The Last King, page 30
ROBERT E. HOWARD, BRAN MAK MORN AND THE PICTS
Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet
“There is one hobby of mine which puzzles me to this day,” wrote Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft in 1932. “That 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 ‘Pict’ 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’s writing career. Only one other creation, Francis X. Gordon (‘El Borak’) appears at both the beginning and the end of Howard’s 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 1922–1923), 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’Brien and Cormac Mac Art, they are the last surviving remnants of Bran’s 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, “The 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 “bare mentionings, usually in disapproval.”
“Then 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’s description, and in it we find so many descriptions and incidents which find resonance in Howard’s 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: “This 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 ‘Homo 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. “A strong force of the oldest men in the settlement, well armed and watchful, were ‘seeing 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:
“Our 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’s Pictish stories is in the chapter Scott Elliot titles “My General, Agricola.” In it, he tells the story of a Tungrian serving in the Roman legion in Britain, and relates their troubles in Caledonia.
“We [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’s outline of Pictish history is generally in accord with the scholarship of the day, differing from the mainstream only in using the term “Picts” to designate these Mediterranean invaders of ancient Britain. Most authorities seem to have preferred the term “Iberians,” 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’s first attempts to write about the Picts, we know little. In his January 1932 letter to Lovecraft, he mentioned “a long narrative rhyme which I never completed, and in which I first put Bran on paper,” saying he had “told it through a Roman centurion on the Wall.” A listing of Howard’s 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 “for my own amusement” which featured, among others, “Bran 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’s high school days (circa 1922–23). 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: “A 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’s 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’s other work, as well.
Another work that apparently dates from 1922–23, 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.
“For some reason or other the Picts as Silurian that fled to Wales did not unite with the cave-men’s 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 “Picts as Silurian” who figure in Howard’s 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, “There 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: “As 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 “felt 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 “weird” 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: “Picts!... I have fought Picts in Caledonia...; they are short but massive and misshapen; not at all like you!” “They are not true Picts,” the ancient tells him, and relates to him the story of “the lost race,” which we have already quoted above.
Cororuc is bewildered by the ancient’s evident hatred of him, and of all the Celts: “That these people were even human, he was not at all certain. He had heard so much of them as ‘little 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’s book (save, of course, Howard’s passionate intensity). As for the stories Cororuc had heard, already becoming “warped,” we find in Scott Elliot: “A 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 ‘little 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: “I thoroughly enjoyed MEN OF THE SHADOWS, but I fear I can not use it in WEIRD TALES. It is too little of a ‘story,’ 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’s comment that “it is too little of a ‘story’” seems just, it is a seminal work for our understanding of Robert E. Howard’s conceptions of the Picts, with it’s lengthy “history” of the race, as told by an aged wizard. It is here that we find new elements grafted onto the story of the “Mediterranean” race.
“Men of the Shadows” is narrated by a yellow-haired Norseman who has served with the Roman legions manning Hadrian’s 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’s final two companions are speared by a Pict who has submerged himself, very clearly echoes a similar incident in Scott Elliot’s 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 “my people,” the Norseman remonstrates, “But you are no Pict!” “I am a Mediterranean,” the chief replies.
“Who are you?”
“Bran Mak Morn.”
“What!” I had expected a monstrosity, a hideous, deformed giant, a ferocious dwarf built in keeping with the rest of his race.
“You are not as these.”
“I am as the race was,” he replied. “The line of chiefs has kept its blood pure through the ages, scouring the world for women of the Old Race.”
Bran, then, is a “pure” Pict, while the rest of the race has degenerated. (The ancient in The Lost Race had said the Picts of Caledonia were “not 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 “and became a race of monstrous dwarfs.” Because the line of chiefs “has 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 “combat 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 “Nameless Tribe” in the beginning, and had their origin somewhere in the northwest of the continent we now know as North America. They were the “First Race” of men, though “beast men” (Neanderthals) preceded them. The “Second Race” were Lemurians, the “Third Race” Atlanteans (also identified as Crô-Magnons), and the “Fourth Race” Celts. The beast-men (who may be identical with the “reindeer 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 Crô-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.
