Bran Mak Morn:
The Last King
Robert E Howard
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
Men of the Shadows
Kings of the Night
A Song of the Race
Worms of the Earth
The Dark Man
The Lost Race
Poem
Miscellanea
Notes on Miscellanea
The Little People
The Little People -Typescript
The Children of the Night
Bran Mak Morn
Bran Mak Morn - Manuscript
Synopsis
Worms of the Earth -Draft Version
Fragment
Poem—Previously Unpublished
Untitled
Endnotes
Appendices
Robert E. Howard and the Picts: A Chronology
Robert E. Howard, Bran Mak Morn and the Picts
Notes on the Original Howard Texts
Acknowledgments
Also by Robert E. Howard
Praise for Robert E. Howard
Copyright
I mulled over his observation for a long time without a reply. After almost two years, I think I have an answer.
I agree there are a lot of shadowy half-seen things in the Bran stories and I’ve tried to remain true to the author’s intent by keeping them so. On the other hand, there is a singular quality crying out for embellishment (at least in my view), a quality which sets these stories apart from the rest of Howard’s work.
It’s the quality of pathos.
Compassion is an element generally not associated with Howard. Here he transcends the fantasy and the heroics he’s known for by creating genuine sympathy for his noble Picts, the dark men who overcome all obstacles by their courage but are finally themselves overcome by fate. It’s this attribute I’m chiefly attracted to and I hope in some way my pictures reflect that.
I will try to leave Robert E. Howard’s shadowy figures to your imagination. Perhaps after reading Bran Mak Morn – The Last King you’ll want to sketch those things yourself.
Gary Gianni
2001
Introduction
Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), in a writing career that spanned less than a dozen years, created many memorable fantasy adventure characters, such as Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane, who continue to thrill readers long after they first appeared in the legendary magazine, Weird Tales. The seemingly endlessly inventive author also created enormously popular characters in other genres, such as the western tall-tales of Breckenridge Elkins, the rollicking misadventures of Sailor Steve Costigan, and the Middle Eastern exploits of El Borak and Kirby O’Donnell. But of all the many characters he created, none seem to have held for the Texas author a fascination to equal that of the people he called Picts, and their great king, Bran Mak Morn.
Writers for the pulp magazines often found that a single character who became popular with readers could turn into a significant meal ticket (Tarzan, for example, or Doc Savage). Unlike many of his contemporaries, though, Howard found that, no matter how popular his characters might be with the readers, he could not continue a series indefinitely. He told fellow Weird Tales author Clark Ashton Smith, regarding his most famous creation, Conan, “the time will come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write convincingly of him at all. This has happened in the past with nearly all my numerous characters; suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away, leaving me to search for another character.”
Most of his tales of Kull, the Atlantean adventurer who becomes king of a fabled land, were written between 1927 and 1929. When H.P. Lovecraft, in 1934, suggested that Howard write more, the Texan replied, “To sit down and consciously try to write another story on that order would be to produce something the artificiality of which would be apparent.” The Solomon Kane stories were written between 1927 and 1930, the Conan tales between 1932 and 1935. Despite the popularity of these characters – Weird Tales readers were still asking for more Kull and Kane stories four and five years after the last had appeared – Howard simply could not bring himself to write more stories after he had lost touch with the conception.
The Picts, though, appeared in some of Howard’s earliest, hand-written manuscripts, dating from perhaps 1923, and in one of the last-written Conan stories, in 1935, and rarely a year went by that they did not figure in some Howard tale.
“There is one hobby of mine which puzzles me to this day,” Howard wrote to 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 reasons for Howard’s fascination with the Picts are undoubtedly as complex as the man himself, and represent a potentially fertile field for generations of scholars and critics. Whatever these reasons might be, the fact remains that the Picts appeared in stories throughout his career, even while better-known or more popular characters played only briefly across the stage of his imagination. Certainly this must be attributed, at least in part, to some strong sense of identification Howard must have felt with this people. But his conception of the Picts also stretches across a vast canvas, from the remotest recesses of a mythical prehistory to the modern era, and though they are based upon a historical people, the conception is “mixed with a bit of fantasy,” so they could be made to serve in stories set not only in the historical past, but in the purely imaginary prehistory of Kull and Conan, and even in more modern tales based on the so-called ‘Cthulhu mythos.’
Howard’s first published story of the Picts (and his second story accepted for professional publication), The Lost Race, is set in the historical past, a period when the Britons have only recently displaced the earlier Gaels from the south of what is now England. The Picts here are the remnants of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of the Isles, a race that had migrated from the Mediterranean region during the Stone Age. In relating his race’s history, the ancient Pict seems to suggest that they originated in Africa. This view of the race’s origins is consistent with prevailing historical opinion in Howard’s time (though then, as now, the term ‘Pict’ was not generally applied to these Mediterraneans), as is the idea that they were driven ‘underground’ (to caverns, or to dwellings called ‘crannogs’ built on lakes), and that from them derived legends of ‘little people.’
Howard’s second complete tale of the Picts, though, is another matter. Men of the Shadows was turned down by Weird Tales in 1926, about a year after The Lost Race was accepted by the same magazine. Editor Farnsworth Wright complained that “It is too little of a ‘story.’ . . . It is rather a chronicle of a tribe, a picture of the evolution of a race.” The criticism seems just, but for those seeking to understand Howard’s conceptions of the Picts, it is a very important tale. In this story, as in The Lost Race, we find the history of the Picts related by an ancient member of the tribe (in this case an unnamed wizard), but now it extends much farther into antiquity, beyond the bounds of what we consider ‘history.’ Here we find our earliest example of what will become a Howard trademark: the idea of a vastly ancient, cyclic history of mankind, in which whole peoples undertake long migrations, surviving world-shattering cataclysms that destroy their hard-won cultures and hurl them back into savagery, whence they slowly, steadily make the upward climb until the next cataclysm.