Bran Mak Morn: The Last King – Robert E. Howard, 2005 ★★★

Requiem for a Forgotten Race

There is much to love in this collection of short fiction and poetry centered around a doomed race of pre-Celtic warriors, but mainly if you are a fan of the author going in.

Underneath Robert E. Howard the professional pulp writer of the 1920s and 1930s was a fighting primitive who rebelled against civilized constraints even though he knew he could only lose. In that light, Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, from the classy continuing series of Howard story collections published by Del Ray, presents Howard in his element.

People who love Howard will want this book, for the different ways it highlights one of the writer’s signature characters, Bran Mak Morn, and more at the core, the Pictish race from which he sprang. But as Spinal Tap’s manager once said, their appeal is selective.

Bran Mak Morn is the Picts’ leader, sworn enemy of various invaders, and all-around tough guy. No lone wolf like Conan, Bran stands alone nevertheless in the knowledge that the Picts are in a losing battle against a future he despises:

“For what we could not keep by battle, we have held by cunning for years and centuries unnumbered. But the New Races rise like a great tidal wave and the Old gives place. In the dim mountains of Galloway shall the nation make its last fierce stand. And as Bran Mak Morn falls, so vanishes the Lost Fire – forever. From the centuries, from the eons.”

Bran is a central figure in “Men Of The Shadows,” quoted above, and the main character in the great “Worms Of The Earth,” the worthy reason many own this collection. He pops up in two other tales as well as a poem and a play fragment included here, too.

"Why should we not hate?" Bran Mak Morn holds court over the Picts in a scene from "Men Of The Shadows," recreated for the Del Ray collection by Gary Gianni.
Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/gary-gianni-bran-mak-morn-comic-art--273312271106520758/

But this collection isn’t really about Bran as much as it is about the Picts, early occupiers of Great Britain, and Howard’s rapt fascination for them. In his introduction, scholar Rusty Burke notes how the Picts “play a central role” in Howard’s work, that of “Eternal Barbarian.” Or as Howard himself put it in a poem which sets the mood for the book:

How can I wear the harness of toil

And sweat at the daily round,

While in my soul forever

The drums of Pictdom sound?

Howard’s captivation often gets the better of his storytelling. His earliest finished stories, “Men Of The Shadows” and “The Lost Race,” both written in the mid-1920s, break down after strong action-centered openings into labored recitals of who the Picts were in the march of civilization, and how they fared against other races.

The magazine Howard submitted them to, Weird Tales, accepted “The Lost Race” only after a rewrite and rejected “Men Of The Shadows” completely. “It is too little of a story, despite the vigorous action in the opening pages,” Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright wrote of the latter.

In 1969, Dell published the first Bran Mak Morn paperback, marking the return to print of some stories first published in Weird Tales and the debut of "Men Of Shadows." The cover is by the legendary Frank Frazetta.
Image from https://www.biblio.com/search.php?stage=1&result_type=works&keyisbn=Bran+Mak+Morn 

Wright had a point. In both tales, Howard uses the same device – an old man steps out to tell the Picts’ latest captive about why they hate all non-Picts. Like many an old man, he goes on a while, to the point where even the book’s fine Gary Gianni sketches fail to liven the mood.

On the other end of the spectrum, you get “Worms,” one of the great revenge tales and, as Burke points out, the only story where Bran is the central character. Snapping after watching one of his subjects crucified on the whim of a Roman governor, Bran undertakes an unholy retribution:

“Man, are you mad?” she asked, “that in your madness you come seeking that from which strong men fled screaming in old times?”

“I seek a vengeance,” he answered, “that can be accomplished only by them I seek.”

Them in this case are a race of demi-humans who inhabited the British Isles before even the Picts, and who have managed to retain their goblin-like identity only by retreating into a vast and deep network of caves, where they shun the light and wish only cruelty on those who displaced them. We never are quite allowed to see them in Howard’s otherwise descriptive prose, but we feel them slithering on the margins of every page.

Howard writes: When a man turns his back on peril its clammy menace looms more grisly than when he advances upon it.

"When savages come among us, let them act with discretion or suffer the consequences..." The powerful opening scene of "Worms Of The Earth," as recreated for Marvel Comics' "Savage Sword Of Conan" #16 in 1976 by Barry Windsor-Smith and Tim Conrad.
Image from https://wellyousaythat.blogspot.com/2012/09/my-hit-list-worms-of-earth.htmlhttps://wellyousaythat.blogspot.com/2012/09/my-hit-list-worms-of-earth.html

Everything works in “Worms,” from the setting to the mood to the dynamic plot and disturbing yet satisfying conclusion, so much so you wonder why Howard didn’t use Bran more. After seeing it published in 1932, Howard never returned to the character. By then, he had moved on to other worlds, specifically the Hyborian one of Conan.

That is disappointing considering how little we get of Bran in the other stories here, all written earlier. There’s one other great yarn featuring the Picts after Bran’s death, “The Dark Man,” an eerie revenge piece like “Worms” with the same high energy and grim mood, but set in the Dark Ages. Bran is represented in a way, but the story holds together fine enough with another character, Black Turlogh, at its center.

Black Turlogh is an outcast and a reiver, turning to theft because as he puts it, “a man must eat, outcast or not.” Then he learns that a young woman, part of the family which disowned him, has been taken by a group of Vikings and is about to be subjected to a forced marriage. As he makes his way to break up the party, he spies a statue of a dark man, which the Vikings have carried to their skelli while they celebrate: 

It loomed above the revelry, as a god that broods on deep dark matters beyond the ken of the human insects who howl at his feet. As always when looking at the Dark Man, Turlogh felt as if a door had suddenly opened on outer space and the wind that blows among the stars.

"The Dark Man" earned Howard a rare non-Conan cover in the December 1931 issue of Weird Tales. Weirdly enough, given the liberties the magazine's artists often took, the illustration is a pretty accurate depiction of a climactic scene in the story.
Image from https://www.abebooks.com/

While somewhat slapped together, “The Dark Man” carries that visceral flow of Howard’s best work, with keenly wrought scenes of bloody mayhem and an ending that connects the narrative to the overarching saga of Bran and his people, which is what this book winds up being, somewhat despite itself.

The best example of this linkage is the third good story in this collection, not as good as the other two, but a happy surprise for me nonetheless. When I read “Kings Of The Night” in another Del Ray-Howard collection, Kull: Exile Of Atlantis, the story struck me as energetic but kind of hokey, King Kull being roped in from a distant past to help Bran Mak Morn do battle against the Romans.

That was because I was reading it from the Kull side, where the return of Kull comes off as a stunt. It works better as a Bran Mak Morn tale.

Bran is leading an unsteady alliance of normally hostile tribes against a common Roman foe. He needs the fierce power of the Norsemen to hold his center in the coming attack, but to do this, he must summon a king. Gonar, the Picts’ creepy sorcerer, recruits a sleeping Kull to the battlefield:

“Did I go back a hundred thousand years, or did he come forward? If he came to me out of the past, it is not I who talked with a dead man, but he who talked to a man unborn. Past, present and future are one to a wise man… In a timeless, spaceless land we met and he told me many things.”

Atla the snake-woman exacts a fearsome price from Bran in exchange for help locating the "Worms Of The Earth." The scene may have inspired a similar tryst in the 1982 Conan The Barbarian film with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Image from http://leogrin.com/CimmerianBlog/the-conscience-and-the-kisses-of-a-king/ 

This not only offers a cosmic explanation for the summoning of Kull (in his own stories, the most colorless of Howard’s famed heroes) but lays out the motive force behind every story here, which is simply this: Even the greatest lives are but flecks of grime circling the drain of eternity.

It is a depressing thought, and Howard does a fine job to sell it, though often at the expense of his usual spirit of adventure.

Both “The Dark Man” and “Kings Of The Night” culminate in rousing battle scenes, while “Worms Of The Earth” keeps Bran running from crisis to crisis (the deadliest stuff happening off-stage.) The other stories suffer from a weightiness that shows Howard, as a young writer just finding his path, could get caught up in a lot of unnecessary detail.

Rusty Burke explains:

In these stories, racial memory and ancient tribal hatreds play a prominent role. Without attempting to excuse this, we should understand the context in which these stories were created. Racialism, in the years before Hitler, was quite intellectually acceptable.

Another Gary Gianni illustration shows Bran leading the Picts to battle. Bran towers over the rest of his race, and Howard leaves some doubt as to his perhaps being of pure Mediterranean stock.
Image from https://kindlegarten.es/gusanos-tierra/

The racialism Burke mentions is not hateful, just tedious, like those long successions of “begats” in the Bible when someone could be smiting more Hittites. What Howard is attempting here is to cement his fantasies in a kind of reality that, if neither practical nor palatable in our day, had a kind of gravitas for readers of his own time. So we learn how the Picts were overcome by the Lapps, who were succeeded by the Celts, and then the Norse, and on and on, until you realize Howard’s title “The Lost Race” not only refers to a people but a contest.

One is left wanting more. But there is only so much Del Ray can offer when the subject is Bran Mak Morn. A rough draft for “Worms” is included, as is a reproduction of another story, “The Little People,” in both regular typeface and Howard’s original typewritten form. “The Little People” is a weak story, like many other underbaked fictions here more intriguing in its possibilities than in its execution.

You get to see a little more of what made Howard tick while reading this. But if you aren’t a fan of his already, “Worms” alone might not be enough to pull you into his orbit.