Дочь Ледяного Великана

Conan short story by Robert E. Howard

"The Frost Giant's Daughter" is one of the original fantasy short stories about Conan the Cimmerian, written by American author Robert E. Howard. The story is set in the fictional history of the Hyborian Age and details Conan pursuing a spectral nymph across the frozen tundra of Nordheim. Rejected as a Conan story by Weird Tales magazine editor Farnsworth Wright, Howard changed the main character's name to "Amra of Akbitana" and retitled the piece as "The Gods of the North", as which it was published in the March 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan. It was not published in its original form in Howard's lifetime.

"The Frost Giant's Daughter" is the earliest chronological story by Robert E. Howard in terms of Conan's life. The brief tale is set in frozen Nordheim, geographically situated north of Conan's homeland, Cimmeria. Conan is a young warrior traveling in a war party of the Aesir, a barbarian people inspired on the main gods of Norse mythology. Shortly before the story begins, a melee has occurred on an icy plain. Eighty men have perished, and Conan alone survives the battlefield where Wulfhere's Aesir "reavers" faced the "wolves" of Bragi, a chieftain of the Vanir, another barbarian group based on Norse gods. Following his battle with the red haired Vanir, Conan, lying exhausted, is visited by a beautiful partially nude woman identifying herself as "Atali". Upon her bodice, she wears a transparent veil: a wisp of gossamer that wasn't spun by human origin. The sight of her awakens Conan's lust and, when she repeatedly taunts him, he chases Atali across the snow covered region. Mocking him with each step, Atali lures Conan into an ambush. Undaunted by the snare, Conan slays her twin brothers, two Frost Giants, and captures Atali in his arms. Atali calls upon her father, Ymir, to save her. Before Conan can ravish her, Atali disappears in a stroke of lightning which transforms the landscape and renders him unconscious. When his Aesir comrades arrive, Conan believes he dreamed the encounter. Then Conan realizes he's still gripping a veil, the sole garment of the Frost Giant's daughter.

While Robert E. Howard had already written many fantasy stories featuring northern Viking like characters, the names and plot structure for "The Frost Giant's Daughter" were derived in their entirety from Thomas Bulfinch's The Outline of Mythology (1913). Howard combined the legend of Atalanta with another reworked Bulfinch legend, that of Daphne and Apollo, but he reversed the roles. Whereas Apollo was a god and Daphne a mortal, Howard made Atali a goddess and Conan a mortal. In the original, Cupid had struck Apollo with an arrow to excite love for Daphne but struck her with an arrow to cause her to find love repellent. Howard kept the idea of the love maddened Apollo (here a lust maddened Conan) pursuing the girl until she invokes aid from her divine father.

The earlier version of the story was published in the collections The Coming of Conan (Gnome Press, 1953) and Conan of Cimmeria (Lancer Books, 1969). The last version, as left by Howard before his death, was first published in 1976 by Donald M. Grant in an edition of the Conan story Rogues in the House. This version has most recently been republished in the collections The Conan Chronicles Volume 1: The People of the Black Circle (Gollancz, 2000) and The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Del Rey, 2004).