The Monsters of the Hyborian Age 8: The Dragon

If you missed last time…

The Dragon from “Red Nails” is one of the more unusual monsters of the Hyborian Age. Like the giant snake or the tower spider, it is pretty much a natural creature (if really big). It has no supernatural connection, nor is it summoned or used by a sorcerer. Robert E. Howard could have easily stranded his hero and heroine up a cliff with a couple of lions. Kenneth Gilbert did a similar scene back in 1926 with a mammoth.

The dragon of “Red Nails” has usually been rendered by artists as a dinosaur. The creature traps Conan and Valeria on a cliffside after killing their horses. The two find the skeleton of some other poor soul who had been trapped there. The fruit growing on the slope is poisonous and the giant lizard is well fed and very patient. Things don’t look so good…

Howard describes the beast thus:

Through the thicket was thrust a head of nightmare and lunacy. Grinning jaws bared rows of dripping yellow tusks; above the yawning mouth wrinkled a saurian-like snout. Huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified, stared unwinkingly at the petrified humans clinging to the rock above it. Blood smeared the scaly, flabby lips and dripped from the huge mouth.

The head, bigger than that of a crocodile, was further extended on a long scaled neck on which stood up rows of serrated spikes, and after it, crushing down the briars and saplings, waddled the body of a titan, a gigantic, barrel-bellied torso on absurdly short legs. The whitish belly almost raked the ground, while the serrated back-bone rose higher than Conan could have reached on tiptoe. A long spiked tail, like that of a gargantuan scorpion, trailed out behind. (“Red Nails” by Robert E. Howard)

Conan defeats the beast by using the poisonous fruit. He coats the tip of a spear and stabs the monster in the mouth. It takes a while but eventually the dragon dies before the two go on to Conan’s final appearance in Weird Tales (serialized July August-September October 1936). Some critics and readers have described the dragon as a cross between a stegosaurus and an allosaurus. This kind of dino-confusion can be seen in the slightly earlier Doc Savage novel The Land of Terror (1933) by Lester Dent. Unfortunately, I have no idea how knowledgeable REH was on dinosaurs. His details may have come simply from other Pulp writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Howard probably wrote his ERB-inspired Almuric around this time as well. It would appear years after his death.)

Let’s take a look at how artists have drawn this strange beast. Harold S. De Lay was the original illustrator for Weird Tales. His art has a kind of old-fashioned Howard Pyle look.

The next artist to draw the dragon thirty-seven years later was Barry Windsor-Smith for Savage Tales #2 (October 1973). The story was adapted by Roy Thomas. A few pages were inked by Pablo Marcos but Smith re-inked them and colored them for the Marvel Treasury #4 (1974). This Conan tale is often reprinted in specialty editions, like Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian #1 (1983).

The dragon is not really important to the story that follows. Conan and Valeria will discover another lost city (See “The Slithering Shadow”), finding themselves in the middle of a very ancient war. Howard knew the story was long and would be serialized so the dragon offers a nice first segment to the tale. It also gives a reasonable explanation why Xuchotil was lost to the outside world. With a fierce dinosaur guarding the forest around the city, visitors were not welcome, only delicious.

I think it also interesting that Howard chose a dragon that might be a dinosaur. If he had gone full-on traditional Fantasy the monster would have had wings and breathed fire. Howard’s much more earthly beast lacks those features (which makes the whole cliff venture possible). It is slightly more plausible as a long-lived remnant of another age that may have inspired the medieval tales of dragons. Howard was fond of these kinds of throwbacks in his pseudo-history. Roy and Dann Thomas would borrow a little of this mojo for one issue of Arak, Son of Thunder (#32, April 1984).

For plenty more dino comics go here…

Next time…The Crawler…