Character closeup: CONAN

One hero towers above all others in the Hyborian world. Black-haired, sullen-eyed, with gigantic melancholies, this is Conan the Cimmerian, barbarian, thief, pirate, raider, mercenary, general, and finally king of the greatest empire of his time.
Conan was born on a battlefield, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding Vanir. The country claimed by and roved over by his clan lay in the northwest of Cimmeria, but Conan was of mixed blood, although a purebred Cimmerian. His grandfather was a member of a southern tribe who had fled from his own people because of a blood-feud and after long wanderings, eventually taken refuge with the people of the north. He had taken part in many raids into the Hyborian nations in his youth, before his flight, and perhaps it was the tales he told of those softer countries which roused in Conan, as a child, a desire to see them."
The son of a blacksmith, Conan grew to boyhood in the hills of Cimmeria, honing his strength and prowess by hunting the wild mountain beasts. At age 15, already standing six feet and weighing 180 pounds but still not full grown, he received his baptism of battle as the Cimmerian clans joined in an attack against Vanarium, an Aquilonian outpost encroaching on their homeland.
In the year following the destruction of Vanarium, Conan made his first journey beyond Cimmeria. He spent some months among a tribe of the Aesir, fighting with the Vanir and the Hyperboreans, and developing a hate for the latter which lasted all his life."
It is here that the recorded saga of Conan, begins...