As to his fictional characters, we’ll let Mr. Howard speak for himself. He says: “The first character I ever created was Francis Xavier Gordon, El Borak, the hero of ‘The Daughter of Erlik Khan’ (Top-Notch), etc. I don’t remember his genesis. He came to life in my mind when I was about ten years old. The next was Bran Mak Morn, the Pictish king (‘The Kings of the Night,’ etc., Weird Tales). He was the result of my discovery of the existence of the Pictish race, when reading some historical works in a public library in New Orleans at the age of thirteen. Physically he bore a striking resemblance to El Borak.”
ROBERT E. HOWARD, BRAN MAK MORN AND THE PICTS
Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet
“There is one hobby of mine which puzzles me to this day,” wrote Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft in 1932. “That is my interest in the people which, for the sake of brevity, I have always designated as Picts. I am of course aware that my use of the term might be questioned.... But to me ‘Pict’ must always refer to the small dark Mediterranean aborigines of Britain. This is not strange, since when I first read of these aborigines, they were referred to as Picts. But what is strange, is my unflagging interest in them.”
The Picts are the only fictional creations to appear throughout Howard’s writing career. Only one other creation, Francis X. Gordon (‘El Borak’) appears at both the beginning and the end of Howard’s career, but he was notably absent from the early 1920s until 1934. Picts, on the other hand, appear in no fewer than thirty stories, poems, and fragments, from The West Tower (probably written circa 1922–1923), a Steve Allison fragment, to The Black Stranger, one of the last Conan stories, probably written in 1935, and rarely a year passes that they do not appear in some story. It seems likely that, had he lived longer, the Picts would have surfaced again in his work.
The Picts appear in many different contexts. In the second story Howard sold professionally, The Lost Race, they are living underground, apparently some-where in the south of Britain, having been driven there by Celtic invaders. In the Bran Mak Morn tales, they are the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Scotland, fighting back the invading forces of Roman Britain. In the stories of Turlogh O’Brien and Cormac Mac Art, they are the last surviving remnants of Bran’s people, now pitted against the Norsemen who have established themselves in the remote northern islands off the coast of Scotland. In the Kull series, they are barbaric allies of the Valusian king, while in the Hyborian Age of Conan, they are the savage inhabitants of a wilderness that stretches from the western borders of Aquilonia to the sea. In the James Allison stories, they are a bestial, jungle-dwelling race. Always they are at the outer fringes of the world.
Howard told an interviewer, “The first character I ever created was Francis Xavier Gordon, El Borak.... He came to life in my mind when I was about ten years old. The next was Bran Mak Morn, the Pictish king.... He was the result of my discovery of the existence of the Pictish race, when reading some historical works in a public library in New Orleans at the age of thirteen.”
Somewhat earlier, Howard had told H.P. Lovecraft that he had first read of the Picts in histories of Scotland, of which he was an enthusiast, but that these had been “bare mentionings, usually in disapproval.”
“Then when I was about twelve I spent a short time in New Orleans and found in a Canal Street library, a book detailing the pageant of British history, from prehistoric times up to – I believe – the Norman conquest. It was written for school-boys and told in an interesting and romantic style, probably with many historical inaccuracies. But there 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. The writer painted the aborigines in no more admirable light than had other historians whose works I had read. His 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 made them a strong, warlike race of barbarians, gave them an honorable history of past glories, and created for them a great king – one Bran Mak Morn.”
While, in the absence of a definite statement from Howard, we cannot know with real certainty which book it was in which he found the Picts, methodical research has finally yielded a very strong candidate: The Romance of Early British Life: From the Earliest Times to the Coming of the Danes, by G.F. Scott Elliot (London: Seeley and Co. Ltd., 1909). The book fits so many of the particulars in Howard’s description, and in it we find so many descriptions and incidents which find resonance in Howard’s work, that one almost feels it has to be the book in question, especially in the absence of any other candidates. In discussing the spread of Neolithic culture from the region of the Caucasus and Mesopotamia, across Northern Africa, and into Spain, for instance, Scott Elliot writes: “This was the first race of man to be thoroughly domesticated. Like the sheep, goats, and oxen which they brought with them, they had been themselves tamed, trained, and taught to labour. Their descendants still exist all along the Mediterranean, and not only there but in our own islands. This people, or rather this race of mankind, has been called by many different names. The most sonorous is not doubt ‘Homo Mediterraneus,’ but they have also been called Basques, Iberians, Silurians, the Firbolg, the Dolmen-builders, the Picts, and Eaters of Garlic. We shall call them Picts, because this is the shortest name, and by using it we shall save time, labour, ink, and paper in writing about them.”
These Mediterraneans are the people whom Scott Elliot says migrated to Britain in Neolithic times, and slowly wrested the islands from the previous inhabitants, a race of red-haired cave dwellers. Interestingly, he fabricates a little story about a party of Picts from Brittany preparing to paddle across the English Channel in dugout canoes loaded with their possessions and livestock. “A strong force of the oldest men in the settlement, well armed and watchful, were ‘seeing off’ the party of emigrants. These were all young men, mostly of a disagreeably bold and enterprising disposition, and of young women who were inclined to be insubordinate and disrespectful to the heads of the tribe. So they were selected as being the best to depart, not merely for their own good, but for the future peace of the old settlement.”
Compare this with the story told to Cororuc by the ancient Pict in The Lost Race:
“Our people came from the south. Over the islands, over the Inland Sea. Over the snow-topped mountains, where some remained, to stay any enemies who might follow. Down into the fertile plains we came. Over all the land we spread. We became wealthy and prosperous. Then two kings arose in the land, and he who conquered, drove out the conquered. So many of us made boats and set sail for the far-off cliffs that gleamed white in the sunlight. We found a race of red-haired barbarians, who dwelt in caves.”
One of the most powerfully suggestive correspondences between The Romance of Early British Life and Howard’s Pictish stories is in the chapter Scott Elliot titles “My General, Agricola.” In it, he tells the story of a Tungrian serving in the Roman legion in Britain, and relates their troubles in Caledonia.
“We [the 2nd Cohort of Tungrians] would go in front and choose the road for the legion. Then a few of us would go first, and watch carefully for an ambush. Often there would be a sudden storm of stone-headed arrows upon us; a Caledonian might be lurking behind every tree or any boulder, and they are clever at concealing themselves. A soldier of ours was cooking his dinner beside a small pool, and had been there two hours watching the banks of it. Then he turned his back, and a savage came out of the water below where he stood and pierced him with his spear before he could turn round. They can stay for hours together with only the lips and nose above water, and no one can see them if the water is dark or full of reeds.”