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 Sauclass="underline"
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.