Arnold is on the big screen once again with another instalment of the Terminator story, but let’s take a trip back to the 80s and look at one of his early films, Conan the Barbarian! What makes this movie so great? How does the Marvel Comics adaptation hold up against it? Listen and find out!
Issues discussed: Marvel Movie Special #21, Conan the Barbarian Movie Special #1-2
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32:20. On the pronounciation of Cimmaria/Cimmerian, I think EVERYONE has it wrong.
Howard’s Conan is a Celtic hero. There’s a map reprinted in the paperbacks that give the relationships between Ancient Hyboria and modern Europe/Asia/North Africa. Cimmeria is shown to be where the British Isles are today.
The Celtic languages rarely use a soft ‘c’. It’s far more often a hard ‘k’ sound, as in ‘Conan’. For example Wales, in the Welsh language, is Cymru, pronounced ‘kum-ree’, never as ‘Sim-ree’.
Indeed, the word Cymru sounds as if it could be Cimmeria after years of change over millennia, and perhaps this is what Howard had in mind.
So to my mind – and the way I’ve always pronounced it is: Ko-nan the Kim- merian.