Category Archives: Kull

Blogging Kull: The Screaming Skull of Silence

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Kull:  Exile of Atlantis
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paperback, $17.00, 317 p.

This is the first of four extremely short stories in the annals of Kull, or at least first in the order of arrangement in this volume.  This one is different from any of the Kull stories that have come before it. It was submitted to Weird Tales, but Farnsworth Wright obviously didn’t care for it since it wasn’t published until 1967 in the Lancer Books volume King Kull.

The tale opens with Kull listening to Brule, his chancellor Tu, Ka-nu the Pictish ambassador, and the slave and scholar Kathulos discussing philosophy (nothing new there).  Kathulos is saying that what we perceive as reality is an illusion.  To make his point, he gives an example of sound and silence, saying that sound is the absence of silence, while silence is the absence of sound.  Kathulos mentions that Raama, the greatest sorcerer who ever lived, thousands of years ago locked a primordial silence in a castle in order to save the universe.

When Brule mentions the castle is in Valusia and he’s seen it, the comment gets Kull’s attention.  He decides he wants to see the place.  Although the other try to dissuade him, he takes them and a hundred of the elite Red Slayers with him.  They find the castle on a hill after days of riding around looking for it.  How the kingdom continues to run or why Brule doesn’t remember the location of the castle is never explained.

As they approach the castle, Kull can sense waves of silence emanating from it.  The only door is sealed.  Next to the door is a gong, green in color and varying in its depths, sometimes seeming to be quite deep and at other times appearing shallow.  Despite the warnings carved on the castle, Kull breaks the bonds.

What rushes out is a palpable silence that knocks all but Kull to the ground.  The men are all screaming, but no sound proceeds from their mouths.  Sensing the silence wants to destroy all life, Kull tries to resist the silence but eventually staggers and falls.  As he does so, he strikes the gong.  Although he can’t hear it ring, Kull senses the silence draw back.  He takes the gong from its stand and begins to ring it, forcing the silence into the castle and eventually destroying it.  This is a pretty good trick since not even Raama was unable to destroy this silence.  The silence screams as it dies.

And that’s all there is to this one.  It has some unique points.  For starters, Kull finds his usual weapons, in this case his sword, useless against a malevolent silence.  He is forced to use his brains rather than his brawn.  For Kull that’s not too much of a stretch since he uses his brain on a regular basis.  It was nice to read that something other than a blade is needed every once in a while.

There’s nothing remarkable about the prose, at least by Howard’s standards.  It’s good, serviceable, and pulls the reader in.  It’s just not his best.  Even so, it’s still better than most of his imitators have done when they were hitting on all cylinders.

The appearance of Kathulos provided the right amount of philosophy needed as a framework to get the action moving.  Howard was reading a lot of philosophy during this period, as evidenced by his correspondence that has come down to us.  I may slow down this series of posts in order to research some of the philosophers who were influencing his work.  Or I might devote an entire post just to that.  We’ll see.  Time constraints will determine that.

This is the second and last story in which Kathulos will appear.  The sorcerer who manipulated him, Thulsa Doom, never appears again in the Kull stories, at least in none of the ones written by Howard.  (I’m not going to consider the comics here.)  For the Lancer Books edition of King Kull, Lin Carter “finished” an untitled draft, eliminated all references to Karon the Ferryman (!), had Felgar be Thulsa Doom in disguise, and called it “Riders Beyond the Sunrise”.  But the more we discuss Carter’s violations of Howard’s works, the more we legitimize them, so that’s the last we’ll  talk about Carter in this post.

Like I stated, this is one of the shortest of the Kull stories.  In some ways it’s one of the more interesting ones because of the nature of the villain Kull has to defeat.  It certainly adds variety to the series. 

Blogging Kull: Delcardes’ Cat/The Cat and the Skull

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Spoiler Alert:  This is not one of Howard’s best stories.  The plot is fairly straightforward, if unbelievable.   Kull goes with Tu, his chancellor, to see the talking cat of Delcardes.  The cat is reputed to be thousands of years old.  During the conversation, Delcardes asks Kull for permission to marry a nobleman from a neighboring kingdom.  This sends Tu into paroxysms of fury because Delcardes is of the nobility, and it is against custom for nobility to marry foreigners.  Howard seems to have developed a fondness for this plot device since he used it in the unfinished draft that precedes this tale in the Del Rey edition.

The cat, whose name is Saremes, tells Kull where he left a left (in his scabbard) and that a courtier is coming to tell Kull that a surplus has been found in the royal  treasury.  Tu insists that this is trickery.  Kull is a little more gullible, and in the end Saremes accompanies Kull back to his palace.  Attending Saremes at all times is the slave Kuthulos, who wears a veil covering his face and neck at all times.  Saremes and Kull often sit up all night talking philosophy, but Saremes refuses to tell Kull much about the future.  Personally I found her reasoning a little thin and had trouble believing someone like Kull could  have been taken in by them.  Howard even says that Kull has his doubts, yet he goes along with everything the cat says.  Except the continued proddings of Saremes to try to convince Kull to let Delcardes’ marry a foreigner.

Then one day, Saremes tells Kull that his Pictish friend Brule has been captured by a monster while swimming in the Forbidden Lake.  Kull immediately takes off to rescue Brule.  After battling several monsters, in what are better than average action scenes, Kull is captured by a giant snake and taken deep under the lake into a cave in which the surviving members of the lake men are living.  They don’t exactly buy Kull’s explanation for why he’s there.  The situation is about to degenerate into a bloodbath when Kull learns that Brule was never in the lake at all.  After pledging to leave the lake men in peace, Kull returns to the surface.

When he gets back to the palace, he finds the place in an uproar.  Seems the king has wandered off somewhere without telling anyone where he was going.  In the ensuing chaos, Kull hears a beating sound and discovers that Kuthulos has been tied up in a secret passage.  The man masquerading as Kuthulos is none other than the evil sorcerer Thulsa Doom who swears to destroy Kull before he escapes.  It seems Thulsa Doom is a servant of the serpent people.  Yeah, those serpent people. Anyway, it turns out that Saremes can’t speak at all, but Kuthulos can literally throw his voice.  He was the one telling Kull to allow Delcardes to marry her foreign lover and all the signs given in the opening scene were tricks.  Only after Thulsa Doom took Kuthulos’ place was Kull told to go to the Forbidden Lake.  Kull graciously pardons Delcardes for her scheming and allows her to marry whomever she wishes.

When published in the Lancer edition, this story was entitled “Delcardes’ Cat”, which is the name of the draft.  There aren’t many differences between the draft and the finished story.  The chancellor Tu is called Ku for the first page or so in the draft, then his name changes.  The only other significant change is the late addition of Thulsa Doom.  Howard added him as an afterthought in the first draft. 

Several things struck me about this story.  First, that the physical description of Thulsa Doom was a whole lot like that given for Skull-Face in the story of the same name. In fact even the name of the slave is similar.  Skull-Face was called Kathulos.  Patrice Louinet reports in “Atlatnean Genesis” (Kull, Del Rey, p. 298, 2006) that this was the original name in the first draft and was later modified for the final story.  It is useful to keep in mind that this story was written at about the same time that Howard was working on “Skull-Face”.

Another thing that struck me was that this is the second story in which a woman has deceived Kull and he’s blown it off and pardoned her.  The first was “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune.”  That’s not something Conan would have stood for.  Not even once.  While he might not have killed the girl, you can be sure Conan wouldn’t have been so forgiving. 

In spite of its flaws, this story definitely shows Howard at his most poetic.  Consider the following quotes (page nubmers are from the Del Rey edition):

“Twilight was stealing down from the mountains of Zalgara when Kull halted his horse on the shores of the lake that lay amid a great lonely forest.  There was nothing forbidding in its appearance, for its waters spread blue and placid from beach to wide white beach and the tiny islands rising above its bosom seemed like gems of emerald and jade.  A faint shimmering mist rose from it, enhancing the air of lazy unreality which lay about the regions of the lake.”  p. 97

“At first the king thought it to be a huge octopus for the body was that of an octopus, with long waving tentacles, but as it charged upon him he saw it had legs like a man and a hideous semi-human face leered at him from among the writhing snaky arms of the monster.”  p. 98

“” ‘You come like the herald of all your race,’ said this lake-man suddenly, ‘bloody and bearing a red sword.’ ” p. 104

While not a major work, and certainly not the best plotting Howard ever did, this one is still worth reading, if only for the passages like those quoted above.  “The Cat and the Skull”  shows Howard beginning to master his form and hints at greater writing to come.

Blogging Kull: Untitled Draft

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Kull:  Exile of Atlantis
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey, $15.95

After completing “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune”, Howard’s next attempt at a Kull tale was an abortive effort simply called “Untitled Draft” in the Del Rey edition.  A good title would have been something along the lines of “Who Rides into the Sunrise” since that phrase is repeated in several forms at one part of the story and would have been a central theme if Howard had chosen to finish it.

The story opens with one of the Valusian nobles telling Kull about a scandal in which the Countess of Fanara, Lala-ah (surely one of the silliest names in all of Howard’s canon and certainly more fitting for a tavern girl than a countess) has jilted her fiance at the altar to elope with Felgar, an adventurer from the neighboring kingdom of Farsunia.  There’s definitely some alliteration here.  Normally, so many proper names so closely associated would be off-putting and confusing to the reader.  A more experienced author would probably not have made this mistake.  Howard was still learning his craft, although by this time he was becoming quite an accomplished wordsmith. Howard perhaps was aware on some level of the potential for confusion, because this is the only time all three names (Fanara, Felgar, and Farsunia) are used in close succession.

Kull is bored by the whole thing, and comments that in Atlantis, the “women mate with whom they will and whom they choose.”  Having grown up in small Texas towns, I think I can safely say that this idea was ahead of its time in 1920s Cross Plains.  It’s only when a messenger informs Kull that Felgar has said:  “Tell the barbarian swine who defiles an ancient throne that I name him scoundrel.  Tell him that some day I shall return and clothe his cowardly carcase {sic}in the clothing of women, to attend my chariot horses.”  Why Felgar would do this is never explained.

Strong words from a man who is also a foreigner, although from one of the civilized kingdoms.  This, of course, sends Kull into a rage.  He summons Brule and the royal cavalry, the Red Slayers.  They take off in pursuit of Lala-ah and Felgar, crossing the border of the neighboring kingdom of Zarfhaana. 

Howard seemed to be setting up some conflict besides that between Kull and Felgar.  There are two other men in the party besides Kull and Brule who are named.  Ka-yana, who led the original pursuit and is overtaken by Kull and the Red Slayers, is the first.  There is definite dislilke between him and Brule.

The second man is named Kelkor.  He is second in command of the Red Slayer.  Instead of being Valusian, he’s Lemurian.  He worked his way up through the ranks, attaining the highest rank he could as a foreigner.  This prevents him from becoming the lord commander of the entire army.  Kull silently laments this fact. The passage (p. 71) implies, to me at least, that this will become a plot point later. Kelkor is a warrior’s warrior.  In fact Kull has something of a man-crush on Kelkor.  I don’t recall any other passage in Howard’s writings in which the central hero wonders if he can ever have the self control and martial prowess another man has.  There may be such a passage, but if there is, I’m not aware of it. 

This is the least brooding of the Kull stories Howard had written up until this time.  The emphasis here is more on pursuit.  The party, all 300 strong, track the lovers to a city on the eastern border of Zarfhaana, but the pair manage to elude Kull, although just barely.  It’s while Kull and Brule are secretly searching for them in the city that the comments of riding into the sunrise begin.

The pursuit continues, across the border into Grondar, a kingdom of fierce horsemen who often raid Zarfhaana and other kingdoms along their border.  Kull has enough men that the Grondarians don’t molest them but do follow along behind them, watching.  Felgar and Lala-ah manage to stay about a day’s ride ahead.  I don’t know much about horses, but I found it a little hard to swallow that the horses Kull’s party as well as the lovers are riding don’t start dropping dead from the relentless pursuit.  I realize that Howard says Felgar and Lala-ah have spare horses, but still, give me a break.

Eventually, they come to a river, the Stagus.  On the western side is grassland; on the eastern, desert.  At the river they meet a man, Karon the Ferryman, as he calls himself.  It’s been established that many of the names Howard was using in his fiction during this period were taken from Bullfinch.  Here’s a  perfect example of his doing so, and I think it’s brilliant.  Howard makes Karon seem a natural fit to the story, not forced.  Howard even states that Karon will eventually be known as boatman to Hades.  While the land on the eastern side of the Stagus isn’t called Hades, it is called World’s End and is a hot and hellish place inhabited by monsters.  No one who has crossed the Stagus has ever returned.

Karon informs the group that he is a member of the Elder Race.  He also knows Kull’s name, even though Kull does not give it.  I’m not sure if this was an oversight on Howard’s part or not.  I suspect not.  It certainly works to make Karon more mysterious and a little threatening even though nothing he does or says is overtly hostile.

Felgar and Lala-ah took the ferry across the Stagus at dawn the previous day.  Kull says he intends to follow to avenge the insult Felgar has given him but that the men are free to return without it being held against them.  They all follow Kull.  So impressed by this is Kull that he gives them the highest compliment he can:  “Ye are men.”  Karon ferries them across, and the party prepares to continue it’s pursuit.

And that’s where the story ends.  Just as it was starting to get interesting. 

It’s unfortunate that Howard chose not to finish this tale.  It was probably shaping up to be the lengthiest Kull story Howard had written up to this time.  Yes, the impetus to get Kull to take to the road is weak.  Pursuing lovers that he would ordinarily sympathize with in order to avenge an insult is a bit thin for motivation to leave the kingdom in the hands of the nobles, who we know from “The Shadow Kingdom” are not to be trusted.  Especially if you take most of your personal guard with you.  It’s easier for me to see Conan in his pre-Aquilonia days doing something like this than it is for me to see Kull acting this way.  But once Kull and his men are on the road, who cares why he left.  This installment shows us some of the geography of Kull’s world, something we don’t get to see much of in the other stories.  Once Kull and Brule are in the city looking for their quarry, Howard drops hints that they’re heading into trouble.  This is confirmed when Karon tells Kull no one who has crossed the Stagus has ever returned. 

Personally, I can’t wait to see what’s on the other side of that river.  I want to know what monsters are lurking there.  More critters from Bullfinch?  It would be fascinating to see what Howard does with them.  Maybe no one has ever returned because a gorgon is hiding over there.  It would certainly fit with the Greek mythology motif Howard establishes with Karon.  And what about the animosity between Brule and Ka-yana?  Where was Howard going to take that?  Yes, I know it would almost certainly have ended in Ka-yana’s blood being spilled, but half the fun is getting to that point.   Let’s not forget Kelkor.  Will Kull eventually go against custom and promote Kelkor to command of all the army and not just the Red Slayers?

Sadly, unless the highly unlikely happens and the rest of the story turns up somewhere, the world will never know.  Even with it’s flaws and unfinished state, this draft showcases Howard’s growth and improvement as a writer.  He has more characters than in any of the previous Kull tales, and their motivations appear to be more complex than any to this point.  Their interactions certainly are.  This could have been a major novella, especially if Howard had tweaked the story a bit to make the motivation for pursuit a little more believable.  It’s our loss that he didn’t.

Blogging Kull: The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune

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This was the second Kull story published in Howard’s lifetime, and the last one to feature Kull as the viewpoint character.  He would make one more published appearance, in “Kings of the Night”, but that tale is primarily a Bran Mak Morn story with Kull in a secondary role.  After that, no more Kull stories would be published in Howard’s lifetime.

This is an extremely short piece, more brooding than action.  In fact, Kull never draws his sword at all.  Only Brule engages in any slaughter. 

Howard chose to open this tale with a quote from Poe, and it’s quite appropriate.  Kull is burned out when the story opens, in what Howard describes as “the time of great weariness”, and what would be called today a midlife crisis.  (I’m looking forward to my midlife crisis and getting a Harley and a hottie, but I will probably ease into it slowly with the one that requires the least maintenance.  That would be the Harley.)  Instead of grabbing a wench and a fast horse and hitting the road, Kull merely broods about the meaninglessness of life and how nothing satisfies him now.  While Howard wasn’t fond of religion and the church, I have to wonder if he had been reading the book of Ecclesiastes when he wrote this.  Howard describes Kull’s daily routine as “an endless, meaningless panorama”, much like the author of Ecclesiastes describes life as “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” 

When no one is around, a servant girl suggests to Kull that he visit the wizard Tuzun Thune.  Whereas Conan would have probably ravished the girl, Kull merely follows her suggestion.  Tuzun Thune tells Kull to gaze into his mirrors and become wise. 

The first mirror shows the past, and the savage battle for survival against flying dragons and other beasts.  It’s a world of endless struggle, with Death the only certainty.  The second mirror shows the future, in which Atlantis and Lemuria are beneath the waves, and only their mountaintops remain, islands in the vastness of the ocean.  Valusia and the other Seven Kingdoms are gone and forgotten, all their splendor and treasures dust.  Tuzun Thune says this is the way of the world, one tribe supplanting the previous.  It’s all very depressing.

Then Tuzun Thune has Kull look in a third mirror.  Kull sees only his reflection and wonders who the man is who gaze matches his own.  He once knew him   Kull begins to wonder who is the man and who is the reflection.

Kull visits Tuzun Thune every day, staring at his reflection in a mirror.  He becomes more and more fascinated by the world in the mirror and wants to know what he would find if he passed through to the other side.  He is in the process of doing so when when Brule shatters the mirror.  Kull comes to his senses to find the lifeless body of Tuzun Thune on the floor before him, Tuzun Thune’s blood dripping from Brule’s sword.  Brule informs Kull that he is the victim of a plot by one of the other nobles, a plot only discovered that very day.  The servant girl who told Kull to visit Tuzun Thune is in on it.  She’s on the floor covering in fear for her life while this exchange between Kull and Brule is taking place.  Amazingly Kull says she was merely a pawn and lets her go unpunished.  After the girl tells Kull about Tuzun Thune, Howard describes her this way:  ” the smile of her scarlet mouth was cunning behind Kull’s back, and the gleam of her narrow eyes was crafty.”  That doesn’t sound like someone who was a pawn to me.  We know she and Tuzun Thune were both members of the Elder Race, who once ruled Valusia.  Conan would never have dismissed her this way, although he probably would have let her live.

In a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith sometime in February 1929, Howard lists all his sales to date.  He records that he got $20 for “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” and that it was “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.”  [Collected Letters Vol. 1, REH Foundation Press, 2007, p. 311]

This is a deep story, but I don’t agree with Howard’s assessment.  It’s not badly written at all.  Some of the paragraphs are quite powerful in their descriptions and mood.  Howard was in his early twenties at this time.  It’s wouldn’t be unusual to feel that sense of weariness he describes.  Here’s a young man who is trapped in a small town where no one understands him.  He had to wonder at times if his desire to write was worth it.  I spent part of my adolescence in a small town about fifty miles from Cross Plains, and I can tell you that what Howard describes is a very real sensation.  Anyone who doesn’t conform to the lowest common denominator expectations of society in those towns will sooner or later experience the fatigue (the weariness) that comes from trying to be your own person when all you meet is opposition and exclusion.  Instead of being out of his depth, Howard seems to me to have poured out his feelings and his experience in this story. 

I think he nails it perfectly, and that’s why for all its brevity, this is a major story in Howard’s oeuvre.

Blogging Kull: The Shadow Kingdom

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Kull:  Exile of Atlantis
Robert E. Howard
Illustrations by Justin Sweet
Del Rey
Trade Paperback, 319 p., $15.95

Just so you know, this post will contain  spoilers.

“The Shadow Kingdom” was the first of the Kull stories to see print, and it appeared in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales.  In this story Kull has, with the help of some dissatisfied nobles, seized the throne of Valusia from the tyrant who’s sat on it for a while. Apparently he’s been on the throne long enough for the luster to have faded, for Kull makes it very clear he prefers the straightforward manner of his barbarian kinsmen.  You know, the ones who’ve exiled him.

After a parade in his honor, Kull is holding court when an emissary from the Pictish ambassador requests a private council with him.  Kull grants it and takes advantage of the opportunity to bait the man, the Picts being ancient enemies of the Atlanteans.  The emissary, a warrior, requests that Kull come alone that night to a banquet with the Pictish ambassador, Ka’nu.

Kull’s suspicious, but goes.  Ka’nu informs Kull that only Kull can usher in an era of “peace and goowill”, of “man loving his fellow man”, to Valusia and the Seven Kingdoms.  This is somewhat ironic seeing as how Kull is a warrior king who carries deep hatreds.  It’s also not what you would normally expect in a Robert E. Howard story.  In order to do this, Kull has to live.  The next in line to the throne is a figurehead controlled by a race of serpent men, if not actually a serpent man himself.  Ka-nu will send proof of this through Brule the Spearslayer.  Kull will recognize Brule by the armlet he’ll be wearing.  To show he can be trusted, Ka-nu reveals to Kull that he has a jewel stolen from the Temple of the Serpent.  If the priests of the Serpent knew its location, Ka-nu would have a very short life expectancy.

The next night, Brule appears.  He’s the Pictish warrior who brought the message from Kan-nu in the first place.  He reveals to Kull a secret society of serpent people who have the bodies of men but the heads of snakes.  Through some type of sorcery they are able to assume the faces of any person they wish. When they die (read are killed by Kull or Brule), their heads revert to their natural forms.

You can probably figure out that there will be a lot of people who turn out to be other than who they appeared.  It turns out the serpent men are an ancient, mongrel race who have a long history in Valusia, although it’s a history that most of Valusia’s citizens are ignorant of. 

Naturally, Kull triumphs, but not easily.  Brule and Ka-nu are afraid he dies from his wounds, although he only loses consciousness.  The intriguing part of the story, for me at least, is the depth at which Howard shows us Kull’s thoughts.  Kull wonders which is the real Kull, the monarch “who sat on the throne or was it the real Kull who had scaled the hills of Atlantis, harried the far isles of the sunset, and laughed upon the green roaring tides of the Atlentean sea.”  This brooding is provoked of course by Kull’s discovery of the Serpent Men and the masks they don to deceive people for evil means, something he had already encountered in his courtiers, albeit in a less literal sense. 

 Evidence indicates “The Shadow Kingdom” was written, or at least begun, in 1926, the year Howard turned 20.  It’s a common occurrence to many men and women around that time in life to discover that people aren’t always what they seem, but don masks to further their own ends.  I think it’s safe to speculate that perhaps some of that discovery of the realities of life was making it’s way into Howard’s fiction.  Many a child and teenager is dismayed to discover that becoming an adult isn’t all the fun and privilege it seems when you’re young.  I know my eight year old certainly has the illusion that being an adult is more fun than being a child because it means getting to stay up late and eat and drink close to bedtime.  Would that it were that simple.

Another thing common to young adults and teens is the fear that they can’t cut it as an adult.  This is a fear that can return later in life when a person experiences a major upset, often but not always the loss of a job or business.  Affirmation that a person can function as an accepted member of adult society is one of the purposes of a rite of passage.  Entire books have been written on this topic.  I have to wonder if Howard was feeling some of that uncertainty about this time in his life.  I know he made a deal with his father to give writing a try for one year and if at the end of that year he wasn’t making a living, he would find a regular job.  Kull has thoughts along these lines more than once in the story.

The first incident occurs during the brooding quoted in the paragraph above when Kull thinks of himself as “the futile king who sat upon the throne – himself a shadow.”  The second occurs at the climax of the story when Kull and Brule have escaped a trap in which the serpent men have disguised themselves as his council in order to assassinate him.  Hurrying back to the council chamber, they find the real council in session with a serpent man disguised as Kull himself.  For a moment Kull wonders “Do I stand here or is that Kull yonder in very truth and am I but a shadow, a figment of thought?”  Maybe I’m reading too much into the text, but it sounds to me as though Kull is experiencing a little insecurity.  Not something you would expect from a Howard hero.

After all the serpent men in the palace have been dispatched, Kull swears an oath to destroy all the remaining ones.  He swears this oath on his own identity as Kull, king of Valusia.  While I may be stretching things a bit to interpret this ending as a metaphor for Howard striving to make his way in the world as a writer, I don’t think I’m too far off the mark.

“The Shadow Kingdom” has been called the first true sword and sorcery story, a statement that is not without some controversy.  I’m willing to go along with that premise, at least for the sake of this post, because it points out something that I think can’t be understated.  Sword and sorcery has been dismissed by its critics as shallow and cliched, without depth, power fantasies of social misfits and closet homosexuals, and mind candy or softcore porn for adolescent boys.  What “The Shadow Kingdom” is, at least as I read the story, is a reflection on identity.  While this is certainly an issue of adolescence, it’s also an issue that concerns everyone at most stages of life, to a lesser or greater degree. Furthermore, I see it as a meditation on the meaning of life, especially the role one will play in that life.  Until he sets out to eradicate the serpent men, Kull is lost, searching for meaning after achieving his goal of becoming king and finding it unfulfilling. I’m fairly sure Howard didn’t consciously set out to create a new form of literature when he wrote “The Shadow Kingdom”, but on some level was dealing with the issues in his life in the best way he knew how: by fictionalizing them.  Creating sword and sorcery was to some degree incidental.  That’s a pretty impressive legacy, to create a new genre with those themes at its core.  Not bad for “escapism”, huh?  So the next time you hear someone dissing sword and sorcery as not being real literature or worthy of serious consideration, give them a copy of “The Shadow Kingdom.”

Blogging Kull: Exile of Atlantis

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Kull:  Exile of Atlantis
Robert E. Howard
Illustrated by Justin Sweet
Del Rey
Trade Paperback, 319 p., $15.95

It’s been a while since I read any of the Kull stories.  I think the last time I read one was when I was an undergraduate, but I may have been in graduate school.  (We’ve talked about that memory and age thing before.  At least I think we have.  I seem to recall we did.)  Why it’s taken me so long to get back to these stories, I’m not entirely sure.  Other demands on my reading time, mostly, including other Robert E. Howard works I hadn’t read.

Anyhoo, in the intervening years since I last read Kull, I’ve grown and (hopefully) matured.  So I thought I’d take a fresh look at these tales.  In some circles, Kull is often thought of as a prototype Conan, an opinion that’s only reinforced by the fact that the first Conan story was a rewrite of an unsold Kull tale.  But is that really so?  Howard, in spite of his critics, was quite adept at characterization.  I’m not sure I buy that idea, even though I have to admit that when I was much younger, I did pick up on the similarities between the two characters more than their differences.  It’s time to take a fresh look.  Over the next half year or so, I’ll be examining them in some detail.  I’m using the Del Rey edition with the story fragments and synopses, even though I own a copy of the Subterranean slipcased edition.  That edition is out of print and probably beyond the budget of many people.  The stories are the same in both volumes.

Oh, and these posts about Kull will contain spoilers.  So if you haven’t read the story (or stories) under discussion, you might want to keep that in mind.  You have been notified.

Howard began thirteen Kull stories between 1926 and 1930, and he completed ten of them before moving on to other characters.  Of those ten, only three saw publication in his lifetime, and one of those is a Bran Mak Morn story in which Kull is brought forward in time to play a major role.  The first story in the book is an untitled story that was published under the title “Exile of Atlantis” in 1967 in the Lancer paperback King Kull.  Not counting the full page illustration facing the first page of text, it’s only seven pages long, and that includes the illustrations on six pages.

The storyline is simple.  Kull, Gor-na, and his son Am-ra are talking over dinner at their wilderness camp.  What they’re doing in the wilderness, we’re never told.  The whole discussion centers around Kull’s disdain for some of the tribal traditions.  It seems he’s been adopted into Gor-na’s tribe, which is the Sea Mountain tribe.  Kull doesn’t know who his tribe is.  Rather he “was a hairless ape roaming in the woods” who “could not speak the language of men.”  If that sounds a little like Mowgli from Kipling’s Jungle Books, it shouldn’t surprise you that Kipling was one of the writers who influenced Howard.  We aren’t given any details of how Kull came to live with the Sea Mountain tribe or how he learned to speak.

The talk then turns to the troubles Atlantis has had with Valusia and the Seven Empires.  Kull isn’t as impressed with them as Gor-na is.  He even expresses a desire to one day see Valusia.  Gor-na tells him if he does, it will be as a slave.  There is also mention made of Lemurian pirates causing trouble.  After some further discussion, the men get some sleep.  During the night, Kull has a dream in which he is hailed as a king by a large crowd.

The next morning the men return to the tribe’s caves to discover a young woman is to be burned at the stake for the crime of marrying a Lemurian pirate.  The only person who seems to show some sympathy is Am-ra, whose “strange blue eyes were sad and compassionate.”  Even the  girl’s mother screams for her death.  Kull thinks this punishment is a bit much, but he isn’t in a position to rescue her.  The best he can do is offer her a quick death rather than a slow painful one.  He catches her eye and touches the hilt of his flint dagger.  She gives him a small nod, and he throws the dagger, piercing her heart.

The enraged mob, cheated of their vengeance, turns on Kull, who has already begun to climb the cliff next to the village and escape.  He is saved from being hit by an arrow when Am-ra bumps the archer’s arm.

And that’s all there is to this story.  It might not look like a lot, but it seems to me the point here is to establish a little bit of Kull’s backstory and define his character.  In this Howard is successful.  Kull is a man who is not afraid, either of battle or of asking unpopular questions.  He does the right thing as he sees it, even when he’s the only one willing to take a stand.  In this story, doing so costs him his home.  We know from the foreshadowing in the dream that Kull will one day see Valusia, not as a traveler but as its king.

While the action in the story is not at the level of what many readers expect from Howard, the noble barbarian is there.  Remember, this was years before a certain Cimmerian made his way through the kingdoms of the Hyborian Age.  Howard was beginning to develop the themes he would return to again and which would occupy a great deal of his thoughts.  To return to certain themes over a period of time, developing and perfecting them, is not an uncommon thing for an author to do.

I don’t know when this story was written.  I seem to recall someone (I want to say Rusty Burke) had put together a timeline of the known composition dates and best estimates of the rest of Howard’s work, but I can’t find it online.  Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.  In his afterward “Atlantean Genesis”, Patrice Louinet states it was either between July 1925 and January 1926 or between August and September 1926.  Whether the story was ever submitted for publication is unknown. This would make it one of the earliest stories Howard wrote in his career.

What I did find interesting is that Kull seems to have grown out of an abortive series of stories and poems about Am-ra of the Ta-an.  These consist of two poems (one only five lines long) plus three fragments.  All are included in this book.  In a letter now lost, but quoted by Alvin Earl Perry in A Biographical Sketch of Robert E. Howard (1935), Howard talks about a story in which a minor character takes over.  “Exile of Atlantis” is the only story we know of that fits this description.

None of these things should be surprising.  It has been well documented that Howard would sometimes reuse names from earlier stories, sometimes altering them slightly, sometimes not.  Even a certain Cimmerian was known as Amra for a while in his wanderings.  An interesting side note to this point, Amra of Akbitana appears in “The Frost King’s Daughter”, which was published in the March 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan under the title “Gods of the North” and later rewritten as the Conan story “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter”, the second in the Conan series. 

Or to put it this way, what we are seeing with “Exile of Atlantis” is Howard stretching himself as a writer.  The events of the story may be dismissed as minor by the casual reader, but to do so would be a mistake.  I maintain that this is an important tale, especially if it was the first Kull story written, which it seems to be.  “Exile of Atlantis”  is an example of Howard beginning to stretch himself and warm up, to use an track analogy, before beginning to sprint and hit his stride with his later works.