Several years ago, in his series on the Conan stories, Mr. John C. Wright wrote about the theme of how barbarians were stronger than civilized men:

“Zaporavo was the veteran of a thousand fights by sea and by land. There was no man in the world more deeply and thoroughly versed than he in the lore of swordcraft. But he had never been pitted against a blade wielded by thews bred in the wild lands beyond the borders of civilization. Against his fighting-craft was matched blinding speed and strength impossible to a civilized man.Conan’s manner of fighting was unorthodox, but instinctive and natural as that of a timber wolf. The intricacies of the sword were as useless against his primitive fury as a human boxer’s skill against the onslaughts of a panther.”

As for me, I feel sorry for the man who is the most well-versed and skilled swordsman in the whole world being bested by a quick and strong adversary who is just born better than he. Hardly seems fair.

My own limited experience as a fencer gives a ripe and loud Bronx Cheer to the idea that natural talent can overwhelm trained skill with a blade. I have fought men stronger and faster than I, but less skilled, and have fought men slighter and slower than I, but more skilled. The victories are not just occasionally or even mostly to the more skilled swordsman, but inevitably. My stronger but unskilled foe could not land a single touch on me, no, not one. My weaker but more highly skilled foe did not let me land a single touch on him, no, not one.

On the other hand, if the reader is not willing to accept, as a given, that naked aborigines, scratching themselves with sticks, living in mud huts, drinking from mud puddles, and eating mud-worms are not stronger and faster than the Olympic Athletes or US Marines formed by training grounds or bootcamps of civilization, such a reader simply is not entering into the daydream of the noble savage, and into the spirit of a Conan story.

It is as stubborn as saying there is no such planet as Kripton, or no such thing as an Amazon, or that no orphaned millionaire fights crime in secret by dressing as a bat. The one unreal conceit to be granted the author is the ticket price for entering any fiction story. Anyone unwilling to pay is left outside, and will never get what this genre of stories are about, or what their appeal is.

Now, Mr. Wright is of course correct about the suspension of disbelief required, and how that is merely the price of admission to the fun. But there is one thing I would like to say in defense of the superiority of the barbarian over the civilized man, and that is, while Mr. Wright is certainly correct that the best that civilization has to offer will tend to massively overwhelm the best that barbarity has to offer, this is not nearly so true of the averages.

Barbarians—if by that we mean hunter-gatherers and not merely people who don’t speak Greek or else Germans—will be, on average, moderately strong and moderately athletic. They actually tend to be decently fed and decently healthy, since in the places where the hunter-gatherer lifestyle works it tends to work quite well and require quite a bit less work than agriculture does to meet one’s caloric needs without the same danger of famine as monocultural agriculture. They have very little in the way of refined sugars or alcohol, and often do a lot of walking and a non-trivial amount of climbing. (I’m painting with broad strokes, of course; there’s a great deal of individual variation.) This will not tend to make anyone nearly as strong as an athlete who trains specifically for strength and speed and who has access to great abundances of foods, as the cream of the crop of civilization has.

But on the other hand, civilized men in the age of mechanized farming, which was when Howard was writing and almost certainly what he was really writing about, could be almost unlimitedly soft and weak unless they specifically chose to be better. And even when they chose to be better than soft and weak, it was often a play form of it, like many modern martial arts.

Modern martial arts suffer from the same problem that all martial training has—you can’t actually practice killing people, so you have to practice the skill of killing people with equipment which prevents you from actually killing them. And, almost invariably, in addition to safe equipment you need to impose rules which prevent injury, too. These rules create an even playing field if everyone is following them, but they can create openings for people who are not following the rules.

The flip side of this, of course, is that experience can be easily misleading; generals of armies are known for often fighting the last battle, not the present one, and this will apply to fighters whose only teacher is experience no less than to generals. There are things you only learn by trying a thousand times, and no one survives a thousand fights to the death. Eventually you come across someone too tall, or too short, or just too lucky, for your previous experience to help you.

Howard’s solution in Conan is the raw fury of the barbarian; unmatched power produced by pure, bestial adrenaline. It’s nice in theory and even works if Conan is just a symbol for nature because hurricanes and volcanoes have orders of magnitude more power than any of the works of man. If Conan is just a man it may work in theory but it doesn’t work in practice—not against an expert.

But Howard isn’t really writing about experts, not real experts. Zaporavo is not meant to be a man who’s fought in a thousand real sword fights and is genuinely skilled at sword fighting because he’s practiced it. I mean, Howard literally wrote that, but I don’t think that he meant it. What he meant (I contend) was that Zaporavo knew the theory of sword craft, and had lots of experience in civilized sword fights, which were under rules because his opponents were also so civilized that they were detached from reality even in a duel to the death. That is, he had the virtues of civilization but also the vices of civilization.

Does that make sense for a long-experienced pirate who lived by his wits and skill? Oh heavens no. But the artistic point is that civilized human beings lost their contact with nature, which is far more powerful than our puny intellects.

And that was certainly going on in the 1930s. One of the curious things, if you knew people who grew up in the 1910s and 1920s, was that they were practically allergic to exercise. (Not all of them, of course; movements such as Muscular Christianity had been trying to get people to want to exercise since Victorian times.) This is a complex historical phenomenon I don’t have the space here even to sketch out with justice, but the short, short version is that a man in the 1930s could look around and conclude that his fellow men wanted to be weak and delicate while attributing to themselves all of the power of technology. They wanted, to use G. K. Chesterton’s phrase, “to sit on sofas and be a hardy race.”

Nearly one hundred years later, I don’t think that this can be appreciated as much because in the intervening decades professional athletes have become celebrated heroes of our culture. Laziness abounds, but the lazy will profess that they should be exercising.

There’s also the issue that the 1930s was the era of the Great Depression, when it looked to many like civilization was failing. I don’t mean failing to be perfect, as it is common to complain about now and in all eras, but failing to be even viable in the basic sense. It was failing to provide jobs for many and failing to provide food for some. (Under-nutrition was more common than outright starvation, but it was fairly wide-spread.) Under these conditions, it looked to many like the collapse of civilization back into barbarism was imminent. And, given what the second world war was like, there may even have been some truth to the expectation.

We have something a little similar in that many people were promised by schools and universities that they were becoming the elites of society when they weren’t. This has been described as “over-producing elites” and they are bitterly disappointed and mistake having been lied to for society collapsing. However, their anticipation of society collapsing looks very different, since they are (wannabe) elites, with at least pretensions to elite tastes.

I think that if we take this historical context into account, the symbolism of the tale rings a bit more true, and requires less effort to buy our ticket with the suspension of disbelief.