Heroes are something we all need and when they are absent, we are somehow less for it. Reading Robert E. Howard’s Chronicles of Conan the Barbarian, I may have been unjust to a certain resident of the Shire in Middle Earth in dismissing him as a whining little turd. For that thought, Conan the Cimmerian is to be thanked.

While we all like heroes for the most part, there are wildly divergent ideas on what a hero is, exactly. For some, they think of the Marvel ...