Known history begins with the waning of the Pre-Cataclysmic civilization, dominated by the kingdoms of Kamelia, Valusia, Verulia, Grondar, Thule, and Commoria. These peoples spoke a similar language, arguing a common origin. […] The barbarians of that age were the Picts, who lived on islands far out on the western ocean; the Atlanteans, who dwelt on a small continent between the Pictish Islands and the main, or Thurian Continent; and the Lemurians, who inhabited a chain of large islands in the eastern hemisphere. […] Then the Cataclysm rocked the world. Atlantis and Lemuria sank, and the Pictish Islands were heaved up to form the mountain peaks of a new continent. Sections of the Thurian Continent vanished under the waves, or sinking, formed great inland lakes and seas. Volcanoes broke forth and terrific earthquakes shook down the shining cities of the empires. Whole nations were blotted out. (The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, Del Rey, 2003, pp. 381–382) [Incidentally, the word “Thurian,” describing Kull’s continent, was coined in 1932; it never appears in any of the Kull stories.]
By retroactively integrating Kull’s world to Conan’s (giving a few details as to its geography and history), by showing the destruction of Kull’s world and how it was eventually replaced by Conan’s, by explaining how the Atlanteans ultimately became the Cimmerians (hence that Conan could be a descendant of Kull) and, last but not least, by writing the first Conan tale on the ashes of an unsold Kull story, Howard was telling us that he now envisioned the Kull series a prehistoric one, which paved the way for the Conan stories. The Thurian continent belonged to the past of the Hyborian world–and of Howard’s career–just as the Hyborian world belongs to our past. Having distanced himself from Kull, Howard had placed himself in a position which prevented him from writing new Kull tales, having obliterated the character and his universe in the meantime.
Considering the Kull series only as an archaic version of Conan is paying them a substantial disservice. Howard’s readers and critics were certainly right to disagree with the author in this matter, for the Kull stories are those in which Howard was creating a new genre of fiction as he was writing the stories, playing with a universe that was definitely not as systematized as Conan’s, and toying with the various possibilities this new genre could offer. While all the Conan stories were penned with Weird Tales in mind, the Kull stories were submitted to a variety of different magazines; some may read like prototypical Conan stories, some as prose poems, some as philosophical fables. Howard let his imagination run free. It was a time of experimentation: the Kull stories range far and wide and can be very different between one story and the next.
The genesis of the stories of the Atlantean king is also that of the genre Howard was inventing.
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In his A Biographical Sketch of Robert E. Howard, which originally appeared in 1935, Alvin Earl Perry quoted from a now-lost letter from Howard. In that letter the Texan offered a few comments on the genesis of some of his characters. About Kull, he wrote that he “was put on paper the moment he was created…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.”
The only extant story that fits the description is the first tale of this book, previously published under the title Exile of Atlantis. This short vignette, in which Kull is but one of three lead characters and is indeed soon “dominating the yarn” is the only Kull story that was written before The Shadow Kingdom. It was thus the first Kull story, but at the same time it was also the last to feature one of Howard’s earliest creations, Am-ra, whose origins will help us understand the genesis of the Kull stories: Am-ra apparently played the same role for Kull that the Atlantean would later play for Conan.
Howard said he began buying pulp magazines at fifteen, in the summer of 1921, though he had probably been reading them for some time. His favorite publications seem to have been Adventure and Argosy, the two leading pulp fiction magazines of that era. Before Weird Tales began publication in 1923, there was no magazine devoted solely to weird fiction. The young Howard was a voracious reader of adventure fiction, an inclination that would be true all his life. Argosy and Adventure specialized in historical and adventure tales, and traces of influence of all the major contributors to those magazines–we may cite Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Arthur D. Howden-Smith–can be detected in the writings of Howard. It was thus natural that when Howard began writing fiction on a (more or less) professional basis in 1921, just after having discovered these magazines, it was in these authors that he found his first inspiration. The Texan thus wrote a number of tales clearly derived from Mundy, and borrowed from Burroughs or, at a later date, from Lamb and Howden-Smith.
It was Howard scholar and Wandering Star editor Rusty Burke who unearthed the influence Paul L. Anderson had on a young Robert E. Howard. Anderson (1880–1956), now completely forgotten, had several novelettes published in Argosy in the early 1920s, beginning with The Son of the Red God in the 31 January 1920 issue. The tale was preceded by a note which explained how he had found a Crô-Magnon parchment in a cave in France and that his story was nothing more than a translation from the original. The subject of the tale is a favorite of the era: how the Crô-Magnons supplanted the Neanderthals. That Howard enjoyed Anderson is attested by his borrowing of several names, found in a series of tales and poems probably dating from 1922 or 1923. Anderson’s “En-ro of the Ta-an” and “Land of the Dying Sun” are echoed in Howard’s “Am-ra of the Ta-an” and “Land of the Morning Sun,” among several other borrowings. Howard’s first professionally published story, Spear and Fang written in 1924, shows remarkable similarity to Anderson’s first tale.
Howard wrote several stories or poems dealing, directly or indirectly, with Am-ra of the Ta-an. In one of these, of which only two pages have come to us, Am-ra has a dispute with a woman named Ah-lala. Both names are echoed in the future Kull stories, with Am-ra appearing in the first Kull story and a Lala-ah appearing in the longest of the unfinished tales. How Am-ra the Crô-Magnon could become Am-ra the Atlantean was explained by Howard himself in a 1928 letter to his friend Harold Preece:
About Atlantis–I believe something of the sort existed, though I do not especially hold any theory about a high type of civilization existing there–in fact, I doubt that. But some continent was submerged away back, or some large body of land, for practically all peoples have legends about a flood. And the Cro-Magnons appeared suddenly in Europe, developed to a high state of primitive culture; there is no trace to show that they came up the ladder of utter barbarism in Europe. Suddenly their remains are found supplanting the Neanderthal Man, to whom they have no ties of kinship whatever. Where did they originate? Nowhere in the known world, evidently. They must have originated and developed through the different basic stages of evolution in some land which is not now known to us.
The occultists say that we are the fifth–I believe–great sub-race. Two unknown and unnamed races came, then the Lemurians, then the Atlanteans, then we. They say the Atlanteans were highly developed. I doubt it. I think they were simply the ancestors of the Cro-Magnon man, who by some chance, escaped the fate which overtook the rest of the tribes.
All my views on the matter I included in a long letter to the editor to whom I sold a tale entitled “The Shadow Kingdom,” which I expect will be published as a foreword to that story–if ever. This tale I wove about a mythical antediluvian empire, a contemporary of Atlantis. (Selected Letters, 1923–1930, Necronomicon Press, 1989, p. 20)
Sadly, the letter to the editor has not survived. However, Howard’s “views on the matter” may be discerned in a story which had been rejected in March 1926 by Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales. A lengthy part of Men of the Shadows is devoted to early history and prehistory, and notably to Atlantis, Lemuria and the Crô-Magnons:
To those islands came the Nameless Tribe [i.e., the Picts]…they were the first Men…Then the Lemurians, the Second Race, came
into the northern land…Now the Atlanteans (Crô-Magnons) were the Third Race. They were physical giants, finely made men, who inhabited caves and lived by the chase…then from the North came the Celts, bearing sword and spears of bronze…And they were the Fourth Race. (Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, Del Rey, 2005, pp. 23–26)
The “great sub-races” Howard alludes to suggest he was familiar with the ideas of Helena Blavatsky and Theosophy, either having read the books or having heard about these theories from his father or a friend who was interested in occultism. The most important point of the letter (and of the Bran story) however, is the fact that Howard was convinced that there was a linkage between the Crô-Magnons and Atlantis, and that the latter was historical, an empire belonging to Earth’s past, not an imaginary one. As early as 1923 Howard had casually mentioned Atlantis as a historical empire, contemporary to Accad, in a letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith. The likeliest source for Howard’s idea of an Atlantean/Crô-Magnon connection is Lewis Spence, a British folklorist. Spence was convinced of the former existence of the continent of Atlantis and wrote several books in which he “proved” his theory. His The Problem of Atlantis (1924) and Atlantis in America (1925) may very well have influenced Howard. The identification of Atlantis as the source of Crô-Magnon man and his culture seems to have been original with Spence.
The Kull series was thus born at the time Howard discarded the entirely “historical” setting–i.e., Atlantis–in favor of one mixing the historical and the imaginary. This is why the first Kull story is also the last of the Am-ra the Atlantean tales. Both characters are very similar: Kull is “a counterpart of [Am-ra], except for the fact that he [i]s slightly larger–taller, a thought deeper of chest and broader of shoulder.” Kull is basically a character who wants to flee reality–his reality–in favor of the pursuit of what is presented as a dream in that first story, a country dreamed of, spoken of, but otherwise unknown: Valusia. When Howard dropped Atlantis for Valusia, he dropped Am-ra for Kull. In a nutshell, he stopped writing “historical” tales in favor of fantasy tales.
The name “Valusia” appears to be a Howardian coinage. It appears very early in the young author’s career in Khoda Khan’s Tale, an incomplete story dating from 1922 or 1923. In that tale, protagonist Frank Gordon is trying to locate an ancient African city, supposedly once inhabited by a strange race of white people. Gordon first discovers “a temple erected to the elephant,” quickly followed by another, fresher looking one, which he soon discovers to be much more ancient than the other:
It consisted merely of a stone wall, round in shape, with an opening at one place. It had no roof. In the center there was a great, carved serpent of stone, coiled on a stone pedestal which [was] decorated by carvings of other, smaller serpents. The stone wall was also decorated by snake-carvings. Gordon went over the ruins carefully. He seemed very much interested and slightly puzzled. “The Carthaginians did not mention another race,” said he, “yet the race that erected this snake-temple did not erect the elephant-temple we found at the edge of the swamp. They represent two distinct forms of architecture, so distinct that it is scarcely possible that the same race erected both temples.” (The Coming of El Borak, Cryptic Publications, 1987, pp. 47–48)
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)