Many of Howard’s Pictish characters share another interesting feature: they have names that share either a b/r or g/r consonant pattern. All the chieftains of the Picts have the b/r pattern: Bran, Brule (in the Kull stories), Berula (The Lost Race), Dulborn (The Ballad of King Geraint), Brogar (The Dark Man and Tigers of the Sea), and Brulla (The Night of the Wolf), while more “primitive” Picts generally have names with a g/r pattern, such as Grom, Gonar, Grok, and Grulk, or names that fit neither pattern. However, the b/r pattern is not reserved to Picts alone: such characters as El Borak, Turlogh O’Brien, Iron Mike Brennon, and Steve Bender also fit the b/r pattern and are short, dark-featured, or both. All, like the Picts, are from early in Howard’s writing career. El Borak, as we have said, actually predates Bran.
What this suggests is that the b/r naming pattern, and even more so the seeming identification with small, dark-featured characters, may have had roots in strong and lasting unconscious patterns, and that Howard’s admiration for the Picts, leading him to adopt them “as a medium of connection with ancient times,” may have stemmed from something prior to his discovery of the Pictish race and creation of Bran, possibly predating even El Borak. But while he created many characters who shared these features, he rarely adopted them as his viewpoint characters (even the earliest El Borak stories are generally told through his associates), until he was able to ally his strong emotional connection and storytelling skills in Worms of the Earth, following which he wrote no further tales of Bran.
Interestingly, then, after Worms of the Earth no Pictish character fits the b/r pattern: we have Teyanoga (Wolves Beyond the Border; in the first draft his name was “Garogh”) and Zogar Sag (Beyond the Black River) in the Conan series, and in these stories (and The Black Stranger) the Picts are primarily howling savages; and in the James Allison tales we find a Kelka (Marchers of Valhalla) and Grom (The Valley of the Worm), both blood brothers to the AEsir heroes, during an era when the Picts seem to be jungle-dwellers. Even the great chieftain of “The Hyborian Age,” who, five hundred years after Conan, leads the Picts in overthrowing the Hyborian kingdoms and establishing an empire, while dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, is named “Gorm.” In other words, Worms of the Earth seems to be the last story in which Howard felt a really personal connection with the Picts, the first and last time he would “look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!”
NOTES ON THE ORIGINAL HOWARD TEXTS
The texts for this edition of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King were prepared by Rusty Burke and David Gentzel, with the assistance of Glenn Lord. The stories have been checked either against Howard’s original manuscripts and typescripts, copies of which were provided by Lord, or the first published appearance if a manuscript or typescript was unavailable. Every effort has been made to present the work of Robert E. Howard as faithfully as possible.
Deviations from the original sources are detailed in these textual notes. In the following notes, page, line and word numbers are given as follows: 11.20.2, indicating page 11, twentieth line, second word. Story titles, chapter numbers and titles, and breaks before and after chapter headings, titles, and illustrations are not counted; in poems, only text lines are counted. The page/line number will be followed by the reading in the original source, or a statement indicating the type of change made. Punctuation changes are indicated by giving the immediately preceding word followed by the original punctuation.
We have standardized chapter numbering and titling: Howard’s own practices varied, as did those of the publications in which these stories appeared. We have not noted those changes here.