EverythingYouKnowAboutConanIsProbablyWrong

Part 2: Why didn't Howard write Conan's origin tale?

TLDR: He didn't want to.

Long version: The reason you’ve never seen Howard’s version of Conan on-screen is the same reason you never will; the vast majority of screenplays...

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...since the late 80s have emphasized “The Hero’s Journey”.

And Conan doesn’t have one.

Howard wrote the Conan stories in the 1930s, before “the Hero’s Journey” writing method existed. Joseph Campbell did not begin championing the monomyth until 1944. Lord of the Rings...

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...wasn't published until the 50s. And Campbell did not perfect his cycle until 1987.

It would take a complete visionary with balls of steel to throw the past 40 years of popular screenwriting into the bin and film Conan’s origin the way Howard wrote it; and then...

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Read 29 tweets
.#EverythingYouKnowAboutConanIsProbablyWrong

Time for Conan's origin tale.

"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..."

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...Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet." - Robert E. Howard

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Robert E. Howard never wrote Conan's origin tale.

But, many details about Conan's youth and his homeland DO appear in other stories, poems, and essays that Howard DID write, and also in a letter to P. S. Miller in 1936, just months before his death.

3/x barbariankeep.com/millerlet.html
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