Barbarians, Nobility, and Lions - When A Warrior Becomes A Lord
Nearly a full century since the creation of Conan, Howard's archetype of the barbarian is still used to powerful effect.
That’s right, dear readers, it’s time yet again for me to pen another essay in response to the good Brothers, though this time around it will act as an accompaniment rather than a counterpoint. You see, upon reading the good Brothers’ latest essay on Howard’s famous and influential barbarian hero, I found myself thinking, as I often do when reading about Conan and Howard, how far reaching the influence of the character is. Conan’s reach is such that his glorious shadow is cast over the entire globe, and those of us who’s knowledge of the character is more intimate can see his hand on the shoulders of creatives the world over. Including in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Before I start digging into the idea that came to me last night, I want to talk in brief about what the good Brothers had to say about Howard’s one and only novel length Conan adventure. Long time readers of theirs will know that this is hardly the first time they’ve written about Hour of the Dragon. There’s plenty of good reason for this that extends beyond the simple fact that this was one of Howard’s only novel length works. (It may actually be his only novel, but I found it difficult to confirm that one way or the other.) Hour of the Dragon represents, in many ways, the culmination of Conan’s story. Yes, there were other adventures Howard wrote and released after this, including Red Nails, the final Conan story he wrote before his death and the one which introduced readers to the woman who would become his love interest in the first movie, the willful and clever Valeria.
However, Hour of the Dragon presents Conan in a rather unique light, as his journey across that story showcases the culmination of his growth across the entirety of his adventures. He had settled down and become a king much beloved by the people he led. He found a woman who loved him not just for his strength and masculine prowess, but his nobility, heroism, and honor as well. Conan may be a powerful and often violent man, but he’s also shown himself many times to be a largely good man. Not perfect by any stretch, but good, just, and fair. The lessons learned across his years of adventure are put on display in this story, and Howard’s goal of showcasing the character’s growth is exemplified in the events the good Brothers discuss in their essay: the rescuing of the black slaves that, as Conan later realizes, were the very crew he sailed with and made loyal to him when he joined with Belit, the Queen of the Black Coast. (Which itself is one of the very best Conan stories and comes highly recommended.)
I’ll not spoil the main thrust of the Brothers’ essay here, but I do wish to touch on two particular points they reference. Upon realizing who it is that’s given them their freedom, Conan’s former crew join in a unified chant of the name, “Amra,” which has direct significance to what I wish to talk about today. To quote the Brothers:
Amra is an interesting name that means ‘Lion’ and that Conan took up in his youth, when he used to raid a great deal of the known world. Even more infamous than even Belit the Queen of the Black Coast, he had forged tight bonds with his crew who seem to worship him as might a younger sibling or child their elder brother or father.
‘Amra! Amra!’ chanted the delirious blacks those who were left to chant. ‘The Lion has returned! Now will the Stygians howl like dogs in the night, and the black dogs of Kush will howl!’
And once again, after noting how the name was originally from Howard’s much earlier stories of Kull but later repurposed for Conan:
Amra here is different, the name means Lion which is interesting as a lion is often in the Bible associated with Christ as any reader of Narnia will tell you. Howard could not have been ignorant of this connotation, and what is more is that the lion is widely considered the ‘King of the Jungle’, with this being a triple nod. There’s of course the kingly reference, there’s the nod to the story of Kull and there is also the nod to Christ, the Returning King in the Bible.
As can be seen from these excerpts alone, the name of Amra and the symbolism of the lion hold a certain level of importance in Hour of the Dragon that isn’t necessarily obvious on the face of it, but is impossible to overlook once it’s noticed. This is made further clear throughout the course of the Brothers’ essay which, as before, I highly recommend reading if you haven’t already. I linked it back at the start of this essay, and I’ll do so again here. It’s a quick read that shouldn’t take longer than ten minutes.
Earlier I mentioned how the hand of Conan has come to rest on the shoulders of writers and creatives the world over. Conan is one of those sorts of figures that’s so well known at this point that even if you’ve never read his stories or seen his movies, there’s still a good chance that showing someone a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the original film or one of the myriad artistic depictions out there, particularly those by or inspired by Frank Frazetta’s famous interpretation, people will recognize it as Conan. (The illustration at the beginning of this essay is one such piece.) In that sense he’s not unlike characters such as Batman, Superman, Goku, and Godzilla, who are often immediately recognizable even to laypeople who know next to nothing about them.
The reach of characters like these transcends cultural bounds to reach to all corners of the globe. No matter how far removed you are from Japan, you’ll probably recognize Goku’s distinctive spiky hair and Godzilla’s charcoal gray skin and spiny dorsal plates. Likewise, even outside America Superman’s suit of red, blue, and that splash of yellow is iconic, and the silhouette of Batman can’t be mistaken. Conan’s recognizability arguably doesn’t reach quite the same heights as these four examples, but he’s pretty damned close from what I’ve seen, and his influence was once again felt in a very big way just a couple years ago, even if many people didn’t fully realize it.
When I say the name Miyazaki, the gentleman pictured above likely isn’t who you think of. Chances are that, for most of you, the name brings to mind the image of an older, kindly looking Japanese man with similarly short white hair, a well trimmed goatee and mustache, and glasses not so dissimilar from those worn by the man above. Naturally, I’m speaking of Hayao Miyazaki, world renown writer, animator, and director, as well as a major force behind the creation and atmospheric rise of Studio Ghibli. That said, for a certain subgroup of video game enjoyers which includes myself, there’s a second Miyazaki that holds sway over our lives.
The man pictured above is Hidetaka Miyazaki, and for some of you, that name already holds powerful meaning. Similar to Hayao Miyazaki made massive waves in the world of animation, Hidetaka Miyazaki ended up making waves in the world of video games when he released a game that, at first, seemed destined to be a colossal flop. That game was Demon’s Souls. Developed by From Software for the Playstation 3 all the way back in February 2009, the game proved to be a bust in Japan. The gameplay and the particular sort of challenge it provided simply didn’t appeal much to Miyazaki’s homegrown audience, and it was looking like his dream of creating dark and intricate fantasy games like these was going to wither on the vine. However, when it was released in North America later that year, and then hit Europe in 2010, this little game made enough ripples in those markets that Demon’s Souls became a cult gaming classic, and Miyazaki was offered the chance to experiment with this formula again.
Enter, Dark Souls.
Where Demon’s Souls achieved cult status through slow growth and word of mouth, Dark Souls was a more immediate hit. It wasn’t massive, but players who’d picked up and enjoyed Demon’s Souls were quick to snatch this new game up and start spreading the word once more. The snowball had finally started to roll down the hill on its own.
Fast forward to 2021, and From Software is a very well established Japanese gaming studio now known as the pioneers of the “Souls” style of game, to the point that the term “soulslike” was coined to represent other games that either tried to ape Miyazaki’s formula and style directly, or took one or more key elements of that style and attempted to iterate on it, to various degrees of success. By 2021, the studio had 6 games under its belt that were all generally considered to fall under this formula: Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 1, 2, and 3, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. (Note that while it’s often lumped in with the genre that fans have lovingly dubbed “Soulsborne” in the wake of Bloodborne’s release, Sekiro differs from the formula of the other five games in significant ways.)
2021 proved to be a thoroughly exciting year for Souls fans. At that point, five years had passed since the release of the last true Souls game, Dark Souls 3, which officially closed out that particular series about a year after its release with the launch of the game’s final DLC expansion, The Ringed City. Sekiro provided a good amount of satisfaction for fans waiting for From’s next mainline Souls style game, but it diverted from the Souls formula in significant ways, providing instead a stealth action game that relied on precision combat in a way that clearly borrowed some of the Souls DNA, but provided a host of entirely new mechanics which massively shook up the formula.
Fans were hungry for something new, and I was no different in that regard. Much as I enjoy playing and revisiting Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, I was looking forward to something new just the same as everyone else in the fandom. Well, in 2021, we got our first glimpse at that new something. After years of rumors, From Software and their publisher, Bandai Namco, had officially released the first story trailer for their most ambitious Souls game yet: Elden Ring.
The Souls community exploded with excitement, and the anticipation for what was to come built very swiftly. The community’s lore hounds, of which there are many due to the very indirect way in which the mainline Souls games and Bloodborne told their stories, were quick to start digging into the video and any extra material that From or Bandai Namco was giving out in hopes of guessing what the story of Elden Ring would entail and what this new open world we’d be playing in, the Lands Between, would be like. That hype carried on right up through the release of the game in February of 2022.
This wasn’t just a new game release, this was an event in the minds of gamers. Hardcore Souls fans were ravenous, ready to sink their teeth into lore and gameplay, while more casual gamers were excited to finally try their hand at facing From Software’s particular brand of difficulty and challenge, an element of their action RPGs which has since become the stuff of legend. Elden Ring quickly skyrocketed to being From’s best selling game ever, and its influence was such that it won Game of the Year at the 2022 VGAs. However, reception to the game was quickly becoming mixed in the weeks and months after its release. Discontent started to spread in certain circles and the shiny, golden luster of praise surrounding the game started to dim.
But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. No, this preamble was simply meant to show the kind of excitement that From’s reputation under Miyazaki’s leadership earned it, and to act as an opening to the discussion of where Miyazaki drew his inspiration from. For those unfamiliar, it’s a well known fact among the Souls fanbase that one of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s chief inspirations for all of the Soulsborne games is the late Kentaro Mirua’s dark fantasy manga epic, Berserk. However, while the games wear this influence on their sleeves, Miyazaki has also been very open about the fact that his design philosophy behind the games was inspired by the reading material he had access to as a child, most of which was foreign fantasy.
You see, Hidetaka Miyazaki didn’t exactly grow up in the lap of luxury. According to various interviews with him, his family wasn’t very well off at all, and one of the few forms of entertainment he had access to as a child was his local library. As someone who spent a good few years of his childhood living in a small town with some similar limitations, I have an idea what this is like. Miyazaki stated that he spent his time reading as many books as he could, with most of them being fantasy. Like many children, he found himself drawn to fantasy. However, most of the fantasy books he found were foreign, with most of them written in English, a language which he didn’t understand well at all. So he would skim through them, trying to piece together the stories based on pictures on the cover and in the books, and based on the few words and phrases he did understand. This process ignited his imagination, and it directly influenced the piecemeal way he presents his stories and settings across his action RPGs. To paraphrase his words, “I wanted to give players the same kind of experience I had in the library as a boy.”
Thus we come back around to the central topic of this essay, the far reaching influence of Conan. Knowledgeable fans of Miura’s work in Berserk will already be aware that he drew inspiration from the darker elements of Howard’s work, with ties able to be drawn between both Conan and Howard’s earlier character, the morally righteous Puritan, Solomon Kane. Thus, one might be tempted to think that Howard’s influence on Miyazaki was second-hand. In fact, that was something which I suspected myself. When playing the Souls games, outside of a small handful of notable exceptions, there’s not much in them which speaks directly to Conan’s sword and sorcery adventures. The influences more often have a “Five Degrees of Kevin Bacon” sort of feel, present because what influenced Miyazaki was itself influenced by Conan.
But then I read the good Brothers essay last night, and I found myself reminded of Conan’s saving of his old crew from slavery. As I read the article, I started to remember the scene in Hour of the Dragon where the men cheer and chant, “Amra!” And then the Brothers reminded me of the name’s meaning, of how Conan was called, “Amra the Lion” by those men, and of how he was respected even more than Belit, who tried to keep them in line with fear of her ferocity. I read these things, and an idea rapidly formed in my mind. Where Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro were concerned, any influences to Conan that were present would’ve been once or twice removed. There is no noble barbarian archetype in those games, no polite and honorable savage facing off against the dark side of civilized life.
Elden Ring is a different story.
When I purchased Elden Ring on its release, I was offered a free steel case upgrade that came with the unique cover art posted above. This art depicts the character of Godfrey, the First Elden Lord, and his spectral beast regent, Serosh. Now the lore of Elden Ring is broad and complicated, so I’m not going to dig too deeply into it here, but we will be taking a closer look at Godfrey because, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, it’s through him that the ties to Conan lie.
To begin with, let’s go over what the Elden Lord is. In the world of Elden Ring, there exists a cosmic entity which the people of the Lands Between call the Greater Will. This entity, essentially a distant and omnipotent god, is believed to be the source of life as it’s known in this world and seeks to maintain some form of order within the world. Based on the myriad endings within the game, it doesn’t seem as though the Greater Will cares which form order takes, just so long as there is order in some form. Well, for order to be maintained, the Greater Will needs some sort of presence in the world. Thus we have the Elden Ring, which represents the order of the world, as well as the anointed Gods and their appointed Lords which oversee and enforce the order of their time.
It’s strongly hinted that across the history of Elden Ring’s world, there have been multiple Gods and multiple Lords which served them. At the time the game is set in, the God appointed by the Greater Will is Queen Marika the Eternal. However, due to a complex series of events that I won’t dig into here, (as I said, Elden Ring’s lore is broad and complex, and it’s about to grow broader with the release of its first expansion later this month,) following the death of her son Godwyn the Golden, Markia decided to commit the gravest sin that she, a God appointed by the Greater Will, could commit: she shattered the Elden Ring and undermined the Golden Order, which was the established order of her time. Thus follows warfare, stagnation, and all sorts of chaos, all stuff which is quite typical to From’s preferred style of fantasy stories.
I’ve mentioned the concept of a Lord which serves under the God of a particular age a few times now, but what is the purpose of these Elden Lords? Well, the Elden Lords seem to have two primary purposes. First and foremost, they are to act as the consort to the God of a particular age, granting them demigod children. Marika is shown in the story to have taken two Elden Lords, with Godfrey being the first of them. The reason why she took two Lords is explained in their second purpose: to be a public leader for the people of their age.
Marika’s second Elden Lord was a man named Radagon. Radagon was a champion who distinguished himself with service in her armies. However, he was also a scholar, studying both tenets of faith, the arts of sorcery, and history, among other things. In short, Radagon was the exact sort of man that was ideal for leading the people in times of established peace and prosperity. Thus, he was made Elden Lord once Marika’s reign and age were fully establshed.
The First Elden Lord, Godfrey, is a very different story. In his day, the Golden Order was nascent. It was nowhere near being fully established, which meant this was a very conflict heavy time for Marika and her followers. Considering she was establishing what was essentially a new religion for what would become her new age, Marika found herself with no shortage of enemies that wished to see her stopped in order to preserve older traditions and ways of life. Thus did she need a strong leader of men, a warrior who would rally troops not just with strength of arms, but leadership as well.
She found that man in Godfrey, a powerful and savage warrior who originally went by the name of Hoarah Loux. Having already established himself as a leader among the warriors within his tribe, Hoarah Loux showcased his ferocity in full when facing Marika’s forces. This convinced her that with the right molding, he’d be an ideal candidate to lead her armies and stand at her side as Elden Lord. How she convinced him is never outright stated, but it is known that Marika was both a powerful and attractive woman before she shattered the Elden Ring, so it’s not hard to imagine how she might’ve won Hoarah Loux over.
In any case, Hoarah Loux learned the ways of civilized life through Marika. Taking on the name Godfrey, he established himself as a strong and noble leader of men who regularly led by example and joined his soldiers on the front lines as they marched to war. Throughout the Lands Between, players can find old war monuments, lovingly dubbed sword monuments by the community for the fact they’re literally giant stone swords embedded into the ground, which have passages written on them about certain battles. Many of these monuments are dedicated to Godfrey, and they, along with extra bits of lore detailed through certain items and environmental storytelling throughout the game, paint a picture of the kind of man Godfrey was. A picture which is then solidified when we have the opportunity to fight him as a boss near the end of the game.
Godfrey is a man of honor, one who believes that strength and courage are the greatest determining factors of the right to rule. This makes sense considering he lived as a warrior even before Marika recruited him to her cause. Not unlike the Cimmerian peoples from which Conan hails, Godfrey is presented as someone who always lived a hard life, but excelled in it by virtue of his tenacity and strength. This aspect carries on even after he gives up the name of Hoarah Loux and starts tempering his barbaric battle rage, partly by the decree of Queen Marika, but mostly through the aid of the beast regent he bound to his body, the lion Serosh.
Yes, that ghostly lion at Godfrey’s shoulder is actually bound directly to his own body, and there’s lore present in the game that hints to how that might’ve been done. That’s not important for this discussion, though. What matters here is that Serosh was originally an opponent of Godfrey. If the look of him wasn’t enough to make it clear, Serosh is far from a normal lion. He’s an intelligent creature, and while we never get to find out if he’s capable of speech like similar creatures are, (Marika has a similar entity which served her, the wolf-like Maliketh) we see through hints in the lore and through visual cues in our fight against Godfrey that Serosh isn’t some simple animal. During our bout with him, he gnaws and pulls at Godfrey’s shoulders, reminding him to exercise restraint even in combat. Make no mistake, Godfrey fights fiercely with his axe, but it’s not the sort of berserker flailing one might associate with more typical depictions of a barbarian, yet another aspect in which he parallels Conan.
Godfrey is depicted as a leader who was much beloved and respected by those who served under him. Much like with Conan’s former crew, who are more than willing to follow him into the immense dangers of Stygia because of how thoroughly they revere him, Godfrey commanded a similar sort of respect from those under his charge. This is best exemplified by a bit of lore about Marika that touches on the moment when she removed Godfrey from her service, later replacing him with Radagon:
"My Lord, and thy warriors. I divest each of thee of thy grace. With thine eyes dimmed, ye will be driven from the Lands Between. Ye will wage war in a land afar, where ye will live, and die.
Then, after thy death, I will give back what I once claimed. Return to the Lands Between, wage war, and brandish the Elden Ring. Grow strong in the face of death. Warriors of my lord. Lord Godfrey."
The grace which is being referred to is the Grace of Gold, which marks all people who live in the Lands Between and serve Marika and the Golden Order. Grace appears in the eyes of the faithful as a golden shine, and this is actually reflected in the eyes of many NPC characters you run into across the Lands Between, which stands as another fine example of how detail oriented Miyazakie and his crew at From are. At the point in time where Marika divests Godfrey and his warriors of their grace, almost all living under her rule were faithful to the Golden Order. Almost all featured the light of grace, but when Marika took that from them their eyes dimmed, they were dubbed Tarnished, and they were driven out form the Lands Between.
Hoarah Loux and the other Tarnished who followed him would end up doing exactly as Marika said. They waged war in a land afar, the Badlands, where they lived and died. However, some time after their deaths, after Marika shattered the Elden Ring, she returned grace to the Tarnished, and they rose from the dead to wage war once again in the land they were cast out of.
As can be very clearly seen, Godfrey and Hoarah Loux carry multiple direct parallels to Conan. Both men are great warriors descended from people who lived difficult lives. Both became respected leaders of men, making names for themselves not just as warriors, but as leaders on the battlefield and as rulers. Both men use the iconography of the lion as markers of their station as fierce but noble rulers, and just as Conan is seen as “the returning king” by the slaves who were once his crew, Godfrey is seen in much the same light, as he was the first Elden Lord. What’s more, we’re also shown an example of why Godfrey was so respected when we face him. Across the course of the game, many characters we run into are either leery of, or outright disrespectful to us due to our nature as Tarnished. Godfrey, however, greets us very differently upon our meeting.
“Long and hard didst thou fight, Tarnished warrior. Spurned by the grace of gold.
Be assured, the Elden Ring resteth close at hand. Alas, I am returned, to be granted audience once more. Upon my name as Godfrey, the First Elden Lord!”
-Godfrey to the player’s Tarnished in the leadup to their battle.
There’s a clear sense of respect present in the way Godfrey addresses the Tarnished in that dialogue, and it gives us clear indications of his values. First and foremost, he doesn’t talk down to us for being Tarnished, because he himself is Tarnished. For him, that designation doesn’t matter, and so it’s safe to assume that any callous words by those who still possess grace also wouldn’t matter to him. (Though I doubt anyone would be foolish enough to openly talk bad about him that way, considering he’s still the First Elden Lord.) What’s more, we’re shown this difference in mien through an earlier portion of his pre-fight cutscene, wherein he cradles the corpse of a boss we previously defeated in his arms:
“It has been a long while, Morgott.”
-Godfrey while cradling his dead son as his body fades into golden grace.
Morgott, a boss we can face three times across the game, is a creature known as an Omen. Omen are people who feature various animal features across their bodies. The most notable of these are their thick skin, which is usually gray or black, and the numerous horns that jut from their flesh. However, some Omen such as Morgott, also have tails, while others can have wings and other animal features. In the time before Marika’s reign, which is believed to overlap with the time Godfrey, then Hoarah Loux, was still living as a warrior, the Omen were viewed as creatures blessed by the order of the prior age, which was more primitive and wild. Having these animal features was seen as a sign that you were touched by what was known as the Primordial Crucible, believed to be the source of all life and then home to the Elden Ring.
However, in Marika’s age, that changed. Omen were viewed as cursed and vile things, and if a child was born with Omen horns - which, mind you, sprouted all over their bodies, not just on their heads - they were to have them cut off. Assuming the child survived this, which was very rare, they were still shunned and exiled to the farthest reaches of society, where they’d usually end up hunted by a cruel cadre of people aptly called Omen killers. This wasn’t the case when it came to Omens of noble, or worse for Marika, royal lineage. Because of the commotion such a thing would bring, Omen born to any noble were instead cast into the cisterns that connected to an ancient version of Marika’s capital city, Leyndell. As sons of Marika and Godfrey, the Omen Twins Morgott and Mohg met with this fate.
Thus, it’s very telling to see the tender way with which Godfrey cradles Morgott’s withered, fading body. Unlike Marika, who is presumed to be the one to have made this particular decree in order to stamp out any remnants of the previous Order, Godfrey doesn’t see Morgott as someone to be shunned. He sees Morgott as exactly what he is - his son. Given the sort of characterizations we see of Conan across Howard’s stories, I can’t help but imagine he would feel similarly to Godfrey if Morgott were his child.
Godfrey is a man who carries himself with honor and respect, yet isn’t at all shy about bringing his strength to the fore to fight fiercely for what he wants. He wishes to reclaim his place as Elden Lord, and as Morgott fades and the golden light of his grace points back to you, thus marking you as the next hurdle that the Greater Will wishes for Godfrey to overcome, (and vice versa) he stands fully ready to fight you to the death even knowing that you were likely once one of his own loyal followers. Or, at the very least, that as a Tarnished you followed in his footsteps to some degree, being driven out of the Lands Between to fight, die, and be brought back when the time was determined right.
But Godfrey is not this man’s true identity, and it’s here that the parallels to Conan start to diverge. As the fight draws on and Godfrey’s knocked down to about 50% of his health, another cutscene plays. Nearly dropping his axe, the First Elden Lord falls to one knee, breathing heavily. Growling, Serosh then leans forward, a glimmer of golden light creeping down his body as he solidifies his spectral form. Faced with the surprising strength and tenacity of your small Tarnished, the beast regent prepares to join his longtime friend and ally in the fight, only to be stopped when Godfrey takes Serosh by the wrist, and then the jaw, and says:
“That will be all. Thou didst me good service, Serosh.”
Serosh then howls in pain as his friend wrenches his neck and arm away, tearing off his armor and the flesh of the beast regent alike. When he raises the hand that took hold of Serosh’s wrist, the regent’s arm moves with him as it drips with blood and fades into gold, just like Morgott’s body. Addressing you directly, Godfrey rises to his feet once more and says:
“I’ve given thee courtesy enough.”
He throws his head back and looses a mighty roar! Then he sighs, and with his body stained with the blood of his friend and ally, faces you down and states without reservation:
“Now I fight as Hoarah Loux. Warrior!”
From this moment, everything about the fight changes. What we thought was Godfrey’s fierce fighting, marked by broad, swift swings of his axe and earth shaking stomps that can knock the Tarnished off balance, leaving you open to easy and painful hits, now seems every bit as reserved as the lore tried to make it seem. Hoarah Loux fights with no restrictions, abandoning his axe to rip you apart with his bare hands. He leaps and swipes at you like a feral animal. He unleashes bestial roars that are so strong, the shockwaves of them can throw the Tarnished back. He’ll grab you and slam you into the ground like a wrestler, stomp and smash the ground beneath him to create massive shockwaves, and even rip up the arena floor with such force that it explodes when he tears his hands free. Absolutely none of the noble grace that he showcased as Godfrey is present in Hoarah Loux. There is only the savagery of the contest, and he will show you why he was the First Elden Lord.
This shift in tone for the character extends to much more than just how he fights and looks. The music itself changes, too. Where Godfrey’s theme is accompanied with a majestic male choir and big, sweeping wind sections that bring to mind images of an old and mighty hero, Hoarah Loux’s theme is as brutal and savage as he is, with multiple brass stings and an intense string section that simultaneously manages to carry the fiddle-like sounds of Celtic music with the tones of panic and stress that the player likely feels from this complete shift in the rules of the fight. Everything about Hoarah Loux screams strength, savagery, and ferocity. In other words, he willingly goes from the parallel of Conan as the nuanced and noble character readers of Howard are familiar with, to the stereotype of the violent savage many assume him to be.
Despite the starkness of this change, though, we do see that Hoarah Loux’s noble values are still present, even in this savage display. Oh he absolutely has zero qualms about throwing away all pretense of civility to smash the Tarnished into a bloody heap. Hell, if you get killed by one of his slam attacks, the developers even went so far as to include a special animation of him digging his hands into the chest of the Tarnished to rip their ribcage open. No, it doesn’t go into full detail with that ala Mortal Kombat, but it’s the kind of storytelling through action that really showcases the difference in who Hoarah Loux was and who he became once he took up the mantle of Godfrey.
His savagery in the fight isn’t carried all the way to its end, though. Upon his defeat, Hoarah Loux shows us exactly where his values lie. Where most other enemies who speak to the Tarnished either curse you in their dying breaths, proclaim you a fool of some kind, or bemoan their defeat, Hoarah Loux makes his values perfectly clear with his final words:
“Brave Tarnished, thy strength befits a crown.”
So do we see that even when he gives himself over to his brutal savagery, Hoarah Loux still holds to his values of strength and honor. He doesn’t belittle the Tarnished or bemoan the failing of his goals upon his defeat. Instead, he recognizes your prowess with calm respect and uses his final breath to declare without reservation that you’ve earned the right to become the next Elden Lord.
So, was Hidetaka Miyazaki directly influenced by Conan when he developed the character of Godfrey? It’s impossible to say for sure as he’s never commented on it, but I personally think the likelihood is high. At the very least Godfrey gives us the most direct influence of Howard’s mighty Cimmerian we’ve yet seen in one of From Software’s titles. As for whether there will be others like Godfrey in future games, again, it’s impossible to say for sure. Miyazaki was inspired by so much in his youth that parallels can be made to all sorts of other properties. Even his animation counterpart has been referenced with the character of Slave Knight Gael, who was introduced in the Ashes of Ariandel and The Ringed City DLCs of Dark Souls 3, said to have been partly inspired by Lord Yupa from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, a property which I believe also had its influences on Elden Ring, as the areas in the game infested by Scarlet Rot - the Aeonian Swamp in Caelid, the Lake of Rot below that, and the inner reaches of the Haligtree - feature fungal and plant growths very similar in their aesthetic to Nausicaä’s Toxic Jungle. Whether or not From gives us future parallels to Conan, or even to Howard’s other work like Solomon Kane, it’s still nice to see elements of the renown Cimmerian appear in the First Elden Lord.