Conan as White Savior

Conan is a White American hero: self-sufficient and independent, strong, honest, and moral, abiding by his own code of honour. His “dual identity of being a savage, but being white,”72 makes him naturally suited to lead the softer, more decadent and corrupted peoples of the south; he becomes, among other things, king of the southern, medievalist realm of Aquilonia. Pulp adventure stories, a genre in which Howard wrote and of which his Conan stories can be considered a fantasy sub-set, were steeped in the concept of the ‘white man’s burden’ according to which “primitive” races benefit from White leadership.73 Conan is depicted as a natural leader of peoples of other races on multiple occasions. In “The Hour of the Dragon” he instigates a mutiny on a ship crewed by black slaves who, as Benjamin Garstad observes, “were apparently docile until they found a white leader.”74 In this tale, as in others, Conan is strong, decisive, rational, and freedomloving in contrast with: “the blacks [who] were frothing crazy now, shaking and tearing at their chains and shrieking.”75 Conan is the Germanic barbarian tribesman of Tacitus, filtered through nineteenth-century American Anglo-Saxonism and re-modeled for twentieth-century consumption.