Bran Mak Morn: The Last King (38 page)

Another work that apparently dates from 1922�3, also hand-written, consists of four pages outlining the history of the Picts and Celts in Britain, essentially following the story as found in The Romance of Early British Life. Of some interest is his account of the immediate aftermath of the Celtic invasion. After relating that most of the Picts had fled to the mountains in the north (what are now the Scottish highlands), he notes that one group, who came to be called Silurians, had fled instead into Wales. The former group, he said, had eventually begun intermarrying with the red-haired savages who had preceded them; the latter were a different story.

�or some reason or other the Picts as Silurian that fled to Wales did not unite with the cave-men� descendents and the early types of Picts remained unchanged, except as, later they were altered by intermarriage with the Celts, fleeing before other invaders. And to this day in mountains of western Wales are still to be found traces of the ancient Pictish type.� It is these �icts as Silurian�who figure in Howard� first (so far as we know) completed story of these people.

In the fall of 1924, Howard got his first literary break, when he sold Spear and Fang, a story about cavemen, to Weird Tales. The eighteen-year-old had been submitting stories to professional magazines for about three years, and this was his first sale. He hastened to follow up. According to his fictionalized autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, �here lingered in the back of his mind a desire to glorify the neolithic man �a hangover from some imagined romance of his early childhood. So he followed up [Spear and Fang] with a wild tale of early Britain, [The Lost Race].�The story was returned to him by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright: �s for [The Lost Race], he had found several faults with it, in that it left too much to the imagination and left some important facts unexplained.... However, the editor professed himself ready to take the story if the changes and additions which he suggested were made.�(Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, p. 35; Howard had used the thinly disguised titles, Talon and Bow and The Forgotten Race).

Though he �elt a sinking of the heart when he contemplated rewriting [The Lost Race],�Howard did make the changes sought by Wright, and the tale became his second sold to, and fourth published in, the magazine, appearing in the January 1927 issue.

The Lost Race, like Spear and Fang, is a relatively straightforward adventure story with little of the truly �eird�in it. A Briton named Cororuc is travelling from Cornwall to his home somewhere to the east, when he is captured by a band of very small, dark-complexioned men, armed with stone tools and dressed in furs. They take him to an immense cavern where he is brought before their apparent leader, an incredibly ancient man, from whom he learns that these people are Picts. He is incredulous: �icts!... I have fought Picts in Caledonia...; they are short but massive and misshapen; not at all like you!��hey are not true Picts,�the ancient tells him, and relates to him the story of �he lost race,�which we have already quoted above.

Cororuc is bewildered by the ancient� evident hatred of him, and of all the Celts: �hat these people were even human, he was not at all certain. He had heard so much of them as �ittle people.�Tales of their doings, their hatred of the race of man, and their maliciousness flocked back to him. Little he knew that he was gazing on one of the mysteries of the ages. That the tales which the ancient Gaels told of the Picts, already warped, would become even more warped from age to age, to result in tales of elves, dwarfs, trolls and fairies... just as the Neanderthal monsters resulted in tales of goblins and ogres.� There is little in this story of the Picts that we do not find in Scott Elliot� book (save, of course, Howard� passionate intensity). As for the stories Cororuc had heard, already becoming �arped,�we find in Scott Elliot: � great many stories of giants are probably dim and jumbled-up traditions of the tall, red-haired cave-men seen by the first Picts who invaded Britain.... But at a much later period the conquering Pict is himself overcome by the Gaelic Celt. Then it is his turn to become a malignant gnome, a dark little dwarf, whose stone arrows are much to be dreaded.... It is by no means improbable that the �ittle people��that is, the small, dark Picts �did live on for many years in those underground houses of theirs....�This idea was not original with Scott Elliot, of course. Numerous writers of the time expressed the idea that fairy tales and myths must have some basis in historical fact.

The Lost Race was accepted by Weird Tales in January 1925 (it was not published until two years later). It is just over a year later that we find evidence of the next story of the Picts, when Weird Tales editor Wright rejects Men of the Shadows, saying: � thoroughly enjoyed MEN OF THE SHADOWS, but I fear I can not use it in WEIRD TALES. It is too little of a �tory,�despite the vigorous action in the opening pages. It is rather a chronicle of a tribe, a picture of the evolution of a race; and thereby it lacks the suspense and thrill that a story of individual conflict and hopes and fears and drama would have.� This is, so far as we now know, the first completed story featuring Bran Mak Morn and, while Wright� comment that �t is too little of a �tory� seems just, it is a seminal work for our understanding of Robert E. Howard� conceptions of the Picts, with it� lengthy �istory�of the race, as told by an aged wizard. It is here that we find new elements grafted onto the story of the �editerranean�race.

�en of the Shadows�is narrated by a yellow-haired Norseman who has served with the Roman legions manning Hadrian� wall. We have already noted that The Romance of Early British Life also told the story of a Roman legionary serving in Caledonia, and that the incident by the lake, in which our narrator� final two companions are speared by a Pict who has submerged himself, very clearly echoes a similar incident in Scott Elliot� book.

The narrator is captured by the Picts, but they are stayed from killing him by the command of their leader, before whom he is brought after he has recovered. When this chief refers to the Picts as �y people,�the Norseman remonstrates, �ut you are no Pict!�� am a Mediterranean,�the chief replies.

�ho are you?� �ran Mak Morn.� �hat!�I had expected a monstrosity, a hideous, deformed giant, a ferocious dwarf built in keeping with the rest of his race.

�ou are not as these.� � am as the race was,�he replied. �he line of chiefs has kept its blood pure through the ages, scouring the world for women of the Old Race.�

Bran, then, is a �ure�Pict, while the rest of the race has degenerated. (The ancient in The Lost Race had said the Picts of Caledonia were �ot true Picts.� We will recall that, in both Scott Elliot and The Lost Race, it was suggested that the Picts, pushed by the Celts into the wild hills of the west and north to which they had themselves pushed the earlier, red-haired cavemen, had interbred with their savage predecessors �nd became a race of monstrous dwarfs.�Because the line of chiefs �as kept its blood pure,�though, Bran represents the race as it once was. We can only wonder what his relationship to the Silurian Picts might be, for Howard does not make it explicit.

The Norseman is then witness to a confrontation between Bran and an aged wizard, what appears to be a contest of wills, a �ombat between the eyes and the souls behind them.�When Bran has triumphed, the ancient relates to his listeners the history of his race, and we find some remarkable new elements now grafted onto the story of the Picts. We learn that they were a �ameless Tribe�in the beginning, and had their origin somewhere in the northwest of the continent we now know as North America. They were the �irst Race�of men, though �east men�(Neanderthals) preceded them. The �econd Race�were Lemurians, the �hird Race�Atlanteans (also identified as Cr�-Magnons), and the �ourth Race�Celts. The beast-men (who may be identical with the �eindeer men,�red-haired savages) first fled southward before the Nameless Tribe, then crossed over to Africa via a chain of marshy islands, then northward into Europe. The Picts (or Nameless Tribe) first drifted from their original home to islands southeast of there, then fled eastward when a cataclysm destroyed their islands (now mountain peaks), then migrated into South America during the Ice Age, and then moved on to Atlantis (driving the Atlantean Cr�-Magnons into Europe, where they displaced the Neanderthal beast-men). Following an internecine conflict, a portion of the Nameless Tribe migrated to Africa, and from this point their story follows the historical one.

These new elements appear to be derived from several sources. The �irst 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� theories of the �oot races�and �ub-races�of mankind through friends acquainted with occult literature, or through secondary sources. It would not appear that he had read Blavatsky� 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� argument, in brief, hinged upon the �udden�appearance of the Cr�-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 Cr�-Magnon man and his culture seems to have been original with Spence, and as we have seen, Howard identifies the Atlanteans as Cr�-Magnons. Atlantis in America goes into greater detail on the American evidences for his thesis, and includes a chapter, �he 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 �utchman�of the story deciphers some hieroglyphics, concluding that the isle on which he and his companion have been stranded is a remnant of Lemuria: �emuria 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� source for the new material in The Isle of the Eons seems to have been not Spence, but E.A. Allen� The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races, published in 1885, a copy of which was in Howard� 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 �he Neolithic Age in Europe,�and particularly to the �uranians.�The word �ict�does not appear in the book, but we can read that �istory, 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: � 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� book, of course, makes no mention of a possible Atlantean or Lemurian connection for the Picts, and his Turanians are not described as the �irst Race,�coming from America. Howard, though, did not hesitate to use some of Allen� conclusions to his own ends. For instance, Allen devotes his tenth chapter to the mysterious �ound Builders�of America, and offers the following commentary concerning a mysterious effigy-mound: