Robert E. Howard: "Men of the Shadows," "Kings of the Night," and "The Little People"

In our last episode we read three stories from the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales, including a story by Robert E. Howard of Conan fame that is associated with the Bran Mak Morn character, "The Lost Race."  Today I'm taking my 2005 paperback edition of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King off the shelf to read three stories about the Picts, the little people who conquered Britain and then in turn were overthrown by the Celts and driven underground, where they nurtured a desire for revenge and became the basis for our legends of elves and dwarves.

"Men of the Shadows" (1969)

"Men of the Shadows" was first printed in 1969 in the edition of Bran Mak Morn with the unforgettable Frazetta cover.  According to Rusty Burke in the 2001 intro to my copy of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, in 1926 Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright rejected "Men of the Shadows" as lacking "story," saying it was more of a "chronicle."  Of course, since then, it has reappeared in a multitude of Bran Mak Morn-themed Howard collections.

"Men of the Shadows" begins with a poem of nine quatrains about how the Picts are the "first great nation" and "the last of the Stone Age Men."

The story proper begins with a hand-to-hand battle between a detachment of Roman soldiers--a fragment of a force of 500 men who marched north from Hadrian's Wall but were scattered by a storm and by attacks from Picts--and a much larger group of the short, hairy, ape-like Picts.  Our narrator is among the five Roman survivors of the fight, as for the Picts, they are wiped out.  Our memoirist is a six-foot-five Norseman serving in the multi-cultural Roman Army, and it isn't long before, as these five head south and run into one Pict ambush after another, that he finds himself the sole survivor of the doomed expedition.  Like Tarzan shedding the veneer of civilization and becoming again a jungle beast, as Lord Greystoke does so many times in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels, our narrator, in his perilous position, surrounded by enemies in a strange mystical wilderness far from any city, shrugs off all his Roman culture and sophistication to become his true self, a viking barbarian!

..a slow, deep rage began to rise in me, coupled with a vast Nordic contempt for my foes.  I was in good mood to go berserk.

When he encounters a party of Picts one hundred strong, he attacks them and is captured after killing many of them.  Then he meets a man who doesn't look like a Pict, being straight and of ordinary height, but is apparently their leader--Bran Mak Morn!  Bran looks like a Mediterranean because "The line of chiefs has kept its blood pure through the ages, scouring the world for women of the Old Race."  Wow, world's best dating service!  (This again reminds us of the world of Tarzan, in which La, Queen of Opar, is a beautiful woman and her underlings are hideous ape-men.)  The arrival of the Norse legionary triggers a showdown between Bran, the political authority of the Picts, and the Picts' religious authority, bringing a long-simmering conflict to a boil.  Bran thinks the old monster-gods are broken and useless, and he no longer permits human sacrifices to them, something the high priest, a wizard more than a century old, resents.  The high priest insists the Norse captive be destroyed, but Bran orders him released, granting his sister's request that he free the big blonde hunk.  (When you are good-looking, the world is full of open doors and escape hatches.)

The wizard challenges Bran's rule, seeking to revive proper worship of the old gods--

"If I conquer, the Serpent coils again, the Wild-cat screeches again, and thou art my slave forever.  If thou dost conquer, my arts are thine and I will serve thee."

--and then the two engage in a test of wills, staring at each other, marshalling invisible forces until the wizard surrenders, beaten.  Howard suggests this battle is symbolic of the triumph of civilization over the Stone Age.

Up until now, "Men of the Shadows" has been a great sword and sorcery story, many fights with plenty of getting people getting decapitated and dismembered, a guy bragging about his height and ethnicity, lots of talk of weapons and armor, a guy escaping death with his sex appeal and then witnessing the mystical struggle over leadership of a dying race.  But then the wizard recites a poem and then tells the story of the Picts.  Our lecture starts with geography and then evolution and proceeds to the sinking of Lemuria, mass migrations, volcanoes, glaciers, conflict with Neanderthals and with the Cro-Magnons, and then we have the people of Atlantis.  The Picts travel all over the globe and conquer or drive before them man races, but in the end are defeated by the Celts.  The wizard then projects moving images from the camp fire, images of the future, of the coming fall of Rome.

In structure and themes, "Men of Shadows" feels a lot like a mere variation on "The Lost Race," and you can see why Wright rejected it (even though he accepted "The Lost Race.")  You've got good sword and sorcery adventure stuff, but that gives way to a history lesson (first the spoonful of sugar, then the medicine), and both stories lack a conventional climax in which the hero overcomes an obstacle in cathartic fashion.

The history lesson is a little tedious, but I'm still giving "Men of the Shadows" a thumbs up as most of the story is pretty exciting. 

"Kings of the Night" (1930)

Here's a story I read in my New York days, when I got my copy of Del Rey's 2006 Kull: Exile of Atlantis not long after it was published.  I remember being reminded by "Kings of the Night" of the first story in my silver paperback copy of Michael Moorcock's Sailor on the Seas of Fate, "Sailing to the Future," in which various Moorcock characters cross the dimensions to join forces.  "Kings of the Night" first appeared in a 1930 issue of Weird Tales alongside stories by Edmond Hamilton and Clark Ashton Smith that I blogged about years ago.

Roman and British armies sit encamped, resting in preparation for tomorrow's big battle!  As two Pictish chiefs and Cormac of Connacht watch, Bran Mak Morn, who is in the process of uniting the squabbling Picts, directs his wizard to tear the living heart out of a Roman soldier and read the future in its last beats!  Victory is foreseen, but is all this magic just a hoax perpetrated to enhearten the Picts, most of whom have a Stone Age Mindset?  The determining factor in tomorrow's battle, for reals, is the behavior of an army of Norsemen camped nearby.  Cormac's Gaels and a bunch of Briton charioteers from south of Hadrian's Wall are committed to fighting beside Bran's Picts tomorrow, but the Norse may join the Romans!  You see, the Viking's king has died and they are trying to squirm out of the deal he made with Bran.  They say they will only fight under a king, and no Pictish or Gaelic king, either!

Howard was a committed history buff and we have to hear all about the weapons and equipment and spirit and relationships of the Picts, Britons, Gaels and Norse before we get to the weird material some of us are here for.  "The ancestors of the Gaels had learned the arts of war on the vast plains of Scythia and at the courts of the Pharaohs where they had fought as mercenaries of Egypt, and much of what they learned they brought into Ireland with them."  Howard loves this "sweep of history" stuff, but I'm more interested in the experiences of individuals and it can get a little tedious.  I guess this business is a little like the catalog of ships at the start of the Iliad and like the descriptions of the armies at the start of a book about Waterloo or El Alamein or Normandy or whatever.

The earlier scene gave us the idea that maybe magic was a load of crap, a bunch of hogwash used by the cognitive elite to bamboozle the ignorant masses, but then the wizard solves Bran's problem with a spectacular bit of sorcery.  Bran has in his crown a gem given his ancestor a hundred thousand years ago by Kull, King of Valusia, a black-maned barbarian who seized the throne of a city the wizard says makes Rome look like a village!  So the wizard summons Kull from across the gulfs of time!  Kull thinks this is all a dream, and mistakes Bran for his Pictish crony--I guess after 4,000 or whatever generations, Bran still looks like the guy Kull awarded the gem to.  Cormac thinks Kull is some ringer the wizard has disguised as Kull, but he has to revise his opinion by the end of the story.

Kull is convinced to take command of the Norse army, but first he has to prove himself to the Northmen.  Their leader challenges Kull to a duel and Kull defeats him in a pretty exciting fight scene.  The Vikings are thrilled to fight under Kull, who has strength, skill, and steel superior to any they have ever seen.  

The duel was a lot of fun, but then comes page after page of fictional military history, with the generals making plans and deploying the cavalry here and the archers there and considering the need for scouts and all that, and then the actual fight, in which Howard gets to use one of his favorite phrases, "red ruin," again and again.  The Romans are surrounded and defeated, and the Vikings are also wiped out, Bran deliberately sacrificing these foreign pirates.  Kull is the only survivor of the Norse detachment, because when he is surrounded by vengeful legionaries he is whisked back to his own time period.

Even if I am not as interested in blow by blow descriptions of fictional battles as I am in more personal conflicts and more supernatural events, the climactic battle scene doesn't undermine "Kings of the Night" by any means.  This story is also better structured than "Men of the Shadows," with proper climax and plot twists near the end.  And I have to admit this story has made me curious to reread the rest of the Kull stories, which I have not read in over a decade.  The last Kull tale I read was "Swords of the Purple Kingdom" and that was in 2013.  So, thumbs up for "Kings of the Night."  

"The Little People" (1970)

"The Little People" was first printed in 1970, long after Howard's death, in a magazine, Coven 13.  A page was missing from Howard's manuscript and so somebody at the magazine came up with something to fill in the gap.  The version in Bran Mak Morn: The Last King lacks any such interpolations.

"The Little People" is a minor trifle, competent but, in this form at least, slight.  A wealthy young American proud of his Celtic heritage, our narrator, is on holiday in western England with his headstrong flapper sister.  From their hotel they can see Celtic megalithic ruins on the moors, the kind of thing that stirs the narrator's heart.  His sister is reading Arthur Machen and this inspires a lecture from the narrator on the Picts and how they came from the Mediterranean and conquered Europe and then were driven by the Celts into caves and became degenerate, the kind of lecture we've been hearing from Howard lately.  The flapper pooh poohs all this as fairy tale nonsense, and gets the idea of spending the night at the ruin to prove absurd local suspicions they are haunted or the Picts are still out there ready to kidnap Celts in revenge.  The narrator discourages her but she sneaks off when he is asleep.  

The ghost of a Celtic Druid wakes up our narrator and he runs outside to save his sister.  Suddenly there are Picts, little misshapen dwarves with flint weapons, chasing the flapper and trying to keep between the narrator and his sister.  The narrator, empowered by his natural Celtic hatred of the Pict, kills many with his fists (back home in the land of the free and the home of the brave he is an amateur boxer.)  The flapper, driven by racial memory, instinctively flees to the Celtic ruins, where the ghost of the Druid appears and drives off the Picts.

Not great--for example, the narrator's killing the Picts with his fists didn't help his sister, who was saved by the Druid.  We can't really hold this one against Howard, as I don't think he tried to sell it to anybody, so it's like an unfinished draft.  Just acceptable.   

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The four Bran stories we've just read feel a little repetitive when read all in one gulp, but none of them had been bad.  As for Kull, two Kull stories appeared in Weird Tales in 1929, so we'll get to the the King of Valusia when our Weird Tales project, currently in 1927, has advanced to that point.