Hyborian Age
The Hyborian Age is a fictional period of Earth's history within the artificial mythology created by Robert E. Howard, serving as the setting for the sword and sorcery tales of Conan the Barbarian.
[1] Howard described the Hyborian Age taking place sometime after the sinking of Atlantis and before the beginning of recorded ancient history.
[3] More recently, Dale Rippke proposed that the Hyborian Age should be placed further in the past, around 32,500 BC, prior to the beginning of the Last Glacial Maximum.
By conceiving a timeless setting – a vanished age – and by carefully choosing names that resembled our history, Howard avoided the problem of historical anachronisms and the need for lengthy exposition.
[7] The essay begins with the end of the Thurian Age (the setting for Howard's King Kull stories) and the destruction of its civilizations, Lemuria and Atlantis, by a geological cataclysm.
Often, the new invaders would wipe away the defenders before absorbing them, resulting in a tangled web of Hyborian tribes and nations with varying ancestral elements within their bloodlines.
These nomads lived in tents made out of the hides of horses, but soon abandoned them in favor of their crude but durable stone houses.
The southernmost of the early kingdoms was Koth, which was established north of the lands of Shem and soon started extending its cultural influence over the southern shepherds.
They included a nameless farming nation related to the people of the Shem and a warlike Pictish tribe who had previously conquered them.
But the conquerors here decided to maintain the kingdom with its old name, merged with the defeated Hyperboreans and adopted elements of Hyborian culture.
In his fantasy setting of the Hyborian Age, Howard created imaginary kingdoms to which he gave names inspired by or adapted from a variety of mythological and historical sources.
Most of these correspondences are drawn from "Hyborian Names", an appendix featured in Conan the Swordsman by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter.
[8] NOTE: Meru is not one of Howard's original Hyborian Age countries, and was created by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter for "The City of Skulls".
NOTE: Uttara Kuru is not one of Howard's original Hyborian Age countries, it appears in Conan the Avenger by Björn Nyberg.
NOTE: Yamatai is not one of Howard's original Hyborian Age countries, but appeared in a Savage Sword of Conan comic adaptation.
In Vendhya, the followers of Asura seek truth beyond the illusions of the physical world, and the Hyborian devotees of Mitra are almost Christian in their merging of asceticism with a commitment to compassion and justice.
Crom is never depicted as directly intervening or otherwise explicitly causing any event in the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard.
There is little consistent evidence in his works that Crom actually exists, in contrast to the demons and highly advanced aliens appearing in "The God in the Bowl" and "The Tower of the Elephant", while the story "The Phoenix on the Sword" implies that Set is one of H. P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones.
Howard's story "Black Colossus" features a princess vocally directed by Mitra to recruit Conan as her champion,[12] but Crom makes no such appearances.
Mitra is a personification of good, popular amongst people of the era.He is probably loosely based on the Vedic and Zoroastrian figure by the same name, and in the Hyborian universe, his worship generally represents Christianity.
Mitra's worship is dominant, effectively the state religion, in the Hyborian countries corresponding to modern Western Europe.
Mitra is the chief god of most of the civilized Hyborian kingdoms, including Aquilonia, Ophir, Nemedia, Brythunia, Corinthia, and Zingara.
[16] Mitra appears directly in Howard's "Black Colossus", where he speaks to Princess Yasmela of Khoraja and guides her in an hour of desperate danger.
Though he had never commanded more than a "company of cut-throats", Conan emerges as a victorious general in a historically important battle involving tens of thousands of soldiers.
In "The Hour of the Dragon" Orastes resurrects Xaltotun with an incantation of Skelos, "Ancient when Atlantis sank", i.e. much older than Stygia, let alone Set-worship.
