I recently finished a re-read of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King (Del Rey, 2005), inspired by a reading of the Karl Edward Wagner pastiche Legion from the Shadows. Some thoughts, rattled off rather quickly as a formal post is not in the cards:
Bran Mak Morn is like an ancient, savage, King Arthur. He is
a once and future king, who will unite all the original tribes of Britain, drive
out the “civilized” Roman and post-Roman invaders, and restore existence to a primitive
ideal. His Camelot/round table will be the Cromlech, an inscrutable symbol of
the unknown. Poul Anderson did this sort of thing with Hrolf
Kraki’s Saga, but Howard’s “Arthur” is even deeper in time, the late third
century.
A lineage of Picts connects all of REH’s material, like a
savage through line. They make appearances in the Kull, Bran Mak Morn, James
Allison, and Conan stories. Brule the spear-slayer’s lineage goes back to the
very beginning (the Thurian Age of Kull, the days of Atlantis and Lemuria). The Last King contains a nice essay on
this topic by Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet, “Robert E. Howard, Bran Mak
Morn, and the Picts.” Bran Mak Morn taps into and unites this ancient spirit, successfully
uniting the tribes before eventually dying in battle. But his image persists, a
literal effigy in stories like “The Dark Man” and “The Children of the Night.” Will
he come again, a once and future king?
Picts are Howard’s image of the primal, original state of
man, whether that state is good or ill. Howard’s Picts are a primitive race.
They organize in tribes, live off the land as hunter-gatherers (notably they do
not farm, which makes men soft), don’t build cities, and work with flint. Howard
saw himself in these slanted forehead, dark complexioned, brutish, un-guiled
race. The Picts are a step below
barbarians in Howard’s taxonomy, unchanging, and eternal. Barbarians would
eventually organize, and civilize, and grow soft—not so the Picts. A
description of the Pictish chieftain Gorm from Howard’s “The Hyborian Age”:
In
the seventy-five years which had elapsed since he first heard the tale of
empires from the lips of Arus—a long time in the life of a man, but a brief
space in the tale of nations—he had welded an empire from straying savage
clans, he had overthrown a civilization. He who had been born in a mud-walled,
wattle-roofed hut, in his old age sat on golden thrones, and gnawed joints of
beef presented to him on golden dishes by naked slave-girls who were the
daughters of kings. Conquest and the acquiring of wealth altered not the Pict;
out of the ruins of the crushed civilization no new culture arose phoenix-like.
The dark hands which shattered the artistic glories of the conquered never
tried to copy them. Though he sat among the glittering ruins of shattered palaces
and clad his hard body in the silks of vanquished kings, the Pict remained the
eternal barbarian, ferocious, elemental, interested only in the naked primal
principles of life, unchanging, unerring in his instincts which were all for
war and plunder, and in which arts and the cultured progress of humanity had no
place.
The Picts did contain a purer, nobler strain, as exemplified
in Bran, from the Thurian Age. They morphed in conception in Howard’s mind as
he wrote the stories, and was exposed to new theories.
Howard uses the term “heather” very frequently when
describing the landscape of ancient Britain, and its wilds, again and again,
like an incantation. I have no knowledge of plant-life, but a quick Google
search reveals that heather is a dominant plant in the heathlands of moorlands
of Europe, yet is hardy and has been successfully introduced to many other
continents and climates, including North America. The way in which Howard uses the
term invites comparisons with his nostalgia for the frontier; I wonder how much
he had in mind old, pre-cultivated, pre-industrial Texas, before the cattle
farms and barbwire taming, while writing these stories.
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