Will Conan the Cimmerian help Yasmina avenge her kingly brother’s death? Robert E. Howard, today on The Classic Tales Podcast. Welcome to The Classic Tales Podcast. Thank you for listening. The Classic Tales Podcast is listener supported. If you enjoy listening to The Classic Tales, please consider becoming a supporting member. It helps support the podcast, and it’s a great way to build out your library of classics. By making a monthly donation of just $5, you’ll receive a corresponding thank-you code for $8 off any digital audiobook download. You win, and we get to keep going strong. Go now to www.classictalesaudiobooks.com and become a member today. If you have the Classic Tales App, check your special features for more Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. If you’d like to share a snippet of today’s show with your friends, join us in beta testing the Airr app. Links can be found in the show notes. We also have a merchandise store where you can get shirts and tote bags with your favorite Classic Tales Covers. Again, links are in the show notes. And check us out on Spotify – our new podcast partner. We’re still chipping away at Hunchback. It’s on its way. Be sure you don’t miss is, and become a monthly supporter. Once it’s ready, I’ll send an email out to all of our current supporters. If you’ve let your membership lapse, be sure and resubscribe. And by the way, the only reason I’m being skittish about announcing a release date for Hunchback is simply because I don’t know how much more of my time I can throw toward it. I’m not trying to be like an enigmatic jerk, but at this point, it’s kind of what I can commit to. I can get it done in the near future, send it out to the supporters and move on. I hope you don’t mind. If you have any suggestions, feel free to send me an email at [email protected] Today we are dipping our toe into the world of Conan the Cimmerian. Now, I decided to do this book for a couple reasons. 1) Howard’s Conan series was a very important chapter in the history of fantasy. Many authors continued the series after Howard’s death – over 50 novels and dozens of short stories of Conan were written by authors other than Howard. 2) This method of story telling, using the cycle of the hero and using larger than life archetypal characters, is something that we have largely moved away from. I’ll explain it in Star Wars: So, in the original trilogy, you had the archetypal characters: The hero, the damsel in distress, the adventurer, the evil villain. This collection of characters are seen in millions of stories, and resonate with something deep within us. This is how storytelling has been done for centuries. This Conan story is a fantastic example of this method. Today, we tend to demand that our characters are more nuanced, complicated, and multi-faceted. The stories that follow the same traditional pattern, using the archetypal characters, seem to not do too well. And so this Conan story is an interesting look at how it used to be done, and hopefully if parts ring a bit shallow, we can realize that we’ve become more developed in our storytelling nowadays. And now, The People of the Black Circle, Part 1 of 4, by Robert E. Howard. Tap here to go to www.classictalesaudiobooks.com and become a financial supporter! Tap here to get early access to the Airr app, and share your favorite snippets of the episode with your friends! Share on Twitter @bjharrisonaudio, and your clip might be on the show! Tap here to purchase Huckleberry Finn – the first Hybrid Audiobook Tap here to go the The Classic Tales Merchandise store! Hear us on roku: