Howard’s 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 “a 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’s Irish outlaw, Turlogh O’Brien, 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’s 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’s 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: “The time is between 296 A.D. and 300 A.D.”), Bran is first identified as “chief of the Cruithni Picts, but then as “the Pictish king.” In both Kings of the Night and The Dark Man, Bran is referred to as “king” of the Picts, whereas in Bran Mak Morn and Men of the Shadows, he was a “chieftain.” In Kings, it is made explicit that Bran rose “by 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 “the first pitched battle between the Picts under their king and the Romans,” thus comes early in Bran’s 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 “hurled into savagery.” “Here in Caledon,” he says, “is 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’s 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. “Bran 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’s poem, The Song of a Mad Minstrel, and Rudyard Kipling’s A Pict Song, from his book Puck of Pook’s Hill, and suggested that Kipling’s 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’s Bran Mak Morn tales. It is a tempting hypothesis, with some strong circumstantial evidence. For instance, Howard’s poem, with lines like “I 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’s “We 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’s 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’s Bran synopsis, and the case seems even stronger. However, Kipling’s Picts (which he, like Machen, refers to as “Little People”) are far from being Howard’s (“Picts seldom fight,” Parnesius says. “I 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’s tales seem to suggest a linkage with Kipling’s.
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’s 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 “some of the squat Mongoloids now represented by the Lapps,” wrote:
“It’s 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 ‘little 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 ‘little 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:
“Your 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 - ‘The 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.”