Ages ago we ruled. Before the Dane, before the Gael, before the Briton, before the Roman, we reigned in the western isles. Our stone circles rose to the sun. … Like wolves we Picts live now among the scattered islands, among the crags of the highlands and the dim hills of Galloway. We are a fading people. We pass.
– Brogar the Pict, in Robert E. Howard, “The Dark Man”
There are two kinds of “savage” or “barbarian” in Robert E. Howard’s fiction. On the one hand we have the good savage – fierce, spontaneous, self-sufficient, honourable, and free from the weakness, hypocrisy, decadence, and over-intellectuality of civilised humanity. On the other hand we have the bad savage – subhuman, duplicitous, creepy, a slithering lurker in darkness, the primordial “other.” The good savage’s straightforwardness is frequently contrasted with the craftiness and duplicity of urban civilisation; the bad savage, by contrast, is cunning and secretive, anything but straightforward. One is like a swordthrust in broad daylight; the other is like a garrote in the dark.
In a particularly unfortunate racist twist, the good savages are almost always Aryan – sometimes Nordic, but more often Celtic – while the bad savages tend to be non-Aryans. (Most of Howard’s barbarian protagonists are Celts; this is obvious in the case of Turlogh Dubh, Donn Othna, Donald MacDeesa, Red Cumal, Red Cahal, Black Vulmea, Eithriall, and the various Cormacs (Cormac of Connacht, Cormac Mac Art, Cormac Fitzgeoffrey), but Conan too is clearly supposed to be a Celt: the name “Conan” is Irish, he swears by the Irish god Crom, and he’s a Cimmerian. In Howard’s day the historical Cimmerians were thought, rightly or wrongly, to be Celtic, the term being regarded as cognate with “Cymric.” And since Howard’s Cimmerians are supposed to be descended from the Atlanteans, that makes Kull of Atlantis a proto-Celt too.) One Howard quote (from the Solomon Kane story “Wings in the Night”) that has regrettably achieved some popularity on neo-Nazi websites runs: “The ancient empires fall, the dark-skinned peoples fade and even the demons of antiquity gasp their last, but over all stands the Aryan barbarian, white-skinned, cold-eyed, dominant, the supreme fighting man of the earth.” (Incidentally, and outrageously, the Wikisource version of “Wings in the Night,” like many online Howard works, is apparently censored and omits this passage without notice.) For arguments over the extent of Howard’s racism, see Joe Marek (scroll to the bottom) on one side and Gary Romeo on the other; what Marek and Romeo between them succeed in showing – if it needed showing – is that severely racist elements in Howard’s thought coexisted with genuinely antiracist elements.
In any case, in odd contrast with all this Celto-Aryan supremacy crap is Howard’s fascination with the Picts, whom he regarded – probably wrongly, but in accordance with theories fashionable in his day – as the pre-Celtic, indeed pre-Aryan, inhabitants of Britain. Howard’s Picts are, accordingly, “bad” savages, or well on their way to being such; they are portrayed (with some exceptions) as declined or declining below the human level (though they seem to have been a long time declining, as Howard’s Pictish stories range from the 1000th century BCE to the 20th century CE), and virtually as hostile, half-visible extensions of the natural environment. In their most extreme decadence they are even shown, sometimes, as furtive, subterranean, Gollum-like worm-people. Yet Howard ordinarily portrays these Picts (at least those that haven’t quite reached Gollum status) sympathetically, and indeed appears to have identified with them to the extent of imagining himself a reincarnated Pict. (Besides the Picts, another interesting exception is the African sorcerer N’longa. When first introduced, in the Solomon Kane story “Red Shadows,” he seems like a typical bad savage; but by “Hills of the Dead” he has plainly become a more sympathetic character.)
Indeed the Picts’ very decline seems to give them a romantic status in Howard’s eyes – and of course a romanticising fascination with those one regards as decadent or inferior is no less racist a reaction than condemnation or revulsion would be. Likewise, the same Rudyard Kipling who wrote “The White Man’s Burden,” championing imperialism as a supposed tool of civilisation, is also the Kipling who felt the allure of primitivism sufficiently strongly to write “Letting In the Jungle.” Such complexities don’t get their authors off the hook for anything; all they show is that these authors were confused in a variety of inconsistent ways, not just in one unitary way. Still, these complexities do make Howard – and Kipling – more interesting.
In a January 1932 letter to H. P. Lovecraft, Howard puzzles over how his childhood fascination with the Picts managed to overcome his admitted racist attitudes (though as Lovecraft was still more racist than Howard he could probably shed little illumination on this question):
I first learned of the small dark people which first settled Britain, and they were referred to as Picts. I had always felt a strange interest in the term and the people, and now I felt a driving absorption regarding them. … Picts were made to be sly, furtive, unwarlike, and altogether inferior to the races which followed – which was doubtless true. And yet I felt a strong sympathy for this people, and then and there adopted them as a medium of connection with ancient times. … I am not yet able to understand my own preference for these so-called Picts. Bran Mak Morn has not changed in the years; he is exactly as he leaped full-grown into my mind – a pantherish man of medium height with inscrutable black eyes, black hair and dark skin. This was not my own type; I was blond and rather above medium size than below. Most of my friends were of the same mold. Pronounced brunet types such as this were mainly represented by Mexicans and Indians, whom I disliked. Yet, in reading of the Picts, I mentally took their side against the invading Celts and Teutons, whom I knew to be my type and indeed, my ancestors. My interest, especially in my early boyhood, in these strange Neolithic people was so keen, that I was not content with a Nordic appearance, and had I grown into the sort of man, which in childhood I wished to become, I would have been short, stocky, with thick, gnarled limbs, beady black eyes, a low retreating forehead, heavy jaw, and straight, coarse black hair – my conception of a typical Pict.
Howard goes on to speculate:
Sometimes I think Bran is merely the symbol of my own antagonism toward the empire. … I saw the name “Picts” first on maps, and always the name lay outside the far-flung bounds of the Roman empire. … I was an instinctive enemy of Rome; what more natural than that I should instinctively ally myself with her enemies ….
For the relevant correspondence see the most recent Bran Mak Morn anthology.
As befits their status as “other,” Howard’s Picts are always portrayed from the standpoint of some non-Pictish character. The Picts tend to figure in other characters’ stories – Kull’s or Conan’s, Cormac’s or Turlogh’s. Even Bran Mak Morn, Howard’s chief Pictish protagonist, is almost always seen through others’ eyes.
There is a sole exception, “Worms of the Earth” – generally considered the greatest of Howard’s Pictish stories – where we see events from Bran’s perspective. (Howard himself noted this when he wrote to H. P. Lovecraft: “when I came to write of them, it was still through alien eyes …. Only in my last Bran story, ‘Worms of the Earth’ … did I look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!”) And it is notably in “Worms” that the character of “bad savage” gets transferred most clearly from the Picts to the titular worm-people, who seem to the Picts as the Picts seem to everybody else. But the Jekyll-and-Hyde ambiguity of Picts-as-fearful-of-the-worm-people versus Picts-as-becoming-the-worm-people runs through the entire Pictish cycle. Howard sometimes tried to resolve the conflict by distinguishing decadent and non-decadent branches of Picts, or decadent and non-decadent phases of Pictish history, but could never arrive at a consistent solution – as is most strikingly evident in the fact that Bran himself in effect becomes, in “The Dark Man,” the worm-people’s stone idol that he views with such revulsion in “Worms.”
Here’s a checklist of Howard’s chief Pictish and/or worm-people stories, with links to online versions where available:
The Shadow Kingdom (1927)
Kull of Atlantis meets the Pictish chieftains Brule and Ka-nu, as well as the serpent-people sometimes identified with the worm-peopleThe Cat and the Skull (1928)
Kull, Brule, and Ka-nu versus Thulsa DoomThe Screaming Skull of Silence (1928)
A quiet moment with Kull, Brule, and Ka-nuThe Mirrors of Tuzun Thune (1929)
Kull and Brule enjoy a reflective momentThree Men Sat at a Table (unfinished, 1928)
Brule tells Kull some Pictish historyBy This Axe I Rule! (1929)
Kull, Brule, and Ka-nu foil a coupSwords of the Purple Kingdom (1929)
Kull, Brule, and Ka-nu foil another coupThe Hyborian Age (1932)
Filling in Pictish history between Kull’s and Conan’s erasTower of the Elephant (1933)
Conan learns some Pictish history from an unlikely sourceBeyond the Black River (1934)
Conan vs. Picts on the Aquilonian frontierThe Black Stranger (1935)
Conan, pirates, and Picts on the Aquilonian frontier; later rewritten as the Black Vulmea story “Swords of the Red Brotherhood,” with the Picts transposed to American IndiansWolves Beyond the Border (unfinished, 1934?)
Pictish skullduggery on the frontier during Conan’s Aquilonian coup
The Lost Race (1924)
Picts in ancient Britain on their way to becoming the worm-peopleMen of the Shadows – excerpt (1925)
A Norse-Roman soldier meets Pictish chieftain Bran Mak Morn and learns some Pictish historyA Song of the Race (?)
Bran Mak Morn and more Pictish historyKings of the Night (1930)
Thanks to time travel, Kull of Atlantis meets Bran Mak MornWorms of the Earth (1932)
Bran Mak Morn meets the subterranean worm-people and steals their stone idol – generally thought to be Howard’s best Pictish storyTigers of the Sea (unfinished,?)
Cormac Mac Art vs. PictsNight of the Wolf (1930)
Cormac Mac Art and Picts vs. VikingsSpears of Clontarf (1931)
Turlogh Dubh and a Pictish seeress at the battle of Clontarf; rewritten as “The Grey God Passes/Twilight of the Grey Gods,” with more supernatural elements and with the Pictish character altered to one of the faërie folk instead; the tale is retold yet again, from a modern perspective, in “The Cairn on the Headland,” but still no PictsThe Dark Man (1930)
Turlogh Dubh meets Bran Mak Morn as the stone idol of the PictsGods of Bal-Sagoth (1930)
Turlogh Dubh on an island adventure; no Picts per se, but somewhat Pict-like enemies, plus the story is a direct continuation of “The Dark Man”Ballad of King Geraint (1927)
Turlogh Dubh in another battle alongside a Pictish comradeThe Valley of the Lost / Secret of Lost Valley (?)
Worm-people in frontier Texas, clearly unrelated to the PictsThe Little People (1928)
The Picts as worm-people in modern timesThe Black Stone (1930)
The stone idol of the worm-people (explicitly distinguished from Picts) shows up in modern HungaryThe Thing on the Roof (1930)
Another artefact of the worm-people (described as being from the same culture as that of “The Black Stone”) shows up in modern Central AmericaThe Children of the Night (1930)
Modern racial memories concerning Picts and worm-people; a Conrad & Kirowan story, plus Bran Mak Morn and the stone idol get a mentionThe Dwellers Under the Tombs (1932)
Worm-people in modern times; a Conrad & Kirowan story, better than most of the modern-times storiesMarchers of Valhalla (1932)
Modern racial memories concerning Picts; a James Allison storyThe Valley of the Worm (1934)
Modern racial memories concerning Picts and something like worm-people; another James Allison storyThe Garden of Fear (1933)
Modern racial memories concerning “little brown people” who seem to be Picts; yet another James Allison storyPeople of the Dark (1931)
Worm-people both in racial memories and in modern times
That said, it must be conceded that labeling a Hurston a libertarian may alleviate only so much of the puzzlement. Hurston has a way of unpredictably lurching leftward on one issue and rightward on another in such a way that almost any reader, libertarian or otherwise, is likely to find her infuriating at some point. (But this is of course likewise true for the other writers listed above.)
Hence Janie, the heroine, learns to dismiss the intrusive opinions of the town gossips by saying “If God don’t think no mo’ ’bout ’em then Ah do, they’s a lost ball in de high grass” (ch. 1), and again advises her friend Pheoby: “Yo’ papa and yo’ mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got to go to God [in this case probably a metaphor for dying], and they got to tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.” (ch. 20)
All around me, bitter tears are being shed over the fate of Holland, Belgium, France and England. I must confess to being a little dry around the eyes. I hear people shaking with shudders at the thought of Germany collecting taxes in Holland. I have not heard a word against Holland collecting one-twelfth of poor people’s wages in Asia. That makes the ruling families in Holland very rich, as they should be. What happens to the poor Javanese and Balinese is unimportant; Hitler’s crime is that he is actually doing a thing like that to his own kind. That is international cannibalism and should be stopped. Hitler is a bandit. That is true, but that is not what is held against him. He is muscling in on well-established mobs. Give him credit. He cased some joints away off in Africa and Asia, but the big mobs already had them paying protection money and warned him to stay away. The only way he can climb out of the punk class is to high-jack the load and that is just what he is doing. President Roosevelt could extend his four freedoms to some people right here in America before he takes it all aboard [sic, presumably for “abroad”], and, no doubt, he would do it too, if it would bring in the same amount of glory. … He can call names across the ocean, but he evidently has not the courage to speak even softly at home. Take away the ocean and he simmers right down. … Our country is so busy playing “fence” to the mobsters that the cost in human suffering cannot be considered yet. …
I see, too, that while we all talk about justice more than any other quality on earth, there is no such thing as justice in the absolute in this word. We are too human to conceive of it. We all want the breaks, and what seems just to us is just what favors our wishes. If we did not feel that way, there would be no monuments to conquerors in our high places. It is obvious that the successful warrior is great to us because he went and took things from somebody else that we could use, and made the vanquished pay dearly for keeping it from us so long. To us, our man-of-arms is almost divine in that he seized good things from folks who could not appreciate them (well, not like we could, anyway) and brought them where they belonged. Nobody wants to hear anything about the side of the conquered. Any remarks from him is rebellion. This attitude does not arise out of studied cruelty, but out of the human bent that makes us feel that the man who wants the same thing we want, must be a crook and needs a good killing. “Look at the miserable creature!” we shout in justification. “Too weak to hold what we want!” (Folklore/Memoirs, pp. 765-66)
One thing impressed me strongly from this …. The white people had held my people in slavery here in America. They had bought us, it is true[,], and exploited us. But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on …. I knew that civilized money stirred up African greed. That war between tribes was often stirred up by white traders to produce more slaves in the barracoons and all that. But, if the African princes had been as pure and innocent as I would like to think, it could not have happened. No, my own people had butchered and killed, exterminated whole nations and torn families apart, for a profit before the strangers got their chance at a cut. It was a sobering thought. … It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory. Lack of power and opportunity passes all too often for virtue. If I were King, let us say, over the Western Hemisphere tomorrow, instead of what I am, what would I consider right and just? Would I put the cloak of Justice on my ambition and send her out a-whoring after conquests? It is something to ponder over with fear. (Folklore/Memoirs, pp. 707-08)
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