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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9609506" data-attributes="member: 7035894">Kipling was British, his father was a professor, and he was partially educated at British schools. That's just a vastly different educational experience than Howard would have had in rural Texas.No, barbarian does not "just mean 'foreigner'" - that's completely ignoring the intended connotations and origins of the word. Yes, you must be a foreigner to be a barbarian, but that does not mean that all foreigners are barbarians. I mean, "Conan the Foreigner" does not exactly have the same ring to it, does it? We don't have a "foreigner" character class in D&D!Edit: also, Beowulf is not exactly an exotic foreigner to the Danes. They've heard of him, and definitely know his people. They have no trouble speaking to each other, and Beowulf knows all the etiquette. He is immediately recognized by Hrothgar as a peer and honoured guest, even if Unferth has some jealousy issues.I'm pretty familiar with Beowulf, both in my super basic Anglo-Saxon but more so in various translations. I usually teach from the Seamus Heaney version; it's not the most literal but I think the most effective in capturing the poetic feel of the original verse. I'm not seeing a ton of similarities to Conan except in a few superficial plot points (big guys who fight monsters). Beowulf is not an outsider who travels to various exotic locales and eventually conquers civilization with his anachronistic American frontier ideals, which is what Conan is. Beowulf is the epitome of Anglo-Saxon heroic culture, drawing on the shared legends  of its Northern Germanic roots, with some Christian anachronisms added by the monk who wrote it.</blockquote>

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