Ours is an age of great power for fans of the fantastic. George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, rife with incest (and, almost as fascinating, intrigue), rules over the kingdom of cable television; preview images from the big-screen version of Tolkien’s The Hobbit generate a deafening elvish buzz across the vast uncharted wastes of the Internet; and would-be-wizards are only just loosening their eldritch grip on the decadent and depraved hordes called the entertainment media, as they mourn the closing of the filmic incarnation of the saga called Harry Potter.

Which means our favourite drawer of swords and hewer of heads, Conan of Cimmeria, may be feeling a tad overshadowed. Verily, a new Conan the Barbarian film rampages its way into theatres this very day and we expect this, the most macho movie of the month, to spew forth ample amounts of muscles, midriffs and mayhem. We will leave it to the scribes that a-peel, the bards that are beancounters and the tomatoes most rotten to ultimately decide whether this latest incarnation of our favourite slayer-of-thousands is “a success” or merely “meh.” As long as it is about Conan, then, by Crom, it cannot help but contain moments of “wikkidawesome.”

Texan Robert E. Howard created Conan in the early 1930s, sending the character on a score of pulp magazine adventures before the author’s death in 1936. The barbarian’s battles predate those of Middle Earth by decades, and in the 80-plus years since his creation he has rarely had a decade pass in which he didn’t take on a new quest in one medium or another. A current comic-book incarnation, deserving winner of numerous industry awards, was launched by Dark Horse in 2004, and is arguably responsible for the lion’s share of restoring Conan’s post-millennium credibility.

Still, Howard’s character rarely ranks amongst the modern age’s most beloved fantasy creations. Conan suffers from a twist of fate in comparison to the Bagginses and Potters of the world, and even in comparison to their many imitators and knock-offs: The bulging swordsman’s many adventures, born as they are from the pulps, are more episodic than epic. As he follows no single great sweeping narrative, Conan is marked as a kind of skull-cracking Rodney Dangerfield (well, without the jokes): He gets no respect, I tells ya’.

This means that Conan’s creator, Howard, also goes without the respect he’s due. One of the greatest skills of a fantasy author is the talent for “world building.” Tolkien and Rowling are arguably loved as much for their worlds as for characters. Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth is as important to his created reality as any of his linguistic games, and the fantasy writers who followed in his wake, including Terry Brooks (the Shannara series), David Eddings (The Belgariad series), and a dozen others, right down to the current cable TV darling George R.R. Martin, wedge the maps of their worlds into the front pages of each new thousand-page doorstop. The world Howard created for Conan, though –“the Hyborian Age”– is one of the greatest of the Swords-and-Sorcery genre. Howard got there before them all, working in the wilds of Texas without the benefit of an Oxford education like Tolkien’s, and without the famous map of Middle Earth to use as his template.

Conan’s adventures take place on our Earth, in a lost age before any of our recorded history, at a time when all the continents and their civilizations are melded into one. Howard plundered historical works, ethnography and myth to create a world big enough to contain a man like Conan, who roamed from his native Cimmeria (in real-life, an ancient name for Wales) through the frosty Vanaheim and Asgard (names taken from Norse legend and packed with proto-Vikings) through the mountains and deserts of Afghulistan to the temples and rivers of Iranistan (we’ll let you imagine your own enemies, here) and far, far beyond. This means that Conan could meet and conquer: frost giants; harem girls; pirates; cavemen; snakes; general hordes; and everything in between. Better still, he could do it all in one glorious age-encompassing every adventure setting from around the world and across time, pretty much up to the invention of the steam engine. Alas, you give your hero a title like “The Barbarian” and people tend to forget everything but the wanton limb-hacking.

Slave, gladiator, mercenary, liberator, thief, avenger, pirate, king and, sure, barbarian. Conan was all those. But it’s his contribution to imaginary cartography that may be this character’s greatest gift. Whether or not this current charge across the silver screen can pay proper homage to Conan’s legacy, you can bet that there will be more adventures to come for the “black-haired, sullen-eyed” warrior, and more chances to return to the Hyborian age, and its satisfyingly barbaric pleasures.

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Images courtesy of Alliance Films, HBO, New Line Cinema and Warner Bros.