The greatest gift a mother can bestow on her son is to die in childbirth, Pliny the Elder argued as early as AD 77, using Julius Caesar as one example. The link between maternal death and military prowess has persisted through the centuries. Knights and warriors such as Tristram, the Arthurian Knight of Sorrows, and Macduff, are shown to be great men, because they have freed themselves from the taint of the maternal body, as Janet Adelman has discussed in Suffocating Mothers, effectively giving birth to themselves. In this chapter I chart the changing use of the trope of the warrior emerging from his mother's dead or dying body. Older iterations are read against the 2011 film Conan, in which the mother's death is reinterpreted into an act of heroism on her part, which confers glory on both mother and son. However, she still dies, and in my analysis I ask the question why it is still the case that a mother must die for her son to become successful.