Bran Mak Morn: The Last King (37 page)

This is Howard� first story of James Allison, who remembers past incarnations, generally as a barbaric warrior in an epoch before the dawn of history. It tells of the world-spanning migration of a band of pre-Aryan Nordics, a band which includes one man not of the tribe.

We came of many clans, but all of the golden-haired AEsir, except the man who strode beside me. He was Kelka, my blood brother, and a Pict. He had joined us among the jungle-clad hills of a far land that marked the eastern-most drift of his race, where the tom-toms of his people pulsed incessantly through the hot star-flecked night. He was short, thick-limbed, deadly as a jungle-cat. We of the AEsir were barbarians, but Kelka was a savage. Behind him lay the abysmal chaos of the squalling black jungle. The pad of the tiger was in his stealthy tread, the grip of the gorilla in his black-nailed hands; the fire that burns in a leopard� eyes burned in his.

JUNE 1932

People of the Dark is published in Strange Tales.

NOVEMBER 1932

Worms of the Earth is published in Weird Tales.

LETTER TO H.P. LOVECRAFT, CIRCA DECEMBER 1932

Concerning �orms of the Earth��I must have been unusually careless when I wrote that, considering the errors �such as �er�for �is� �im�for �imself� �oathsome�for �oathing� etc.. I� at a loss to say why I spelled Eboracum as Ebbracum. I must investigate the matter. I know I saw it spelled that way, somewhere; it� not likely I would make such a mistake entirely of my own volition, though I do frequently make errors. Somehow, in my mind, I have a vague idea that it� connected some way with the Gaelic �broch��York.

THE VALLEY OF THE WORM, FEBRUARY 1934

This is another story of James Allison, remembering a past incarnation as a hero whose battle with a monstrous creature inspired later legends of dragon-slayers. In this story, the AEsir come into a land inhabited by the Picts.

I will take up the tale at a time when we came into jungle-clad hills reeking with rot and teeming with spawning life, where the tom-toms of a savage people pulsed incessantly through the hot breathless night. These people came forth to dispute our way �short, strongly built men, black-haired, painted, ferocious, but indisputably white men. We knew their breed of old. They were Picts, and of all alien races the fiercest. We had met their kind before in thick forests, and in upland valleys beside mountain lakes. But many moons had passed since those meetings.

I believe this particular tribe represented the easternmost drift of the race. They were the most primitive and ferocious of any I ever met. Already they were exhibiting hints of characteristics I have noted among black savages in jungle countries, though they had dwelt in these environs only a few generations. The abysmal jungle was engulfing them, was obliterating their pristine characteristics and shaping them in its own horrific mold. They were drifting into head-hunting, and cannibalism was but a step which I believe they must have taken before they became extinct. These things are natural adjuncts to the jungle; the Picts did not learn them from the black people, for then there were no blacks among those hills. In later years they came up from the south, and the Picts first enslaved and then were absorbed by them.

CIRCA OCTOBER 1934

Beyond the Black River is accepted by Weird Tales. This story prominently features the Hyborian Age Picts. Two other Conan stories, the unfinished Wolves Beyond the Border, possibly written before Beyond the Black River, and an unsold story, The Black Stranger, which was likely written afterward, also feature the Picts.

ALVIN EARL PERRY, A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF ROBERT E. HOWARD, FANTASY MAGAZINE, JULY 1935

As to his fictional characters, we�l let Mr. Howard speak for himself. He says: �he first character I ever created was Francis Xavier Gordon, El Borak, the hero of �he Daughter of Erlik Khan�(Top-Notch), etc. I don� remember his genesis. He came to life in my mind when I was about ten years old. The next was Bran Mak Morn, the Pictish king (�he Kings of the Night,�etc., Weird Tales). He was the result of my discovery of the existence of the Pictish race, when reading some historical works in a public library in New Orleans at the age of thirteen. Physically he bore a striking resemblance to El Borak.�

ROBERT E. HOWARD, BRAN MAK MORN AND THE PICTS Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet

�here is one hobby of mine which puzzles me to this day,�wrote Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft in 1932. �hat is my interest in the people which, for the sake of brevity, I have always designated as Picts. I am of course aware that my use of the term might be questioned.... But to me �ict�must always refer to the small dark Mediterranean aborigines of Britain. This is not strange, since when I first read of these aborigines, they were referred to as Picts. But what is strange, is my unflagging interest in them.� The Picts are the only fictional creations to appear throughout Howard� writing career. Only one other creation, Francis X. Gordon (�l Borak� appears at both the beginning and the end of Howard� career, but he was notably absent from the early 1920s until 1934. Picts, on the other hand, appear in no fewer than thirty stories, poems, and fragments, from The West Tower (probably written circa 1922�923), a Steve Allison fragment, to The Black Stranger, one of the last Conan stories, probably written in 1935, and rarely a year passes that they do not appear in some story. It seems likely that, had he lived longer, the Picts would have surfaced again in his work.

The Picts appear in many different contexts. In the second story Howard sold professionally, The Lost Race, they are living underground, apparently some-where in the south of Britain, having been driven there by Celtic invaders. In the Bran Mak Morn tales, they are the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Scotland, fighting back the invading forces of Roman Britain. In the stories of Turlogh O�rien and Cormac Mac Art, they are the last surviving remnants of Bran� people, now pitted against the Norsemen who have established themselves in the remote northern islands off the coast of Scotland. In the Kull series, they are barbaric allies of the Valusian king, while in the Hyborian Age of Conan, they are the savage inhabitants of a wilderness that stretches from the western borders of Aquilonia to the sea. In the James Allison stories, they are a bestial, jungle-dwelling race. Always they are at the outer fringes of the world.

Howard told an interviewer, �he first character I ever created was Francis Xavier Gordon, El Borak.... He came to life in my mind when I was about ten years old. The next was Bran Mak Morn, the Pictish king.... He was the result of my discovery of the existence of the Pictish race, when reading some historical works in a public library in New Orleans at the age of thirteen.� Somewhat earlier, Howard had told H.P. Lovecraft that he had first read of the Picts in histories of Scotland, of which he was an enthusiast, but that these had been �are mentionings, usually in disapproval.� �hen when I was about twelve I spent a short time in New Orleans and found in a Canal Street library, a book detailing the pageant of British history, from prehistoric times up to �I believe �the Norman conquest. It was written for school-boys and told in an interesting and romantic style, probably with many historical inaccuracies. But there I first learned of the small dark people which first settled Britain, and they were referred to as Picts. I had always felt a strange interest in the term and the people, and now I felt a driving absorption regarding them. The writer painted the aborigines in no more admirable light than had other historians whose works I had read. His Picts were made to be sly, furtive, unwarlike, and altogether inferior to the races which followed �which was doubtless true. And yet I felt a strong sympathy for this people, and then and there adopted them as a medium of connection with ancient times. I made them a strong, warlike race of barbarians, gave them an honorable history of past glories, and created for them a great king �one Bran Mak Morn.� While, in the absence of a definite statement from Howard, we cannot know with real certainty which book it was in which he found the Picts, methodical research has finally yielded a very strong candidate: The Romance of Early British Life: From the Earliest Times to the Coming of the Danes, by G.F. Scott Elliot (London: Seeley and Co. Ltd., 1909). The book fits so many of the particulars in Howard� description, and in it we find so many descriptions and incidents which find resonance in Howard� work, that one almost feels it has to be the book in question, especially in the absence of any other candidates. In discussing the spread of Neolithic culture from the region of the Caucasus and Mesopotamia, across Northern Africa, and into Spain, for instance, Scott Elliot writes: �his was the first race of man to be thoroughly domesticated. Like the sheep, goats, and oxen which they brought with them, they had been themselves tamed, trained, and taught to labour. Their descendants still exist all along the Mediterranean, and not only there but in our own islands. This people, or rather this race of mankind, has been called by many different names. The most sonorous is not doubt �omo Mediterraneus,�but they have also been called Basques, Iberians, Silurians, the Firbolg, the Dolmen-builders, the Picts, and Eaters of Garlic. We shall call them Picts, because this is the shortest name, and by using it we shall save time, labour, ink, and paper in writing about them.� These Mediterraneans are the people whom Scott Elliot says migrated to Britain in Neolithic times, and slowly wrested the islands from the previous inhabitants, a race of red-haired cave dwellers. Interestingly, he fabricates a little story about a party of Picts from Brittany preparing to paddle across the English Channel in dugout canoes loaded with their possessions and livestock. � strong force of the oldest men in the settlement, well armed and watchful, were �eeing off�the party of emigrants. These were all young men, mostly of a disagreeably bold and enterprising disposition, and of young women who were inclined to be insubordinate and disrespectful to the heads of the tribe. So they were selected as being the best to depart, not merely for their own good, but for the future peace of the old settlement.� Compare this with the story told to Cororuc by the ancient Pict in The Lost Race:

�ur people came from the south. Over the islands, over the Inland Sea. Over the snow-topped mountains, where some remained, to stay any enemies who might follow. Down into the fertile plains we came. Over all the land we spread. We became wealthy and prosperous. Then two kings arose in the land, and he who conquered, drove out the conquered. So many of us made boats and set sail for the far-off cliffs that gleamed white in the sunlight. We found a race of red-haired barbarians, who dwelt in caves.� One of the most powerfully suggestive correspondences between The Romance of Early British Life and Howard� Pictish stories is in the chapter Scott Elliot titles �y General, Agricola.�In it, he tells the story of a Tungrian serving in the Roman legion in Britain, and relates their troubles in Caledonia.

�e [the 2nd Cohort of Tungrians] would go in front and choose the road for the legion. Then a few of us would go first, and watch carefully for an ambush. Often there would be a sudden storm of stone-headed arrows upon us; a Caledonian might be lurking behind every tree or any boulder, and they are clever at concealing themselves. A soldier of ours was cooking his dinner beside a small pool, and had been there two hours watching the banks of it. Then he turned his back, and a savage came out of the water below where he stood and pierced him with his spear before he could turn round. They can stay for hours together with only the lips and nose above water, and no one can see them if the water is dark or full of reeds.� Compare this with the story told by the Norse narrator of Men of the Shadows, particularly the incident in which Romans are killed on the shore of a lake (p. 8).

Scott Elliot� outline of Pictish history is generally in accord with the scholarship of the day, differing from the mainstream only in using the term �icts�to designate these Mediterranean invaders of ancient Britain. Most authorities seem to have preferred the term �berians,�but for the most part, they agreed that this short, dark people had spread across most of Western Europe from North Africa (though it was not known if they had originated there), eventually migrating into the British Isles, and were the bringers of Neolithic culture. They were thought to be related (though none could say precisely how) to the Basques, and some speculated that they were kin to the Silures (ancient Welsh), Picts (ancient Scots), Lapps, Finns, and other remnants of pre-Celtic peoples. Because they were thought to have originated in northern Africa, and were physiologically similar, they were thought by some to have been related to the Berbers.

Of Howard� first attempts to write about the Picts, we know little. In his January 1932 letter to Lovecraft, he mentioned � long narrative rhyme which I never completed, and in which I first put Bran on paper,�saying he had �old it through a Roman centurion on the Wall.�A listing of Howard� poems made by his agent, Otis Adelbert Kline, after his death, included one titled Bran Mak Morn, with the notation that it was ten pages long. Unfortunately, this poem has not surfaced and may be forever lost. In a letter dated October 5, 1923, Howard told his friend Clyde Smith of a book he was writing �or my own amusement�which featured, among others, �ran Mak Morn, who was the greatest chief the Picts ever had....�This work, too, has not surfaced. Possibly Howard did not get far with it. [Note: The story has been found. See page 289.]

The earliest work featuring Bran or the Picts that we do have is Bran Mak Morn, three handwritten pages on composition paper, probably dating from Howard� high school days (circa 1922�3). It is set during a time when the Picts are warring against both Gaelic and Norse invaders, but Bran apparently sees a greater foe looming: � hard, thank-less task it is to raise the Pict nation out of savagery and bring it back to the civilization of our fathers. Of the Age of Brennus. The Picts are savages. I must make them civilized.... Because I know that no barbarian nation can stand before Rome.� Here is our earliest glimpse of a theme that will run throughout Howard� dealings with the Picts: they are a once-great, civilized race, fallen into barbarism or savagery. This theme, of course, finds echoes in much of Howard� other work, as well.