The Last King, page 31
These new elements appear to be derived from several sources. The “First Race” and successors come from Theosophy, a quasi-religious movement founded by Madame Helena Blavatsky in the 19th century. Her work was a hopeless gallimaufry of quasi-Oriental religion and philosophy combined with imperfectly understood science (or, more frequently, her rantings against science) and anthropology, not to mention flights of pure unbridled fancy, but she attracted a huge following. It is possible that Howard learned of Madame Blavatsky’s theories of the “root races” and “sub-races” of mankind through friends acquainted with occult literature, or through secondary sources. It would not appear that he had read Blavatsky’s own work, for he does not follow her identifications of the races in most particulars (certainly not her ludicrous physical descriptions), nor does he seem to allude in a direct way to any of her ideas.
Another source for these ideas appears to have been the work of the British folklorist Lewis Spence, particularly his The Problem of Atlantis (1924) and Atlantis in America (1925). In these works Spence brings together a great mass of geological, botanical, anthropological, and other evidence, together with accounts from Classical sources, in an attempt to prove the former existence of an Atlantean continent in the Atlantic Ocean. Spence, having written a number of scholarly treatises on the folklore of many cultures, was able to make it all sound convincing enough, at least to readers with no particular scientific knowledge, or those who wanted to be convinced (as, apparently, he did himself). His books have a much greater aura of plausibility than those of the occultists.
Spence’s argument, in brief, hinged upon the “sudden” appearance of the Crô-Magnons in southwestern Europe, and the assumption that, since no evidence of an earlier, transitional stage was known, they must have acquired their culture somewhere other than Europe or Africa. He attempts to tie together a great mass of anthropological data to show a common culture-complex spreading through Africa, Europe, and the Americas at roughly the same time, suggesting that this culture must have originated at some mid-point between those lands, a place no longer accessible to archaeologists – Atlantis. This identification of Atlantis as the source of Crô-Magnon man and his culture seems to have been original with Spence, and as we have seen, Howard identifies the Atlanteans as Crô-Magnons. Atlantis in America goes into greater detail on the American evidences for his thesis, and includes a chapter, “The Analogy of Lemuria,” which presents a brief outline of evidences adduced by other writers for the previous existence of a Pacific continent. Howard must have encountered these ideas between the writing of The Lost Race (accepted in January 1925) and Men of the Shadows (rejected March 1926).
Late in July 1925, Howard began a story called The Isle of the Eons. He appears to have written the first 26 pages of the story, which are fairly straightforward action, in that month, then set the tale aside for a time. He then resumed writing the story at about the same time he wrote Men of the Shadows, i.e., early 1926. He took up the tale where he had left it, and wrote an additional 17 pages, bringing the total to 43 pages, leaving the story, once again, unfinished. He would return to this draft once more, in 1927 or 1928, and then write two other drafts in 1929.
The 1926 portion of the first draft ends as the unnamed “Dutchman” of the story deciphers some hieroglyphics, concluding that the isle on which he and his companion have been stranded is a remnant of Lemuria: “Lemuria iss to der Pacific, vot Atlantis iss to der Atlantic.... Von Kaelmann alvays said ... dot dey had a great civilization vhen der der men on Atlantis ver still apes, who ver der ancestors uf der Cro-Magnon peoples” (from unpublished draft, p. 43).
It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that Howard stopped working on The Isle of the Eons to write Men of the Shadows, a story in which he would refine and develop these new ideas.
We may also note that the 1926 section of The Isle of the Eons provided new information about the buildings and ruins found on the island, including a number of allusions and comparisons to Central and South American monuments or cities. While Spence posited that the pre-Columbian cultures of South and Central America owed much to Lemuria, Howard’s source for the new material in The Isle of the Eons seems to have been not Spence, but E.A. Allen’s The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races, published in 1885, a copy of which was in Howard’s library.
In this book Howard not only found names and descriptions he could use in The Isle of the Eons, but also found several chapters that no doubt commanded his attention, in view of his interest in the Picts. Chapter 6, for example, is devoted to “The Neolithic Age in Europe,” and particularly to the “Turanians.” The word “Pict” does not appear in the book, but we can read that “history, tradition, linguistics, and ethnology conspire to fortify the conclusions that, in prehistoric times, all Europe was overspread by the Mongoloid (Turanian) race, of which remnants have survived to our own times in the persons of the Basques, Finns, Esths, Lapps, and some smaller tribes.” As to their physical description, it conforms to that of the writers we have already mentioned: “a race of people, small in stature, dark visaged, and oval-faced – fond of war and the chase, yet having a rude system of agriculture.”
Allen’s book, of course, makes no mention of a possible Atlantean or Lemurian connection for the Picts, and his Turanians are not described as the “First Race,” coming from America. Howard, though, did not hesitate to use some of Allen’s conclusions to his own ends. For instance, Allen devotes his tenth chapter to the mysterious “Mound Builders” of America, and offers the following commentary concerning a mysterious effigy-mound:
“In this case, however, nearly all observers conclude that it was a religious work. Mr. MacLean, after describing these three figures, propounds this query: ‘Does the frog represent the creative, the egg the passive, and the serpent the destructive power of nature?’ Not a few writers, though not acquainted with the presence of the frog-shaped figure, have been struck with the combination of the egg and the serpent, that plays such an important part in the mythology of the Old World. We are told that the serpent, separate or in combination with the circle, egg, or globe, has been a predominant symbol among many primitive nations.”
Howard draws upon this in Men of the Shadows, thus reinforcing his mythical connection between America, Atlantis and the Picts:
“The ancient took a flaming brand from the fire and with a motion incredibly swift, inscribed the circle and triangle in the air. And strangely, the mystic symbol seemed to hover in the air, for a moment, a ring of fire.
“‘The circle without beginning,’ droned the wizard. ‘The circle unending. The Snake with its tail in its mouth, that encompasses the Universe. And the Mystic Three. Beginning, passivity, ending. Creation, preservation, destruction. Destruction, preservation, creation. The Frog, the Egg, and the Serpent. The Serpent, the Egg, and the Frog.’”
In depicting the contest of wills between Bran and the wizard, Howard seems to suggest more than a personal struggle for power between two men. Rather, the two are the focal points through which unseen powers seek to loose themselves upon the world. “The wizard was the Stone Age typified; the chief, the coming civilization. The destiny of the Pictish race, perhaps, hinged on that struggle.” The wizard warns Bran that if he wins “the Serpent coils again”: the serpent, as usual with Howard, is associated with the enemy, with destruction. Bran, on the contrary, is associated with the “coming civilization.”
It is interesting to note that in Men of the Shadows, and in the earlier playlet, Bran Mak Morn, Bran is referred as a chief. It is not until later in 1926, and the stories of Kull, that the theme of kingship, which we can see as, precisely, a step toward “coming civilization,” is first dealt with. It will be almost exactly four years before we see Bran Mak Morn again, this time as a king. It is in the Kull stories that we next find the Picts.
The Picts of the Kull series are barbarian allies of the ancient kingdom of Valusia. In the first published Kull story, The Shadow Kingdom, which Howard worked at sporadically between the summer of 1926 and September 1927, we learn that Kull, as an Atlantean, is a “hereditary enemy of all Picts,” though as king of Valusia he is their most important ally. He and a Pictish warrior, Brule, though their first meeting was marked by “mutual tribal enmity seething beneath their cloak of formality,” come to be fast friends in this series, and on more than one occasion it is Brule who saves Kull’s life. The Kull stories are set in the far recesses of an imaginative past, long before the great cataclysms that supposedly destroyed Atlantis and Lemuria, so the “historical” Picts of the early tales were now adopted by Howard as a means of connection, not just with “ancient times,” but with the world of fantastic adventures through which Kull, and later Conan, would move. Howard completed 10 stories of Kull (including two in which he is merely an offstage character), a poem, and began three stories which he left unfinished, most written between 1927 and early 1929. Of these, only three stories (the first, Exile of Atlantis, and the two in which Kull is offstage) and the poem do not include Brule the Spear-Slayer and the Picts.
Some time in 1928, Howard wrote a story entitled The Little People in which the Picts are featured, with inspiration from yet another writer added into the mix. In this story, set in the modern day, a brother and sister, Americans named Costigan, are in England during a European tour. When his young sister expresses disgust for the “foolishness” of Arthur Machen’s The Shining Pyramid, which he considers a “masterpiece of outré litrature,” Costigan lectures her, telling the story of the Picts essentially as outlined in The Romance of Early British Life. But the reference to Machen’s The Shining Pyramid suggests that Howard has now taken the Welsh writer’s conception of The Little People and added it to his conception of the Picts.
In The Shining Pyramid, two Englishmen investigate the puzzling disappearance of a young woman from a local village, and ultimately are horrified witnesses when she is burned to death in a sacrificial ceremony by a host of loathsome underground dwellers, “things made in the form of men but stunted like children hideously deformed, the faces with the almond eyes burning with evil and unspeakable lusts.” Their flesh is described as a “ghastly yellow,” and they speak to one another in “tones of horrible sibilance.” In explaining to his friend Vaughan the chain of deductions that led them to that horrible scene, Dyson explains: “I remembered what people had said about Annie Trevor’s disappearance, that she had been ‘taken by the fairies’.... And the hint came of the old name of fairies, ‘the little people,’ and the very probable belief that they represent a tradition of the prehistoric Turanian inhabitants of the country, who were cave dwellers: and then I realised with a shock that I was looking for a being under four feet in height, accustomed to live in darkness, possessing stone instruments, and familiar with the Mongolian cast of features!”
Howard’s linkage of the Picts with the Little People suggests that the once-proud Pictish race eventually devolved into misshapen underground monsters. This conception would undergo another change very soon.
In the spring of 1930, Howard returned for the first time in four years to Bran Mak Morn, selling two stories to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, Kings of the Night and The Dark Man. In the former, Bran has brought together forces of Gaels and Norsemen to join his Picts in what he hopes will be a decisive battle against the Romans. But the Norse leader has died, and his men refuse to follow either Bran or Cormac the Gael, insisting upon “a king, neither Pict, Gael nor Briton” to lead them. Through the sorcery of the aged wizard Gonar, King Kull of Valusia appears upon the scene, and takes on the leadership of the Norsemen. In The Dark Man, Howard’s Irish outlaw, Turlogh O’Brien, learns that Bran Mak Morn has become a God to the remnants of the Pictish nation he forged. A brief synopsis of a Bran Mak Morn story has also been found among Howard’s papers which seems to date from this time: it may in fact have been written before either of the completed stories, and represent a clear transition in Howard’s thinking about Bran, for in this synopsis, which deals largely with the intriguing of Roman commanders to seize power for themselves in the period following the assassination of Carausius (Howard states: “The time is between 296 A.D. and 300 A.D.”), Bran is first identified as “chief of the Cruithni Picts, but then as “the Pictish king.” In both Kings of the Night and The Dark Man, Bran is referred to as “king” of the Picts, whereas in Bran Mak Morn and Men of the Shadows, he was a “chieftain.” In Kings, it is made explicit that Bran rose “by his own efforts from the negligent position of the son of a Wolf clan chief, had to an extent united the tribes of the heather and now claimed kingship over all Caledon.” The battle recounted in this tale is said to be “the first pitched battle between the Picts under their king and the Romans,” thus comes early in Bran’s career.
In this story Howard clearly links his imaginary pre-Cataclysmic world of Kull to our own historical world. The wizard, Gonar, tells Bran that he is a descendant of Brule the Spear-slayer, and tells how only the Picts survived the cataclysm that claimed Valusia, Atlantis, and Lemuria, that they won up the ladder again to civilization before being overrun by the Celts and again “hurled into savagery.” “Here in Caledon,” he says, “is the last stand of a once mighty race. And we change. Our people have mixed with the savages of an elder age which we drove into the North when we came into the Isles, and now, save for their chieftains, such as thou, Bran, a Pict is strange and abhorrent to look upon.”
The Dark Man, set some eight centuries after Kings of the Night, makes clear that Bran’s initial triumph, while it forged the Picts into a united nation and enabled them for a time to keep the Romans south of the Wall, was ultimately in vain. “Bran Mak Morn fell in battle; the nation fell apart. Like wolves we Picts live now among the scattered islands, among the crags of the highlands and the dim hills of Galloway. We are a fading people. We pass.”
Some observers have noted the strong correspondences between Howard’s poem, The Song of a Mad Minstrel, and Rudyard Kipling’s A Pict Song, from his book Puck of Pook’s Hill, and suggested that Kipling’s tale, in that book, of the British Roman Parnesius and his struggle to hold the Wall of Hadrian against the Picts and Northmen during the reign of Maximus may have been an influence on Howard’s Bran Mak Morn tales. It is a tempting hypothesis, with some strong circumstantial evidence. For instance, Howard’s poem, with lines like “I am the thorn in the foot, I am the blur in the sight; I am the worm at the root, I am the thief in the night,” clearly echoes Kipling’s “We are the worm in the wood! We are the rot in the root! We are the germ in the blood! We are the thorn in the foot!” When we note that The Song of a Mad Minstrel was sold to Weird Tales in March 1930, the same month Howard sold Wright The Dark Man and Kings of the Night, we might be excused for thinking it more than coincidence. Add to this the fact that in Kipling’s tale of Parnesius, he has him making tentative alliances with Picts and Norsemen who are threatening the Wall, to try to hold them from attacking until Maximus is able to triumph in Gaul and return the legions he has taken with him, seeming to echo the plot line outlined in Howard’s Bran synopsis, and the case seems even stronger. However, Kipling’s Picts (which he, like Machen, refers to as “Little People”) are far from being Howard’s (“Picts seldom fight,” Parnesius says. “I never saw a fighting Pict for half a year. The tame Picts told us they had all gone North.”), and none of the particulars of Howard’s tales seem to suggest a linkage with Kipling’s.
During the summer of 1930, Howard began a correspondence with the great weird fictionist H.P. Lovecraft. Among the earliest exchanges was a discussion which directly bears upon Howard’s treatment of the Picts. Lovecraft, saying that he believed it probable that if there were any human inhabitants of the British Isles before the coming of the Mediterraneans, they were not cavemen or savages, but possibly “some of the squat Mongoloids now represented by the Lapps,” wrote:
“It’s true that the Celts share most vigorously the myth-cycle of fairies, gnomes, & little people, which anthropologists find all over Western Europe... & attribute to vague memories of contact with the Mongoloids.... Since these fair Nordic Celts found a smaller, darker race in Britain & Ireland, there is a tendency on the part of some to be misled, & to assume that the ‘little people’ legends allude to contact with those dark aborigines. This, however, can be clearly disproved by analysis of the myths; for such myths invariably share with the parallel Continental myths the specific features (or tracks of these features) of having the ‘little people’ essentially repulsive & monstrous, subterraneous in their habits of dwelling, & given to a queer kind of hissing discourse. Now this kind of thing does not apply to Mediterraneans - who are not abnormal or repulsive from the Nordic standpoint (being very similar in features), who did not live underground, & whose language... could scarcely have suggested hissing.”
Howard replied:
“Your observations regarding the Mongoloid aborigines and their relation to the fairy-tales of western Europe especially interested me. I had supposed, without inquiring very deeply into the matter, that these legends were based on contact with the earlier Mediterraneans, and indeed, wrote a story on that assumption which appeared some years ago in Weird Tales - ‘The Lost Race.’ I readily see the truth of your remarks, that a Mongoloid race must have been responsible for the myths of the Little People, and sincerely thank you for the information.”
