Howard almost immediately put this new “knowledge” 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’s contention that the “Bran 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. ‘These 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, ‘but 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’s 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’Donnel, is recalling a past life as Aryara, he says of the abhorrent race his people called “the Children of the Night,” “They 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:
“In 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.
H.P. Lovecraft, memorializing his friend, said, “It is hard to describe precisely what made Mr. Howard’s stories stand out so sharply; but the real secret is that he himself is in every one of them....” The best of Howard’s tales are centered squarely on the viewpoint character. This is why Worms of the Earth is by far the best of the Bran Mak Morn stories: it is the only one in which Bran is not seen through the eyes of another character. Howard himself recognized this, writing to Lovecraft shortly after this story was accepted:
“My interest in the Picts was always mixed with a bit of fantasy – that is, I never felt the realistic placement with them that I did with the Irish and Highland Scotch. Not that it was the less vivid; but when I came to write of them, it was still through alien eyes - thus in my first Bran Mak Morn story – which was rightfully rejected – I told the story through the person of a Gothic mercenary in the Roman army; in a long narrative rhyme which I never completed, and in which I first put Bran on paper, I told it through a Roman centurion on the Wall; in ‘The Lost Race’ the central figure was a Briton; and in ‘Kings of the Night’ it was a Gaelic prince. Only in my last Bran story, ‘The Worms of the Earth’ which Mr. Wright accepted, did I look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!”
This would also prove to be the last Bran Mak Morn story Howard would write. In the same letter (dated March 10, 1932) in which Weird Tales editor Wright told Howard, “I want to schedule WORMS OF THE EARTH soon, for that is an unusually fine story, I think,” he had returned two other stories, asking for revisions to one: these were The Frost-Giant’s Daughter and The Phoenix on the Sword, the first tales of a Cimmerian adventurer named Conan who would dominate Howard’s fiction for the next three years. The Picts were, of course, present in Conan’s prehistoric “Hyborian Age”: they were the hereditary enemies of the Cimmerians, who were themselves descendants of the pre-Cataclysmic Atlanteans of Kull. The Pictish wilderness stretched from the western borders of Aquilonia to the sea, and it is on that border that one of Howard’s finest Conan tales, Beyond the Black River, is set. Pictish characters also play supporting roles in two of the James Allison stories, Marchers of Valhalla and The Valley of the Worm. But Bran, having made his foul bargain with the Worms of the Earth, is never heard from again.
It is tempting to see in Bran Mak Morn an autobiographical representation of Robert E. Howard. More so than any other of his characters, Bran feels the heavy weight of personal responsibility for his people, much as one suspects Howard must have felt toward his aging parents, especially his sickly mother. Bran knows that he is the last of his line, as perhaps Howard, an only child, may have felt he was the last of his. And Howard seems to explicitly suggest this connection when he insists upon his undying fascination with the Picts, and says “had I grown into the sort of a man, which in childhood I wished to become, I would have been short, stocky, with thick, gnarled limbs, beady black eyes, a low retreating forehead, heavy jaw, and straight, course black hair – my conception of a typical Pict.” Of course, Howard is at some pains to show us that Bran Mak Morn differs from the “typical Pict,” though sharing the characteristics of being small and dark-complected, with dark hair and eyes. This was not, as Howard says, his own type (“I was blond and rather above medium size than below”), making it all the more noteworthy that so many of his earliest characters share these features. Howard explicitly states, for instance, that Bran “physically...bore a striking resemblance to El Borak,” the first character he created, some two years before Bran. His alter-ego in the fictionalized autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, is described as a “black Celt,” “spare and gaunt,” a “dark youth.” And he related to H.P. Lovecraft a dream he had had as a child, in which the characters match this description:
“I dreamed that I slept and awoke, and when I awoke a boy and a girl about my age were playing near me. They were small and trimly shaped, with very dark skin and dark eyes. Their garments were scanty, and strange to me, now that I remember them, but at the time they were not strange, for I too was clad like them, and I too was small, and delicately fashioned and dark ... Now, as I woke in my dream, this scene was fully familiar to me, and I knew that the boy and the girl were my brother and sister; it was not as if I had merely wakened from a sleep, returning to my natural, work-a-day world. And suddenly in my dream, I began to laugh and to narrate to my brother and my sister the strange dream I had had. And I told them of what – if there was any truth at all in reality – constituted my actual waking life... I told them that my dream had seemed so vivid while dreaming it, that I had actually thought it to be real, and believed myself to be a stocky blond child living a waking life, without knowledge of any other....” (Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. December 1930, in Robert E. Howard: Selected Letters 1923–1930, p. 77).