By Crom, Have I Got a Tale for You!
(And it doesn’t start in Cimmeria!)
Brought to you by today's word of the day: Quim.
Alright, fellow travelers of the Hyborian Age, pull up a flagon of your finest ale and lend an ear. We all know and love the tales of Conan the Barbarian, the Cimmerian who strode across the jeweled thrones of the Earth with sandaled feet. But have you ever wondered from whence the mighty Robert E. Howard drew his inspiration? Well, I’m here to tell you a tale of a writer who forged the path that Howard would later tread, a writer by the name of Harold Lamb. And the hero of our tale? None other than the grizzled, wandering Cossack, Khlit!
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “A Cossack? What’s a Cossack got to do with Conan?” And to that I say, “Everything!” You see, long before Conan was cleaving his way through Picts and sorcerers, Khlit was riding his shaggy pony across the vast, unforgiving steppes of Asia. He was a hero of a different sort, not a muscle-bound barbarian, but a wiry, old Cossack with a wit as sharp as his curved saber. He was a wanderer, an exile, a man who had seen too much of the world to be fooled by its illusions. Sound familiar?
Lamb’s tales of Khlit, published in the pulp magazine *Adventure*, were a revelation. They were fast-paced, action-packed, and set in exotic locales that fired the imagination. Lamb was a master of historical fiction, and his stories were filled with the clash of steel, the thunder of hooves, and the whispers of intrigue in forgotten cities. He wrote of the endless plains of Tartary, the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, and the dusty bazaars of Samarkand. He painted a world that was both savage and beautiful, a world where a lone warrior could carve out a kingdom or die a dog’s death in the dust.
And you know who was reading these stories with wide-eyed wonder? A young writer from Texas named Robert E. Howard. Howard himself admitted that Lamb was one of his favorite writers, and it’s not hard to see why. The DNA of Khlit is woven into the very fabric of Conan. Both are outsiders, men who are more at home in the saddle than on a throne. Both are men of action, who would rather solve a problem with a sword than with a silver tongue. And both are men who live by their own code, a code that is often at odds with the so-called “civilized” world.
But the influence goes deeper than that. Lamb’s stories gave Howard a blueprint for the Hyborian Age. The vast, sprawling world that Conan inhabits, with its myriad of cultures and kingdoms, is a direct descendant of the world that Lamb created for Khlit. Howard took Lamb’s historical settings and cranked them up to eleven, adding a dash of sorcery and a heaping helping of cosmic horror. But the foundation was already there, laid by the master storyteller, Harold Lamb.
So, the next time you pick up a Conan story, take a moment to remember the original bean flicker: Khlit the Cossack. The old warrior who rode out of the pages of *Adventure* and into the heart of a young Texan writer. For without Khlit, there would be no Conan. And that, my friends, is a thought too grim to contemplate.
