Bran Mak Morn: The Last King (39 page)

�n this case, however, nearly all observers conclude that it was a religious work. Mr. MacLean, after describing these three figures, propounds this query: �oes 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:

�he 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. �he 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. �he 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 �he Serpent coils again� the serpent, as usual with Howard, is associated with the enemy, with destruction. Bran, on the contrary, is associated with the �oming 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 �oming 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 �ereditary 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 �utual 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� 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 �istorical�Picts of the early tales were now adopted by Howard as a means of connection, not just with �ncient 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 �oolishness�of Arthur Machen� The Shining Pyramid, which he considers a �asterpiece of outr� 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� The Shining Pyramid suggests that Howard has now taken the Welsh writer� 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, �hings 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 �hastly yellow,�and they speak to one another in �ones of horrible sibilance.�In explaining to his friend Vaughan the chain of deductions that led them to that horrible scene, Dyson explains: � remembered what people had said about Annie Trevor� disappearance, that she had been �aken by the fairies�... And the hint came of the old name of fairies, �he 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� 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 � 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� Irish outlaw, Turlogh O�rien, 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� 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� 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: �he time is between 296 A.D. and 300 A.D.�, Bran is first identified as �hief of the Cruithni Picts, but then as �he Pictish king.�In both Kings of the Night and The Dark Man, Bran is referred to as �ing�of the Picts, whereas in Bran Mak Morn and Men of the Shadows, he was a �hieftain.�In Kings, it is made explicit that Bran rose �y 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 �he first pitched battle between the Picts under their king and the Romans,�thus comes early in Bran� 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 �urled into savagery.��ere in Caledon,�he says, �s 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� 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. �ran 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� poem, The Song of a Mad Minstrel, and Rudyard Kipling� A Pict Song, from his book Puck of Pook� Hill, and suggested that Kipling� 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� Bran Mak Morn tales. It is a tempting hypothesis, with some strong circumstantial evidence. For instance, Howard� poem, with lines like � 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� �e 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� 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� Bran synopsis, and the case seems even stronger. However, Kipling� Picts (which he, like Machen, refers to as �ittle People� are far from being Howard� (�icts seldom fight,�Parnesius says. � 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� tales seem to suggest a linkage with Kipling�.

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� 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 �ome of the squat Mongoloids now represented by the Lapps,�wrote:

�t� 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 �ittle 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 �ittle 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:

�our 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 - �he 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.� Howard almost immediately put this new �nowledge�to use, in The Children of the Night, which he sold to Weird Tales in October 1930, less than two months after the above exchange. In the opening scene of this story, several scholars are having a bull session in the library of a man named Conrad. The discussion turns to the Nameless Cults of Von Junzt, and the author� contention that the �ran cult�is still active.

�But when Von Junzt speaks of Picts, he refers specifically to the small, dark, garlic-eating peoples of Mediterranean blood who brought the Neolithic culture into Britain. The first settlers of that country, in fact, who gave rise to the tales of earth spirits and goblins.� �I can not agree to that last statement,�said Conrad. �hese legends ascribe a deformity and inhumanness of appearances to the characters. There was nothing about the Picts to excite such horror and repulsion in the Aryan peoples. I believe that the Mediterraneans were preceded by a Mongoloid type, very low in the scale of development, whence these tales-� �Quite true,�broke in Kirowan, �ut I hardly think they preceded the Picts, as you call them, into Britain. We find troll and dwarf legends all over the Continent, and I am inclined to think that both the Mediterranean and Aryan peoples brought these tales with them from the Continent. They must have been of extremely inhuman aspect, these Mongoloids.�

From this point on, Howard� degenerated race of underground dwellers are no longer identified with the Picts, as they had been in The Little People. In fact, in Children of the Night, when the narrator, O�onnel, is recalling a past life as Aryara, he says of the abhorrent race his people called �he Children of the Night,��hey had once overrun and possessed this land, and they had been driven into hiding and obscurity by the dark, fierce little Picts with whom we contested now, and who hated and loathed them as savagely as did we.� In People of the Dark, written in 1931, Howard makes clear that The Little People and Children of the Night are the same. In this story, too, we learn of an object they worship:

�n the center of the chamber stood a grim, black altar.... Towering behind it on a pedestal of human skulls, lay a cryptic black object, carven with mysterious hieroglyphics. The Black Stone! The ancient, ancient Stone before which, the Britons said, the Children of the Night bowed in gruesome worship, and whose origin was lost in the black mists of a hideously distant past. Once, legend said, it had stood in that grim circle of monoliths called Stonehenge, before its votaries had been driven like chaff before the bows of the Picts.� The People of the Dark was returned to Howard by Strange Tales in September 1931, with a request for revisions. It was probably between that date and February 1932 that he wrote the story in which all these elements at last came together, a story that is generally regarded by most Howard fans as one of his very best, Worms of the Earth.