Men of the Shadows is also the first completed story of Bran Mak Morn, though we know of at least two earlier attempts to commit him to paper. Here, as in the earliest extant work in which Bran appears (the unfinished play, Bran Mak Morn), we find him bound to his people by a sense of mission, the feeling that he must single-handedly lift them out of savagery. And even in these very early works, we find the sense of doom hanging over Bran’s story. “Suppose I do drag them a little way toward the goal? I will fall in battle and they will back deeper than ever into the pit of barbarism.” Author David Weber has suggested that this is one of the characteristics that makes the Bran stories stand out from Howard’s other heroic tales: “The brooding darkness which clings to virtually all of Howard’s heroic fantasy is nowhere stronger than in the case of Bran Mak Morn, last king of the oldest race – an alien among his own degenerating people, set apart by a pure bloodline they no longer share, who knows his entire race is going down into the dark no matter what he does. Yet for all his awareness of the inevitability of the Picts’ doom, Bran refuses simply to submit to it. . . . I think it’s the fact that Bran Mak Morn, more than any of Howard’s other characters, sees the doom awaiting him so clearly which makes Bran the quintessential Howard hero, for all of Howard’s heroes share that refusal to surrender, yet few of the others are brought as inescapably face-to-face with the ultimate futility of their struggle.”
In Men of the Shadows, Bran is identified only as a ‘chief,’ not a king. At the time this story was written, the theme of kingship had not yet emerged in Howard’s work. When it did, though, in the Kull stories, the Picts were there, but Bran was not. The Picts and Atlanteans, in these tales, both inhabit island chains to the west of Kull’s kingdom of Valusia, and are ancient foes, but Kull’s best friend and ally comes to be Brule the Spear-Slayer, a Pict. Brule, whose name echoes Berula, of The Lost Race, appears in nearly all the stories in the Kull series, written, as noted before, largely between 1927 and 1929.
The next significant appearances of the Picts in Howard’s work brought them back into the historical world, though in somewhat different eras. Kings of the Night, the Howard masterwork that features both Bran Mak Morn and Kull, seems to be set in roughly the same period actually specified by Howard in a synopsis for a never-written Bran story: ‘between 296 and 300 A.D.’ (Lest we too hastily assume this to solidly place Bran in history for us, on a separate listing of his stories and characters Howard had given Bran’s era as 100 A.D.) The Dark Man, which was accepted for publication at the same time as Kings of the Night (March 1930), is set in the early 11th century. In the former tale, Bran is the son of a chief who has, by his own efforts, united many of the Pictish clans into something that might become a nation. In the latter story, Bran has become a god to the remnants of the Picts, surviving on the outer fringes of the British Isles. In both tales, Howard decisively links Bran to the age of Kull, telling us that he is the direct descendant of Brule the Spear-Slayer, and in these stories he first identifies Bran as ‘king’ of the Picts, rather than a ‘chief.’ The Dark Man also provides a glimpse of Bran’s eventual fate, and that of his people, and it is exactly that foretold in the earlier tales: “Bran Mak Morn fell in battle; the nation fell apart. 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.” (It may be worth noting that Night of the Wolf, a tale of the 5th century reiver Cormac Mac Art, written in the spring of 1930, also showcased the Picts, though Bran was not mentioned.)
Later in 1930, Howard began corresponding with H.P. Lovecraft, the highly esteemed weird fictionist, who encouraged the Texan to join with him and Clark Ashton Smith in inserting glancing references to one another’s fictional creations in their own work, thus lending all an aura of verisimilitude. Howard’s own additions to the ‘Cthulhu mythos’ include the forbidden tome, Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Nameless Cults) and its author Von Junzt, the mad poet Justin Geoffrey, the Black Stone, the serpent men from the Kull stories – and the Picts and their great king/god, Bran Mak Morn. In his first attempt at a Lovecraft-type story, The Children of the Night, Howard refers to ‘the Bran cult,’ the remnants of the Pictish race who, even in the present day, worship The Dark Man, the stone effigy of their great king. Further inspired by Lovecraft’s letters, he also decisively turned from an earlier theory about the fate of the Picts. In The Little People, written about 1928, he had linked the Picts with the loathsome subterranean dwellers of Arthur Machen’s The Shining Pyramid, suggesting that, having been driven into caves (as in The Lost Race), they had degenerated into these hideous creatures. In The Children of the Night, though, these subterranean creatures are said to have degenerated from a Mongolian race which Lovecraft told him were displaced when the Neolithic peoples first began to spread through Europe and into the British Isles, and we learn that the Picts detest them as much as the Celts do.
This idea served as the genesis of what most fans regard as Howard’s finest story of Bran Mak Morn and the Picts (and one of his very best, period), the tale of which Lovecraft wrote, “Few readers will ever forget the hideous and compelling power of that macabre masterpiece, Worms of the Earth.” Here Bran, to slake his thirst for vengeance against the Roman governor who has ordered a Pict crucified, makes an unholy pact with the loathsome underground dwellers. Lovecraft noted that one of the things that made Howard’s stories so vivid was that “he himself is in every one of them,” and Howard himself recognized it with this story. Noting that all his previous tales of Bran and the Picts had been told through non-Pictish narrators, he said, “Only in my last Bran story, The Worms of the Earth ... did I look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!”
The comment was, alas, prophetic: Worms of the Earth turned out to be the last story of Bran Mak Morn Howard would write, though not the last of the Picts. In a letter dated March 10, 1932, Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright wrote: “I want to schedule Worms of the Earth soon, for that is an unusually fine story, I think.” In that same letter, he rejects one story outright and sends another back for revisions: they are The Frost-Giant’s Daughter and The Phoenix on the Sword, the first tales of Conan the Cimmerian, who would keep Howard busy chronicling his adventures for the next three years. The Picts, of course, inhabit Conan’s Hyborian Age, which lies in the mythical past between the pre-Cataclysmic Age of Kull and our own historical epoch. As always, they are on the fringes of that world, savage inhabitants of the primeval forests of the west, age-old foes of Conan’s people (who are descendants of the Atlanteans), bitterly contesting any attempt to enter their domains. The Picts play a central role in one of Howard’s last, and best, Conan tales, Beyond the Black River, in which he played out in fiction the struggle that had taken place on the American frontiers, including his native Texas. Tellingly, the Picts in that story take back land that was taken from them, scoring a temporary success against the Aquilonians, just as Bran had warded off the incursions of the Romans in Caledonia.