The young Howard
next turned to ancient Britain for the creation of Bran Mak Morn.
When Robert was 13, his father took the family to New Orleans,
where the doctor enrolled in a post-graduate medical course. While
there, Robert sought out a public library and discovered a book
on British history in which he learned of a small, dark race of
Mediterraneans who settled in the British Isles before the arrival
of the Celts. These people were called Picts, and they strongly
appealed to young Robert’s imagination. “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.”
As with El Borak, it would yet be some time before Bran’s
exploits were written down. The earliest mention of this character
is in a 1923 letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith, in which
Howard names Bran among several characters in a book he is writing
(which apparently does not survive). One of Howard’s early
sales to Weird Tales, ‘The Lost Race,’ deals with
the Picts, but the chieftain in the story is named Berula, rather
than Bran. In early 1926 Howard wrote ‘Men of the Shadows,’
in which Bran is a great chief, but not a king. It was only in
1930, when he wrote ‘Kings of the Night,’ that Howard
made Bran a king... and more than a king. In that year, Howard
also wrote ‘The Dark Man,’ a story set in the 11th
century, in which Bran is said to have become a god to the remnants
of the Pictish race. Curiously, while the central character in
most of Howard’s stories would also be said to be the viewpoint
character (even when the story is told in third person), in the
Bran stories this is not the case. Howard himself recognized this,
telling Lovecraft, “Only in my last Bran story, Worms of
the Earth, did I look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish
tongue!” This story, one of Howard’s very best, was
also the last in which Bran would appear.
At the age of 16, Howard dreamed up another character, Solomon
Kane, a Puritan swashbuckler who travels the world avenging wrongs.
“He was probably the result,” said Howard, “of
an admiration for a certain type of cold, steely-nerved duellist
that existed in the sixteenth century.” As with El Borak
and Bran Mak Morn, his adventures were not immediately transcribed,
but in the fall of 1927, Howard completed a story called ‘Solomon
Kane,’ in which his hero tracked the villainous Le Loup
from a European forest to a final confrontation in the sorcery-haunted
African jungle, and submitted it to Argosy All-Story, one of the
top pulp markets for fiction. He was considerably heartened when
he received a personal note from the associate editor, telling
him what was wrong with the story, but saying “You seem
to have caught the knack of writing good action & plenty of
it into your stories.” Howard told Clyde Smith that he had
originally written the story for Weird Tales but decided to try
his luck with Argosy first; he did in fact send it on to Weird
Tales unchanged. It was accepted, but he was asked to come up
with another title. The story appeared in August 1928 as ‘Red
Shadows.’