"Barbarism must always ultimately triumph"

Brian Phillips for Grantland comments on the enduring appeal of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian:

There's an awesomeness quotient here that accounts for a part of the story's success. But what's really striking is how grim [Howard's third installment] "The Tower of the Elephant" is. In sharp contrast to most heroic fantasy, there's no overriding moral order, no dichotomy of good vs. evil, no trustworthy authority that makes everything make sense. Yara is evil, but Conan is a thief, and the elephant creature is simply unfathomable. The world — and this is common to all the Conan stories — is essentially an anarchy of situations; what happens just happens, with no final judgment or possibility of redemption. You climb a tower, you discover a gruesomely tortured elephant-headed alien, you cut its heart out. Maybe you decide to get revenge on its behalf. On to the next adventure.

What's the appeal of all this? The Lord of the Rings was the perfect fantasy for WWII-era Europe, the story of an external evil defeated by a courageous alliance. The Conan stories address a more insidious threat, the decay of civilization from within. Science fiction and the western took opposite tacks to create frontier adventures for a world with no more frontiers; Howard created a sort of nightmare inversion of both, a world in which the ragged edge of civilization is always rolling backward. "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind," he wrote in the Conan story "Beyond the Black River." "Civilization is unnatural. … And barbarism must always ultimately triumph." It wasn't a cheerful form of escapism — Howard killed himself with a gunshot to the head in 1936, when he was 30 years old — but it was weirdly suited to a Depression America whose guiding institutions were widely perceived to have failed.

So, to Phillips the Conan saga is "an awesome story around a strain of American neurosis — the idea that civil society is about to collapse, and then it's just you and the road and your sword. That's a fantasy that tends to spring up in hard times, obviously, when cultural decline is combined with a suspicion of collective action."

Maybe so. I'm always a little skeptical of analysis done on the comic book genre. And it sounds a little like saying fans are "clinging to their guns and religion"--the unfortunate social analysis of a certain politician running for office. Still, it's an interesting observation to contrast Tolkien's Christian-infused fantasy with Howard's nihilistic one.