In terms of the writing: Tolkien’s epics took place in “Middle-Earth” which had hints of but little direct connection to the present world, while Howard’s Conan stories took place in the Hyborian Age which was explicitly placed in a period of barbarism and empire-building that occurred between the fall of the continent of Atlantis and the rise of the ancient civilizations we know these explicit references are most conspicuous in names we recognize from legend and history: Argos, Corinthia, Himaleya, Zimbabwe, and others. Howard’s most prolific decade was the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, while Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings during the 1940s. Interestingly, both were born within a decade of each other. Howard shot himself in the head at the age of 30 when he learned his mother was dying. Tolkien died comfortably in his 70s after the death of his wife, and surrounded by doting children. Howard was the child of an itinerant Texas physician, eschewed vocational paths other than writing, and tailored his writing to the profitable markets of the day. So here are the differences: Tolkien was from the British intellectual class, taught at Oxford, and wrote his most famous work as a personal project to rehabilitate certain elements of mythology in a fictitious setting with British sensibilities. It’s interesting where the differences between the two writers and the two genres are gaping and stark, as well as where they are surprisingly close. I was almost tempted to go with Fritz Leiber instead, since I have fond memories of reading about Lankhmar as a kid, but I thought Howard would make a striking comparison to Tolkien, and that ended up being the case. I know… that our main focus this summer is the sweeping, epic “high fantasy,” but I wanted at least a basic understanding of “low fantasy” Sword and Sorcery, and Howard is consider to be its founding father. This is correspondence related to my summer Epic Fantasy reading project.
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