Not typically … but Robert E. Howard was anything but typical.
If you want to know why Howard lasts while so many of his barbaric descendants have not, gaze into "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune."
But not too closely. You might not be able to rip your gaze away.
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“Mirrors” starts with an epigraph by Edgar Allan Poe, placing the reader into the proper headspace for the story to come. Poe wrote stories of psychological disorientation and spirals into madness.
The stuff of “Mirrors.”
Not much actually happens plot-wise. Kull is king but unsatisfied with reality, weary of life, and unable to hear the sea-songs of Atlantis of his youth. It has the same melancholy, disenchanted feel of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key” (Feb. 1929 Weird Tales), even though Howard wrote the story considerably earlier and that could not have been an influence. Must have been something in the inter-war air.
A slave girl with an ulterior motive recommends Kull seek out Tuzun Thune, a wizard who holds the secrets of life and death. And he does.
But this story isn’t about plot, or character. It’s theme, the exploration of life itself, and how strange and ephemeral this thing called “reality” is. When you get right down to it the relationship of reality and consciousness are incredibly complex, and uncertain, prone to dissolve if you look at them too closely.
Is there reality if no one is there to observe it? Does the observer therefore create reality? And if so, can we create and inhabit worlds of our own making, every bit as “real” as this one?
Skeptical of slippery sophistry, Kull nevertheless accepts Thune’s offer to gaze into his mirrors. And there finds the origins of man, a “dream of the gods,” and learns the truth of mankind’s ephemeral existence, that all our glories will fade like smoke on a summer sea.
Kull is soon lost in a hall of mirrors that seem real but may be a metaphor for his own tortured and bewildered metaphysical thinking.
Is his world real, or the world inside the mirror real?
Does it matter, if reality is only in our heads, the product of our highly individual consciousness? Is life merely a dream?
The line between fantasy and reality blurs as Kull himself begins to fade; he threatens to vanish entirely into the world in the mirror until his Pict friend, Brule the Spear-Slayer, kills Tuzun Thune and shatters the glass.
But this is no heroic finish. Unease remains. Kull is left to ponder, was it Thune’s witchery changing him to mist, or had he stumbled on to a secret? Maybe there are worlds beyond worlds, ones we can access.
Conan would famously reject such mirrors and place his gaze firmly upon this world. He scorns such bottomless and possibly destructive philosophizing (“Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me."). Perhaps both he and Howard came to discover that the only truth we can ever truly know is our own.
Though even Conan’s words can be interpreted with ambiguity; after all he never admits he knows the truth, only that he will let others brood upon its nature, and that the illusion is real, to him.
A few additional notes
“The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” originally appeared in the September 1929 Weird Tales and has been reprinted and adapted widely since. In print, too numerous to mention, but some notables include Skull-Face and Others (Arkham House, 1946), The Coming of Conan (Gnome Press, 1953), and King Kull (Lancer, 1967).
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The story was adapted for Savage Sword of Conan #34 (Oct. 1978), with script by Roy Thomas and art by Mike Ploog. I have this. It’s pretty cool even though two of the pages are transposed. The images from this essay are taken from that.
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The heavy metal band Arkham Witch covered the tale in a song of the same name.
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It contains one of my favorite Howard passages, a prose-poetry which made Howard so special.
“There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester's bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky, and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh.”
This passage was heavily adapted for the screenplay of Conan the Barbarian (1982) and voiced by Max Von Sydow.
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Yes: Conan was borne out of a rewritten Kull story and so contains his literal DNA. Both are powerful, massive, untamed, fierce fighters, barbarian outsiders sitting uncomfortably on the thrones of civilized kingdoms.
No: Howard was in a different place in his life when he wrote these stories, and the characters are therefore different. Kull has his own distinct characteristics: Brooding, reflective, relatively chaste, philosophical, prone to dreaming. In his essay “Atlantean Genesis” included in Kull: Exile of Atlantis (Del Rey, 2006), editor Patrice Louinet shares some passages from letters to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith at the time of the writing of “Mirrors,” and they are rife with the same sort of philosophical/psychological inquiry.
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Can a story about the nature of reality be categorized as sword-and-sorcery? I don’t want S&S minus the Clark Ashton Smithian-weird strain. And it’s got a warrior and a wizard in it.
So I say, yes.
