Atlantis

Atlantis is the legendary sunken civilization of the Hyborian Age, the mythic origin point from which the secret of steel descends into the world of Conan. The Nemedian Chronicles frame the entire tale within the age "between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the rise of the sons of Aryas," marking Atlantis as the boundary of a half-forgotten epoch when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars. It was into this age undreamed of that Conan came, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, to tread the jewelled thrones of the Earth beneath his sandalled feet. Atlantis thus anchors the chronology of the Hyborian world, the vanished civilization whose fall opens the era in which the Cimmerian's saga unfolds.

The Atlantean Inheritance of Steel

The deepest significance of Atlantis lies in its role as the ancestral keeper of the secret of steel. According to the tale Corin the smith tells his young son on a rocky ridge swept clear of snow, the Earth Giants once dwelt within the earth, crafty and wise, the fashioners of stone and wood, the miners of gems and gold. In the darkness of chaos, they befooled even Crom, the Father of Gods, and stole from him the most precious possession of the immortals: the secret of the silvery metal that, when bent, springs into shape again. Greatly enraged, Crom smote the giants with blasts of wind and bolts of fire, and the earth swallowed them forever. But in his wrath, the god overlooked the secret of the beaten metal and left it upon the battlefield, where the first men found it—the Atlanteans of legend, the ancestors of the Cimmerians before the dawn of history. This myth establishes Atlantis not merely as a lost land but as the conduit through which divine knowledge passed into mortal hands, the origin of the steel that Conan will come to trust above all else.

The Secret Carried South and North

Corin the smith, Conan's father, is the living inheritor of this Atlantean legacy. He had come out of the south lands bearing within his breast the arcane art of the secret of steel, that precious inheritance from the ancient Atlanteans, believed lost and forgotten by all who lived in the darkling age. The folk about his village thought him something of a warlock for turning iron into steel, and indeed he was something of a godling to his neighbours. When forging the great sword that would become Conan's legacy, Corin explained to his awe-struck son that the blade must be baked at a constant temperature in a charcoal bed, declaring: "This is the secret possessed of the folk of Atlantis; this is the knowledge I brought hither from the south when I fled my former clan." The forging itself was a ritual of Atlantean craft: the anvil rang like a bronzen bell, fountains of sparks rose and fell, the glowing iron assumed the shape of a mighty sword blade, and the cross-guard was fashioned into the form of a stag's antlers, the grip wrapped with string made from the gut of forest tigers, the pommel cast in the likeness of the hooves of elk. When assembled, the weapon was a thing of bright enchantments, the polished blade flashing like a mirror as if imbued with the spirits of the air. Atlantis thus lives on not in its sunken cities but in this forged steel, the tangible inheritance that Corin passes to his son.

The Riddle of Steel and the Cimmerian Code

The Atlantean secret is inseparable from the philosophy Corin imparts to Conan on that stormy night. Standing against the fury of the tempest, the burly, bearded smith thrust his enormous two-handed sword into the heart of the storm and chanted an ancient rune spell, then taught his son the central doctrine of the Cimmerian code: "Know that in all the world you can trust no one, neither man nor woman nor beast, neither spirit nor demon nor god. But you can trust a blade of well-forged steel." The heart of a man, Corin declared, is like a piece of unworked iron, to be hammered by adversity and forged by suffering nigh unto the point of breaking, purified and shaped on the anvil of despair and loss. Only when the heart has become as steel will a man be worthy to wield a keen-edged sword in battle. This teaching, rooted in the Atlantean inheritance, becomes the moral foundation of Conan's life—the riddle of steel that he must master before he is worthy to bear a sword such as the gods once bore against the giants. The boy did not understand at first, but his father promised he would in time.

The Lost Land in Conan's Journey

The shadow of Atlantis falls across Conan's entire trajectory. When the Vanir raiders swept down upon the Cimmerian village, shattering the thin ice of the stream and slaughtering the inhabitants, the boy was dragged into slavery, his mother Maeve's severed head rolling in the mire at his feet. The surviving captives, a sad remnant of what had been a close-knit Cimmerian clan, trudged across the pristine snow into slavery, while the Vanir put all buildings to the torch and trampled the coals so that no evidence of the dwelling place of men would remain. Conan was chained to the Wheel of Pain, grinding grain beneath its ponderous weight, and later sold to Toghrul, a pit master from Hyrkania who travelled the lands of Nordheim staging fights for the amusement of local chieftains. Throughout these trials, the Atlantean inheritance remained his only compass—the knowledge that steel alone could be trusted, that his heart must be forged by suffering into the hardness of the metal his ancestors had discovered. When he finally journeyed east toward Shadizar of Zamora, the crossroads of the world, he carried the ancient sword taken from the cave of the grinning skeleton, whetted to a razor edge, a blade whose lineage stretched back to the Atlantean discovery of the beaten metal.

The Steel Within the Man

The culmination of the Atlantean legacy comes in Conan's final confrontation with Thulsa Doom. The cult leader, who had once demonstrated his power by commanding a young girl to leap to her death, had mocked the value of steel, declaring: "What is steel, compared to the hand that wields it; what is the hand, without a mind to command it?" Yet when Conan's sword sighed as it swept up in a great arc and clove the swaying snake head from the serpent-bodied Doom, the Cimmerian spoke the final word on the riddle: "My father was the light of day; Thulsa Doom, my night. Yet in one thing he spoke true. What matters is not the steel within the blade, but the steel within the man." This is the Atlantean secret fulfilled—not the mere metal, but the forging of the heart that Corin promised on the storm-swept ridge. The blade that Conan wielded was the inheritance of Atlantis, but the strength to wield it was the inheritance of his own suffering, the heart hammered into steel through slavery, the Pit, and the loss of all he loved. Atlantis, the sunken civilization whose secret was stolen from the gods and found by the first men, thus completes its arc: from mythic origin to forged blade to the steel within the man who would become Conan the Great, ruler of Aquilonia, the mightiest lord of his day.