Status Updates From Bran Mak Morn: The Last King

Untitled 5/10
The Lost Race 6/10

“Robert E. Howard, Bran Mak Morn and the Picts”

A companion essay to the timeline that chronicles REH’s conception of the Picticious race, down to the history book that first inspired his love affair with the race, his eventual apotheosis of the Bran character in “Worms”, and his subsequent jettisoning of them as the sacred subject that they had once been in his cosmology.

“Robert E. Howard and the Picts: a Chronology”

This details every time Howard touched on Picts, whether it was in a story in this volume, one in others (the Steve Allison tales), or in letters written to others, particularly H.P. Lovecraft. Howard also examines along with Lovecraft why this peculiar preference for the Picts existed in his mind. It’s a very interesting read.

“Untitled”

This is an aborted novel from a teenage Howard where a dude does super drugs and then recounts episodes of his past lives. Stone Age, pre-English Pict, Babylon, an Egyptian slave… and Viking-on-Viking violence. The more he wrote, the more detailed and longer the episodes got. It’s not a bad concept, especially with Howard’s historicentric brain.

“Poem (previously unpublished)”

Rather than glorifying the Picts, this poem warns of the “worms” of the earth and the sort of doom that waits to be unleashed upon mankind, lurking deep beneath the earth.

“Fragment”

This is more like it! Bran is undercover and meets a Viking out in the middle of nowhere. Both of them lie about who they are and what they are doing, and they part more or less amicably. Eventually he runs into a red-headed warrior woman who challenges his passing into her peoples’ land and she pounces on him since he will not condescend to wrestle her.

“Worms of the Earth—Draft Version”

The differences aren’t that notable to me. Some different names or spellings, maybe short a segment or two with the Roman Governor… you would have to do a line-by-line comparison to really get a feel for what extra material Howard added, apart from I guess an early aside where Sulla contemplates the murder of Valerius.

“Synopsis”

This feels like the genesis of “Kings of the Night”, mainly because of the key detail of Bran poised to block a Roman invasion with a host of Norse invaders. Where this would have focused on a bunch of political intrigue related to Rome, tho, “Kings” mostly focused on what passes for politicking between Bran’s defensive forces.

“Bran Mak Morn—Manuscript”

this is of course the scanned manuscript that the preceding play fragment is derived from. Howard’s script is a lot easier to read, here, but this is again more of a curio.

“Bran Mak Morn”

This is the first act and scene of a play that Howard wrote when he was 17. Bran is something of an Arthur figure as the modus behind his Kingship is to repel the Roman invasion, but Bran believes that his goal is doomed and that he will ultimately die in battle, with his people backsliding further under Roman aggression.

“The Children of the Night”

The first half of this story is a who’s who of Weird Fiction mixed with a lot of intellectualized racism that bangs the drum of Howard’s Picts. Then our Celtic narrator gets a head wound and briefly relives a past life where he berserked and slew dozens of, uh, the pre-Pict “mongoloid” race (not to be confused with the redheads) that originally inhabited the UK.