In some ways,
Kane is one of Howard’s most complex and fascinating characters.
His exploits seem to take place largely during the reign of Elizabeth
I, and while some stories are set in England and the Continent,
it is in Africa Kane faces his greatest challenges. Among his
African encounters are the discovery of an ancient Atlantean colony
now ruled by a sensuous yet degenerate queen (‘The Moon
of Skulls’), a tribe of zombies (‘The Hills of the
Dead’) and a village menaced by winged harpies (‘Wings
in the Night’). Throughout his adventures, Kane is convinced
he is a servant of God, even as he carries a ju-ju staff given
him by his blood-brother N’Longa, the “mighty worker
of nameless magic” first encountered in ‘Red Shadows.’
According to his creator, “all his life [Kane] had roamed
about the world aiding the weak and fighting oppression; he neither
knew nor questioned why. That was his obsession, his driving force
of life.... If he thought of it at all, he considered himself
a fulfiller of God’s judgment, a vessel of wrath to be emptied
upon the souls of the unrighteous.” Through the whole series,
Kane’s sense of divine purpose is tempered by his conscience
and guilt over his own lust for excitement. Kane was the first
character Howard sustained beyond a published story or two: seven
of the Kane tales appeared in Weird Tales between 1928 and 1932,
and he remains a favorite with readers and fellow writers alike.
According to Howard’s semi-autobiographical novel Post Oaks
and Sand Roughs, sometime in the fall of 1926, while he was taking
the bookkeeping course at the Howard Payne Academy, he began “a
wild fantasy entitled ‘The Phantom Empire,’ which
he laid aside partly finished and forgot about.” The following
summer, “He came upon ‘The Phantom Empire,’
deserted several months before, completed it, and then again laid
it aside and forgot about it.” Soon afterward, he “again
discovered ‘The Phantom Empire,’ rewrote it, and again
laid it aside.” In September 1927, he finally submitted
the story to Weird Tales, and a short time later it was accepted,
with a promised payment on publication of $100.00 - the largest
sum Howard had been offered to that time. It would be over a year
before this story saw publication in August 1929. The title as
given in Post Oaks and Sand Roughs is, of course, thinly disguised:
the story was ‘The Shadow Kingdom,’ the first published
appearance of King Kull, and the tale generally regarded as the
first true example of “sword and sorcery” fiction
- the melding of heroic adventure with elements of fantasy and
horror.
Howard said, “King Kull differed from the others (i.e.,
El Borak, Bran Mak Morn and Solomon Kane) in that he was put on
paper the moment he was created, whereas they existed in my mind
years before I tried to put them in stories. In fact, he first
appeared as only a minor character in a story which was never
accepted. At least, he was intended to be a minor character, but
I had not gone far before he was dominating the yarn.” That
initial glimpse of Kull was evidently in ‘Exile of Atlantis,’
which appears to have been written during the first half of 1925,
when Howard was but 19. This slight tale relates how a young Kull
grants the boon of a quick death to a woman about to be burned
at the stake, thus violating tribal custom and forcing him into
exile. The confining nature of traditions, customs, taboos and
laws is a frequent theme in the Kull stories. In this story we
learn that Kull was adopted by the Sea-Mountain tribe of Atlantis
after he was found wandering in the woods. He knows nothing of
his parentage, but he has a dream in which he is hailed as king
of Valusia, the greatest civilization of his age.