ATLANTEAN GENESIS
by Patrice Louinet
Between 1926 and 1930, Robert E. Howard began thirteen stories featuring Kull, Atlantean king of Valusia, completing ten. However only three of those tales saw print in Howard’s lifetime: The Shadow Kingdom (Weird Tales, August 1929), The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune (Weird Tales, September 1929), and Kings of the Night (Weird Tales, November 1930), the last a Bran Mak Morn story co-starring the Atlantean king.
These three stories were particularly well received by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright and by the readers, if the commentaries found in the magazine’s letters section (sometimes years after the stories had appeared) are any indication. Howard Phillips Lovecraft held these stories in very high esteem and even suggested in a 1934 letter that Howard write more tales about the character. Howard replied, in his deceptively deprecatory tone: “Thanks for the kind things you said about the Kull stories, but I doubt if I’ll ever be able to write another. The three stories I wrote about that character seemed almost to write themselves, without any planning on my part; there was no conscious effort on my part to work them up. They simply grew up, unsummoned, full grown in my mind and flowed out on paper from my finger tips. To sit down and consciously try to write another story on that order would be to produce something the artificiality of which would be apparent.”
Howard’s stories, at least all the major ones, required much more work and elaboration than the Texan was willing to concede, and the Kull series was no exception. For instance, Howard worked on the second Kull story for over a year. But when he was telling Lovecraft that he was unable to write a Kull story anymore, Howard was probably telling the truth. He had started to lose his grip on the character by 1929 and had discarded him completely after a series of false starts and unsold stories. In 1932, Howard had recycled one of the last-written Kull stories–By This Axe I Rule!–in order to create a new series, centering around a certain grim Cimmerian warrior. The two characters have little in common except their imposing physiques, but the background for the two series is similar: barbarian characters evolving in kingdoms or empires from earth’s mythical past, confronted, in one way or another, by decaying civilizations–Kull by his adopted country, Conan by the Hyborian kingdoms. Conan had replaced Kull, and Howard found it impossible to write about a character who no longer represented a vehicle through which he could express his ideas.
What Howard was unaware of, in spite of the unusual critical praise these three stories received over the years, was that he had given birth to a new subgenre of literature, since dubbed “Heroic Fantasy,” “Epic Fantasy,” or “Sword and Sorcery”–denominations as unsatisfying as they are reductive. The mixing of historical (or pseudo-historical) elements with elements of fantasy was nothing new; on the contrary it harked back to the very beginnings of literature. What Howard brought to the form was to modernize it, getting rid of the chivalrous aspects, flowery language, and stilted personalities, writing violent tales in a realistic style that reflected Howard’s environment and that of his readership. Critic George Knight once argued very convincingly, “Because his most popular creations are his fantasy tales, Howard is put into the category of ‘fantasy writer,’ yet…the most interesting aspect of his fiction is not the fantasy but the realism–a realism springing from Howard’s class, environment, beliefs, and the age in which he wrote.”
The Kull stories (and this is also true for the Conan series) are thus “realistic fantasy tales.” Unlike his predecessors and unlike the immense majority of his successors, Howard set his stories in universes not so much imaginary as they are forgotten: he wrote about our world and his themes are universal ones. Kull’s serpent-men-infected Valusia is no more fantastic than Shakespeare’s ghost-haunted Elsinore, yet who would think of labeling Hamlet as “Sword and Sorcery”?
In 1932, when he initiated his Conan series, Howard wrote an essay, The Hyborian Age, which explains how this particular phase of mankind’s past has now been forgotten. In a letter sent with the essay, Howard explained his need for realism in writing fantasy stories: “Nothing in this article is to be considered as an attempt to advance any theory in opposition to accepted history. It is simply a fictional background for a series of fiction-stories. When I began writing the Conan series a few years ago, I prepared this ‘history’ of his age in order to lend him and his sagas a greater aspect of realness.”
Interestingly enough the essay begins with the destruction of what was Kull’s universe:
Known history begins with the waning of the Pre-Cataclysmic civilization, dominated by the kingdoms of Kamelia, Valusia, Verulia, Grondar, Thule, and Commoria. These peoples spoke a similar language, arguing a common origin. […] The barbarians of that age were the Picts, who lived on islands far out on the western ocean; the Atlanteans, who dwelt on a small continent between the Pictish Islands and the main, or Thurian Continent; and the Lemurians, who inhabited a chain of large islands in the eastern hemisphere. […] Then the Cataclysm rocked the world. Atlantis and Lemuria sank, and the Pictish Islands were heaved up to form the mountain peaks of a new continent. Sections of the Thurian Continent vanished under the waves, or sinking, formed great inland lakes and seas. Volcanoes broke forth and terrific earthquakes shook down the shining cities of the empires. Whole nations were blotted out. (The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, Del Rey, 2003, pp. 381–382) [Incidentally, the word “Thurian,” describing Kull’s continent, was coined in 1932; it never appears in any of the Kull stories.]
By retroactively integrating Kull’s world to Conan’s (giving a few details as to its geography and history), by showing the destruction of Kull’s world and how it was eventually replaced by Conan’s, by explaining how the Atlanteans ultimately became the Cimmerians (hence that Conan could be a descendant of Kull) and, last but not least, by writing the first Conan tale on the ashes of an unsold Kull story, Howard was telling us that he now envisioned the Kull series a prehistoric one, which paved the way for the Conan stories. The Thurian continent belonged to the past of the Hyborian world–and of Howard’s career–just as the Hyborian world belongs to our past. Having distanced himself from Kull, Howard had placed himself in a position which prevented him from writing new Kull tales, having obliterated the character and his universe in the meantime.
Considering the Kull series only as an archaic version of Conan is paying them a substantial disservice. Howard’s readers and critics were certainly right to disagree with the author in this matter, for the Kull stories are those in which Howard was creating a new genre of fiction as he was writing the stories, playing with a universe that was definitely not as systematized as Conan’s, and toying with the various possibilities this new genre could offer. While all the Conan stories were penned with Weird Tales in mind, the Kull stories were submitted to a variety of different magazines; some may read like prototypical Conan stories, some as prose poems, some as philosophical fables. Howard let his imagination run free. It was a time of experimentation: the Kull stories range far and wide and can be very different between one story and the next.
The genesis of the stories of the Atlantean king is also that of the genre Howard was inventing.
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In his A Biographical Sketch of Robert E. Howard, which originally appeared in 1935, Alvin Earl Perry quoted from a now-lost letter from Howard. In that letter the Texan offered a few comments on the genesis of some of his characters. About Kull, he wrote that he “was put on paper the moment he was created…In fact he first appeared as only a minor character in a story which was never accepted. At least, he was intended to be a minor character, but I had not gone far before he was dominating the yarn.”
The only extant story that fits the description is the first tale of this book, previously published under the title Exile of Atlantis. This short vignette, in which Kull is but one of three lead characters and is indeed soon “dominating the yarn” is the only Kull story that was written before The Shadow Kingdom. It was thus the first Kull story, but at the same time it was also the last to feature one of Howard’s earliest creations, Am-ra, whose origins will help us understand the genesis of the Kull stories: Am-ra apparently played the same role for Kull that the Atlantean would later play for Conan.
Howard said he began buying pulp magazines at fifteen, in the summer of 1921, though he had probably been reading them for some time. His favorite publications seem to have been Adventure and Argosy, the two leading pulp fiction magazines of that era. Before Weird Tales began publication in 1923, there was no magazine devoted solely to weird fiction. The young Howard was a voracious reader of adventure fiction, an inclination that would be true all his life. Argosy and Adventure specialized in historical and adventure tales, and traces of influence of all the major contributors to those magazines–we may cite Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Arthur D. Howden-Smith–can be detected in the writings of Howard. It was thus natural that when Howard began writing fiction on a (more or less) professional basis in 1921, just after having discovered these magazines, it was in these authors that he found his first inspiration. The Texan thus wrote a number of tales clearly derived from Mundy, and borrowed from Burroughs or, at a later date, from Lamb and Howden-Smith.
It was Howard scholar and Wandering Star editor Rusty Burke who unearthed the influence Paul L. Anderson had on a young Robert E. Howard. Anderson (1880–1956), now completely forgotten, had several novelettes published in Argosy in the early 1920s, beginning with The Son of the Red God in the 31 January 1920 issue. The tale was preceded by a note which explained how he had found a Crô-Magnon parchment in a cave in France and that his story was nothing more than a translation from the original. The subject of the tale is a favorite of the era: how the Crô-Magnons supplanted the Neanderthals. That Howard enjoyed Anderson is attested by his borrowing of several names, found in a series of tales and poems probably dating from 1922 or 1923. Anderson’s “En-ro of the Ta-an” and “Land of the Dying Sun” are echoed in Howard’s “Am-ra of the Ta-an” and “Land of the Morning Sun,” among several other borrowings. Howard’s first professionally published story, Spear and Fang written in 1924, shows remarkable similarity to Anderson’s first tale.
Howard wrote several stories or poems dealing, directly or indirectly, with Am-ra of the Ta-an. In one of these, of which only two pages have come to us, Am-ra has a dispute with a woman named Ah-lala. Both names are echoed in the future Kull stories, with Am-ra appearing in the first Kull story and a Lala-ah appearing in the longest of the unfinished tales. How Am-ra the Crô-Magnon could become Am-ra the Atlantean was explained by Howard himself in a 1928 letter to his friend Harold Preece:
About Atlantis–I believe something of the sort existed, though I do not especially hold any theory about a high type of civilization existing there–in fact, I doubt that. But some continent was submerged away back, or some large body of land, for practically all peoples have legends about a flood. And the Cro-Magnons appeared suddenly in Europe, developed to a high state of primitive culture; there is no trace to show that they came up the ladder of utter barbarism in Europe. Suddenly their remains are found supplanting the Neanderthal Man, to whom they have no ties of kinship whatever. Where did they originate? Nowhere in the known world, evidently. They must have originated and developed through the different basic stages of evolution in some land which is not now known to us.
The occultists say that we are the fifth–I believe–great sub-race. Two unknown and unnamed races came, then the Lemurians, then the Atlanteans, then we. They say the Atlanteans were highly developed. I doubt it. I think they were simply the ancestors of the Cro-Magnon man, who by some chance, escaped the fate which overtook the rest of the tribes.
All my views on the matter I included in a long letter to the editor to whom I sold a tale entitled “The Shadow Kingdom,” which I expect will be published as a foreword to that story–if ever. This tale I wove about a mythical antediluvian empire, a contemporary of Atlantis. (Selected Letters, 1923–1930, Necronomicon Press, 1989, p. 20)
Sadly, the letter to the editor has not survived. However, Howard’s “views on the matter” may be discerned in a story which had been rejected in March 1926 by Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales. A lengthy part of Men of the Shadows is devoted to early history and prehistory, and notably to Atlantis, Lemuria and the Crô-Magnons:
To those islands came the Nameless Tribe [i.e., the Picts]…they were the first Men…Then the Lemurians, the Second Race, came into the northern land…Now the Atlanteans (Crô-Magnons) were the Third Race. They were physical giants, finely made men, who inhabited caves and lived by the chase…then from the North came the Celts, bearing sword and spears of bronze…And they were the Fourth Race. (Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, Del Rey, 2005, pp. 23–26)
The “great sub-races” Howard alludes to suggest he was familiar with the ideas of Helena Blavatsky and Theosophy, either having read the books or having heard about these theories from his father or a friend who was interested in occultism. The most important point of the letter (and of the Bran story) however, is the fact that Howard was convinced that there was a linkage between the Crô-Magnons and Atlantis, and that the latter was historical, an empire belonging to Earth’s past, not an imaginary one. As early as 1923 Howard had casually mentioned Atlantis as a historical empire, contemporary to Accad, in a letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith. The likeliest source for Howard’s idea of an Atlantean/Crô-Magnon connection is Lewis Spence, a British folklorist. Spence was convinced of the former existence of the continent of Atlantis and wrote several books in which he “proved” his theory. His The Problem of Atlantis (1924) and Atlantis in America (1925) may very well have influenced Howard. The identification of Atlantis as the source of Crô-Magnon man and his culture seems to have been original with Spence.
The Kull series was thus born at the time Howard discarded the entirely “historical” setting–i.e., Atlantis–in favor of one mixing the historical and the imaginary. This is why the first Kull story is also the last of the Am-ra the Atlantean tales. Both characters are very similar: Kull is “a counterpart of [Am-ra], except for the fact that he [i]s slightly larger–taller, a thought deeper of chest and broader of shoulder.” Kull is basically a character who wants to flee reality–his reality–in favor of the pursuit of what is presented as a dream in that first story, a country dreamed of, spoken of, but otherwise unknown: Valusia. When Howard dropped Atlantis for Valusia, he dropped Am-ra for Kull. In a nutshell, he stopped writing “historical” tales in favor of fantasy tales.
The name “Valusia” appears to be a Howardian coinage. It appears very early in the young author’s career in Khoda Khan’s Tale, an incomplete story dating from 1922 or 1923. In that tale, protagonist Frank Gordon is trying to locate an ancient African city, supposedly once inhabited by a strange race of white people. Gordon first discovers “a temple erected to the elephant,” quickly followed by another, fresher looking one, which he soon discovers to be much more ancient than the other:
It consisted merely of a stone wall, round in shape, with an opening at one place. It had no roof. In the center there was a great, carved serpent of stone, coiled on a stone pedestal which [was] decorated by carvings of other, smaller serpents. The stone wall was also decorated by snake-carvings. Gordon went over the ruins carefully. He seemed very much interested and slightly puzzled. “The Carthaginians did not mention another race,” said he, “yet the race that erected this snake-temple did not erect the elephant-temple we found at the edge of the swamp. They represent two distinct forms of architecture, so distinct that it is scarcely possible that the same race erected both temples.” (The Coming of El Borak, Cryptic Publications, 1987, pp. 47–48)
As will be the case in The Shadow Kingdom, the confrontation is between a white-skinned barbaric race and an older, highly civilized one, closely linked to the Serpent. Earlier in the story, Gordon had indicated that: “The people who inhabited the empire were white, fair-skinned and fair-haired, and the name of the empire was Valooze” (p. 38). Evidently, this “Valooze” was the direct ancestor of Howard’s later “Valusia.”
As to Kull’s name, there is a possibility that the name comes from a poem Howard had read many years prior in Cosmopolitan. On February 4, 1925, Howard wrote R.W. Gordon, editor of the folk songs department of Adventure magazine: “There is a poem which I have been trying to re-discover. I suppose it is out of your department, as it has been published but if any of the readers should know of it, I should appreciate it very much if they could assist me in obtaining a copy of it. It came out in the Cosmopolitan magazine some nine years ago.” This poem, identified by Rusty Burke as The Search by Edgar Lee Masters, appeared in the March 1917 issue; it has several allusions to “Old King Cole.” Perhaps even more interesting are the few lines which Howard remembered eight years later as:
By heaven’s breeze unfurled
The lion banner and the dragon banner
Flutter around the world.
and which read in fact:
By heaven’s breeze unfurled
The Tiger banner and Dragon banner
Flutter around the world.
Howard’s memory was an exceptional one, and only one word didn’t match. Readers familiar with Howard’s writings will recognize the tiger as Kull’s totem while Conan is often associated with the lion: in the novel The Hour of the Dragon, the lion banner is the emblem of Aquilonia, while the dragon banner is that of its enemy, Nemedia, in a clear homage to Masters.
The last glints of the sun shone on the golden banner of Nemedia with the scarlet dragon, unfurled in the breeze above the pavilion of King Tarascus on an eminence near the eastern cliffs. But the shadow of the western cliffs fell like a vast purple pall across the tents and the army of Aquilonia, and upon the black banner with its golden lion that floated above King Conan’s pavilion. (The Bloody Crown of Conan, Del Rey, 2004, pp. 92–93)
It is of course impossible to ascertain the influence of Masters’ poem on the naming of Howard’s character, but it is a tempting possibility. Another will be detailed below.
It is not conclusively known when–or even if–that first Kull story was ever submitted professionally. The original typescript is a peculiar one, written either between July 1925 and January 1926, or between August and September 1926 (that is to say just before Howard began work on what was to become The Shadow Kingdom.) The various typographical errors and amateurish corrections would seem in favor of the anterior date, but the fact that the story exists as an original and a carbon would tend to indicate the latter. Early in his career, Howard rarely prepared carbons for his stories, but this probably changed in January 1926 when Weird Tales thought they had lost the typescript for a story which had been accepted for publication. Howard had been unable to provide them with the carbon the editors asked for, not having prepared one. On the other hand, neither the original nor the carbon are titled or signed, usually a sure sign that the typescript was not submitted. The only solutions that present themselves, then, are that Howard thought the story unsuitable for submission and never attempted to title or submit it professionally, preferring to start work on The Shadow Kingdom, or that this story was originally the beginning of The Shadow Kingdom, whose convoluted history is detailed below.
The Shadow Kingdom occupies a special place in Howard’s fiction in particular and weird fiction in general, as well as in the author’s heart. In the letter to Alvin Earl Perry, he stated that he “enjoyed writing ‘The Shadow Kingdom’ better than any other tale.” Just after selling the story, Howard confided to Tevis Clyde Smith:
I enjoyed writing it more than any piece of prose I ever wrote. The subject of psychology is the one I am mainly interested in these days. The story I sold before this was purely a study in psychology of dreams and this mss. deals largely in primitive psychology. (REH to Tevis Clyde Smith, ca. October 1927, Selected Letters, 1923–1930, p. 9)
Evidence to be found in Howard’s semi-autobiographical novel Post Oaks and Sand Roughs enables us to trace the first attempts to complete what would become The Shadow Kingdom to 1926. In that novel, Howard’s alter-ego, Steve Costigan “did begin a wild fantasy entitled ‘The Phantom Empire’ (i.e., The Shadow Kingdom),” which he “laid aside partly finished and forgot about” (Post Oak and Sand Roughs, D. Grant, 1989, p. 109). Almost a year later, in the summer of 1927, “he came upon ‘The Phantom Empire,’ deserted several months before, completed it, and then laid it aside and forgot about it.” Some time later, “Steve again discovered ‘The Phantom Empire,’ rewrote it, and again laid it aside.” The story was accepted a short while later by Farnsworth Wright and published in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales.
A series of letters to H. P. Lovecraft illuminates the source for many of the events depicted in the story. In June 1931, Howard briefly summed up his interests in the Bible to Lovecraft:
As for Biblical history, my real interest begins and ends with the age of Saul, outside of snatches here and there, as in the case of Samson. I’m sure you’re right in your theory that numbers of Aryans must have drifted into the near East of that age, and as far as I can see, the days of Saul and David represent an Aryan phase in the racial-life of Israel. (REH to H. P. Lovecraft, ca. June 1931, unpublished)
He had expressed much the same sentiment in an earlier letter:
I cannot think of Saul, David, Abner and Joab as Jews, not even as Arabs; to me they must always seem like Aryans, like myself. Saul, in particular, I always unconsciously visualize as a Saxon king, of those times when the invaders of Britain were just beginning to adopt the Christian religion. (REH to HPL, ca. February 1931, unpublished)
This seems to have been an important issue with Howard. Tevis Clyde Smith, in the notes for his projected Howard biography, wrote:
Hated Disliked Samuel and Respected Saul–(“So Far the Poet….,” Report on a Writing Man & Other Reminiscences of Robert E. Howard, Necronomicon Press, 1991, p. 36)
Howard even wrote a poem, “Dreaming in Israel,” on the subject.
In the February letter to Lovecraft, Howard went on to elaborate on his admiration for King Saul:
I have always felt a deep interest in Israel in connection with Saul. Poor devil! A pitiful and heroic figure, set up as a figure-head because of his weight and the spread of his shoulders, and evincing an expected desire of being king in more than name–a plain, straight-forward man, unversed in guile and subtlety, flanked and harassed by scheming priests, beleaguered by savage and powerful enemies, handicapped by a people too wary and backward in war–what wonder that he went mad toward the end? He was not fitted to cope with the mysteries of king-craft, and he had too much proud independence to dance a puppet on the string of the high-priest–there he sealed his own doom. When he thwarted the snaky Samuel, he should have followed it up by cutting that crafty gentleman’s throat–but he dared not. The hounds of Life snapped ever at Saul’s heels; a streak of softness made him human but made him less a king…Samuel had him in a strangle-hold; not only did the high-priest have the people behind him, but he played on Saul’s own fears and superstitions and in the end, ruined him and drove him to madness, defeat and death. The king found himself faced by opposition he could not beat down with his own great sword–foes that he could not grasp with his hands. Life became a grappling with shadows, a plunging at blind, invisible bars. He saw the hissing head of the serpent beneath each mask of courtier, priest, concubine and general. They squirmed, venom-ladened beneath his feet, plotting his downfall; and he towered above them, yet must perforce bend an ear close to the dust, striving to translate their hisses. But for Samuel, vindictive, selfish and blindly shrewd as most priests are, Saul had risen to his full stature–as it was, he was a giant chained…To one man Saul could always turn–Abner, a soldier and a gentleman in the fullest sense of the word–too honorable, too idealistic for his own good. Saul and Abner were worth all that cringing treacherous race to which they belonged by some whim of chance.
Most of these sentences echo the general tone and plot of The Shadow Kingdom, where the snake metaphor has given way to actual snake-like characters. They also echo some of Kull’s musings: “As he sat upon his throne in the Hall of Society and gazed upon the courtiers, the ladies, the lords, the statesmen, he seemed to see their faces as things of illusion, things unreal, existent only as shadows and mockeries of substance. Always he had seen their faces as masks, but before he had looked on them with contemptuous tolerance, thinking to see beneath the masks shallow, puny souls, avaricious, lustful, deceitful, a vague horror that lurked beneath the smooth masks. While he exchanged courtesies with some nobleman or councilor he seemed to see the smiling face fade like smoke and the frightful jaws of a serpent gaping there” (p. 41). The “one man” to whom Saul can always turn evokes of course Brule, the spear-slayer. The only notable difference between the two “stories” resides in the absence of an equivalent to the “snaky Samuel”; in Howard’s story, the snake-characters are indistinguishable from one another.
Upon learning of the acceptance of The Shadow Kingdom in September 1927, Howard reacted in a typical fashion and almost immediately proceeded to write another story starring the same character. (Howard had completed Wolfshead in July 1925, the same month the first story starring de Montour, In the Forest of Villefère, was published. A few months later, he would repeat this, completing the second Solomon Kane story, Skulls in the Stars, upon news of the sale of the first, Red Shadows.) This time the writing took much less time than for the first story: Howard wrote an eight-page draft, polished it by rewriting the last two pages of the story and sent the result to Weird Tales. That second Kull story, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, was quickly accepted by Farnsworth Wright for $20. Of that story, generally held in high esteem by contemporary as well as modern readers, Howard offered the following comment to his friend Clyde Smith: “more of the Shadow Kingdom, occult and mystical, vague and badly written; this is the deepest story I ever tried to write and I got out of my depth.”
It was some weeks before Howard would return to writing Kull stories. In the first months of 1928, he began what could have been a serial-length Kull story, but abandoned it at the eighteenth page (see p. 65). Howard probably realized that his story was rambling and unconvincing, relegated it to his archives, and immediately began work on another Kull story, which was to be titled Delcardes’ Cat. The history of the composition of this tale is worth detailing: Howard wrote it in two sessions. He titled his first draft Delcardes’ Cat, and only had the idea for the character that was to become Thulsa Doom as he was writing page 22 of a draft that runs 25 pages. The introduction of the new character (whose name was initially Thulses Doom) required a few modifications in the earlier parts of the tale, which of course lacked any references to Thulsa–or Thulses–Doom. Howard, in a particularly unprofessional move, didn’t even rewrite his story, making all his changes on his first draft, and retitled the tale The Cat and the Skull, whose “Skull” is an explicit reference to Thulsa Doom. The story survives as an original (with the modifications) and a carbon (which shows the first stage of the story).
The story is rather poor and suffers from a lack of cohesiveness, which is not surprising given the late addition of Thulsa Doom. The character of Kuthulos is introduced as a “slave,” but later on Tu, the chancellor, suddenly “remembers” that Kuthulos is “a slave, aye, but the greatest scholar and the wisest man in all the Seven Empires.” In fact, it is quite probable that Howard first intended Kuthulos to be the villain of the story, only discarding the idea when he came up with Thulsa Doom. Last, it took Howard several pages before he gave a name to the slave; and it appears, upon close scrutiny of the typescript, that his original name was not Kuthulos, but Kathulos. Not surprisingly, the story was rejected by Weird Tales, apparently to Howard’s surprise, if this is indeed the unnamed story he is alluding to in Post Oaks and Sand Roughs (p. 133). Undaunted, Howard wrote yet another tale featuring Kull, the second and last featuring Kuthulos: The Screaming Skull of Silence. The story was quickly submitted to Weird Tales and likewise rejected.
After a false start and two unsold tales, it would be several months before Howard would return to writing Kull stories. In the meantime, he met with commercial success in the acceptance of his longest story to date. Skullface (Howard’s original form of the title) was written during the second half of 1928, and was accepted for $300 later in the year. It would be hard not to notice that in this story, Stephen Costigan and John Gordon are opposed to the deadly “Kathulos of Atlantis,” whose physical description matched that of Thulsa Doom. Kathulos/Kuthulos had disappeared from the Kull stories only to re-enter Howard’s fiction via another story.
As 1928 was drawing to a close, Howard once again returned to Kull. The Striking of the Gong was the first Kull story not submitted to Weird Tales, but was sent instead to Argosy; The Altar and the Scorpion, a short story in which Kull is only mentioned, was submitted to Weird Tales. Both stories failed to sell. The Curse of the Golden Skull, also barely mentioning Kull, and probably composed in late 1928 or early 1929, likewise met rejection.
The metaphysical tone of the early Kull stories echoed Howard’s philosophical delvings of the time. In January 1928, Howard was writing Clyde Smith: “The subject of psychology is the one I am mainly interested in these days.” The questions of reality and identity are central to those stories which, due to their short length, writing style, and atmosphere, tend more toward the philosophical fable than the kind of fantasy stories Farnsworth Wright would have bought.
This passage from a letter to Clyde Smith, for example, resonates with passages in The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune and The Striking of the Gong:
Life is Power, Life is Electricity. You and I are atoms of power, cogs in the wheels of the Universal system. Life is not predestined, that is, the trivial affairs of our lives are not, but we have certain paths to follow and we cannot escape them…we are sparks of stardust, atoms of unknown power, powerless in ourselves but making up the whole of some great power that uses us as ruthlessly as fire uses fuel. We are parts of an entity, futile in ourselves. We are merely phases of electricity; electrons endlessly vibrating between the magnetic poles of birth and death. We cannot escape these trails in which our paths lie. We do not, as individual entities, really exist, we do not live. There is no life, there is no existence; there is simply vibration. What is a life but an uncompleted gesture, beginning in oblivion and ending in oblivion?…There is no beginning, nor will there ever be an end to the thing. (REH to Tevis Clyde Smith, ca. February 1928)
As a matter of fact, all of Howard’s letters to Tevis Clyde Smith from early 1928 contain lengthy passages on philosophy, religion, psychology and similar interests. Howard was undergoing a period of profound introspection, that very naturally found its way into his fiction. Common to all the themes alluded to in the letters is the central motif of identity, the relation of the self to the universe.
At any rate, in the fourteen months that had followed the sale of The Shadow Kingdom and The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, Howard had begun or completed six Kull stories, hadn’t succeeded in selling any of them, and none had yet appeared in print.
Between late 1928 and mid-1929, Howard would not complete another Kull story. That he had not decided to cease his efforts in spite of these failures is attested by the two aborted stories he attempted to complete in the first months of the year.
There is little to be said about The Black City, a three page fragment that takes Brule and Kull away from Valusia to the city of Kamula. The other, untitled fragment, however, is particularly interesting. In April 1929, an overjoyed Howard wrote Tevis Clyde Smith:
On my return here I found a returned ms. from Adventure, with a line or two from the assistant editor, telling me to submit some more of my work, and soon after returning I got a letter from Argosy, accepting that story that I told you about…The day after getting that letter I got a check from them for $100. Also a letter from Weird Tales with the advance sheets of a story appearing in the next issue. Farnsworth said he intended publishing a sonnet in the next issue after that and then “The Shadow Kingdom” which is a $100 story, and after that a shorter story [The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune]. I believe he’s paving the way to publish the serial I sold him, but of course I may be wrong.
As the acceptance of The Shadow Kingdom seems to have occasioned the writing of The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, it was probably the news of the forthcoming appearance of the two Kull stories that prompted Howard to return once more to the character, but abandoning the more metaphysical aspects in favor of straight-adventure stories set in a Fantasy background.
His first attempt didn’t go beyond the third page. This untitled draft (see p. 151) is the first Kull story to display Howard’s growing passion for things Celtic, which had become conscious in December 1928. Why Howard did not complete the story is easily understood: not only does the story make mention of the historical Celts (in a story supposedly set thousands of years B.C.), but he also gives blue eyes to the fragment’s protagonist, Brule. Brule had always been mentioned as having dark eyes in previous stories, and logically so since he was a Pictish warrior. Blue eyes were in fact becoming the staple of Howard’s Celtic or pseudo-Celtic heroes, Conan being the most famous, of course. More than a casual mistake, this was a clue as to what was happening to the series: Howard was growing detached from his Atlantean creation, and more and more interested in Brule. In that fragment, Brule explains the mode of government of his tribe, the Borni:
We all acknowledge Nial of the Tatheli as over-king but his rule is loose. He does not interefere were our affairs among ourselves, nor does he levy tribute or taxes, as the Valusians call it, from any except the Nargi and the Dano and the Whale-slayers who live on the isle of Tathel with his own tribe…Neither does he interfere when two tribes go to war–unless some tribe enroaches on the three who pay tribute. When the war is fought and won, he arbitrates the matter, and his judgment is final…And when the Lemurians or the Celts or any foreign nation or band of reavers come against us, he sends forth for all tribes to put aside their quarrels and fight side by side. Which is a good thing. He might be a supreme tyrant if he liked, for his own tribes is very strong, and with the aid of Valusia he might do as he liked–but he knows that though he might, with his tribes and their allies, crush all the other tribes, there would never be peace again, but revolt as long as a Borni or a Sungara or a Wolf-slayer or any of the tribesmen was left alive.
The fragment stops at this point, and it is very interesting to compare it to what happens in the next–and last–Kull stories.
By This Axe I Rule! and Swords of the Purple Kingdom were completed in rapid succession, probably in May and June 1929. In many ways, both stories mark a return to the roots of the Kull series. In Exile of Atlantis were mentioned the characters of Ascalante and Ala; these are also the names of characters, albeit different ones, in the 1929 story. More important, the plots of the 1929 tales revolve around an attempted coup d’état, as did The Shadow Kingdom. But if The Shadow Kingdom had its origins in Howard’s reading of the Biblical story of Saul, By This Axe I Rule! was inspired by his reading of a classic playwright.
In the early months of 1929, Howard had probably been rereading Shakespeare. In March, he included two erotic playlets in a letter to Smith. Of the first, Howard wrote that his “desires wavered between a wish to write straight jovial obscenity and a desire to simply parody Shakespeare and exaggerate and emphasize what I consider show the bastardness of the scut’s nature.” Not surprisingly, Tevis Clyde Smith later indicated that Shakespeare was Howard’s favorite playwright.
By This Axe I Rule! opens with a scene in which conspirators decide to do away with the king on that same day. The scene takes place late at night, as dawn is nearing. To seal their alliance, all men take an oath.
Act II, scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar takes place in Brutus’ orchard. It is night, and dawn is nearing. As the conspirators agree to assassinate Caesar on that same day, Brutus asks them to join their hands and Cassius subsequently proposes an oath, which Brutus refuses. Despite the small difference, this scene is highly reminiscent of its equivalent in By This Axe I Rule!
After the oath has been sworn, the conspirators of the Kull story depart; Ascalante tells them: “Get back to your places and not by word, deed or look do you betray what is in your minds.” In Julius Caesar, Brutus declares: “Good gentlemen, look fresh and merrily;/Let not our looks put on our purposes”…
And if Howard had found in Shakespeare the basic plot of his story, it could be that Howard himself was also indeed trying to “kill” his king, i.e., to put an end to the character and the series. The character now little resembled what he was in the early stories, having become an autocratic ruler. If, in The Shadow Kingdom, the menace of the serpent-men was an abhorrent one, in the later story there is little difference between Kull and Ascalante, the leader of the conspirators. What the exile Ascalante wishes to do is exactly the same thing Kull did when he ascended the throne: kill the present and legitimate king. Their method is exactly the same, as shown in this passage from The Shadow Kingdom, which describes Kull’s ascent to the throne, but which applies perfectly to Ascalante and what he is doing in By This Axe I Rule!: “a bold snatching of opportunity, the swift whirl of swords, the slaying of a tyrant of whom men had wearied unto death, short, crafty plotting with ambitious statesmen out of favor at court–and Kull, wandering adventurer, Atlantean exile, had swept up to the dizzy heights of his dreams: he was lord of Valusia, king of kings.” (pp. 18–19). Ascalante and Kull have much more in common than one may presume at first glance. Further, Brule, who was always on hand to save Kull’s life in time of danger, is noteworthily absent from the tale, leaving Valusia as the story opens. His departing words are quite disquieting: “We are barbarians, together, even if we have spent most of our lives in this land. I go, now. You have naught to fear save an attempt at assassination, which is no fear at all, considering the fact that you are guarded night and day by a squad of the Red Slayers.” Strange words from a man who saved Kull’s life numerous times, and especially in The Shadow Kingdom, in which Kull was nearly slaughtered in his room by conspirators while he thought he was guarded by the Red Slayers. It is also in By This Axe I Rule! that we at last learn the name of the tyrant Kull killed to win the throne: Borna. The name’s resemblance to Brule’s tribe, the Borni, is striking.
It thus very much seems that Howard was losing contact with his creation and, as he would put it in an oft-quoted passage from a letter to Clark Ashton Smith:
suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away, leaving me to search for another character. (REH to Clark Ashton Smith, 14 December 1933, Selected Letters, 1931–1936, p. 59)
By This Axe I Rule! was rejected by Argosy and Adventure, while it is not known where or if Swords of the Purple Kingdom was submitted. The Shadow Kingdom appeared in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales, followed the next month by The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune. This time, Howard was no longer sufficiently interested in the character to attempt to write new stories.
In February 1930, Kull made a brief come-back in Kings of the Night. It is not uninteresting to note that the protagonist of this story is Bran Mak Morn, the Pictish king, whom we learn to be a direct descendant of Brule, no longer the simple warrior of The Shadow Kingdom, but described as “the greatest of all the Pictish war-chiefs”; Kull had now become only a secondary character, a king without a kingdom in that story.
Kull and Valusia would linger in Howard’s mind until, in March 1932, the character was changed into a Cimmerian and given blue eyes instead of grey–the eyes of Am-ra the Atlantean and of Brule in the Celtic fragment. As to Valusia, its destruction was carried out in the essay The Hyborian Age in April of that year.
Conan and the Hyborian Age were coming.