ROBERT E. HOWARD: ANATOMY OF A CREATIVE CRISIS

“Beyond the Sunrise” is the unofficial title afforded an unfinished Kull story that did not see print until over forty years after the author’s death. Its significance is due largely to the fact that it was the first of four widely differing attempts to continue the Kull series following the publication of both “The Shadow Kingdom” and “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” in Weird Tales in 1929.

Robert E. Howard starts the story off with a bored Kull sitting on his throne listening to a rather dull tale of the Valusian noblewoman, Lala-ah who has run off with her foreign lover leaving the nobleman she was promised to waiting at the altar. The barbarian king’s pride is piqued once he learns the foreigner insulted him behind his back. He then readily agrees to lead a posse to retrieve the noblewoman and restore his and his nation’s honor.

I was about as enthusiastic as Kull when I first started the story and thought the Atlantean was acting like a childish oaf for getting his nose out of joint just because a foreigner called him a sissy when he wasn’t around to defend himself.

Even with the weakest Robert E. Howard stories, the imagery he employs in crafting the tale redeems any failings. Howard waxes eloquent when Kull and his men visit neighboring kingdoms and the king stands upon a mountaintop overlooking the valley below and ponders the difference of the topography from his native Atlantis. Kull draws parallels on how the lay of the land is reflective of the endurance of its people.

Howard continues this introspective spell in having the king measure himself against the commander of his troops. Surprisingly, Howard has his hero find his own character lacking in a strict departure from the norms of the heroic genre. Kull subsequently reflects on the unfairness that his commander can rise no higher in the ranks because he is of foreign birth. Kull, himself a barbarian usurper to the throne, is also a foreigner and an illegitimate monarch to boot.

That Howard has drawn a deliberate parallel with the inequality of arranged marriages in the plight of the fugitive Lala-ah to the inequality of the rules limiting his commander’s station is beyond Kull’s understanding, but certainly not the reader.

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Robert E. Howard: Peering Behind the Veil of Life

“The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” is Robert E. Howard at his most poetic. His writing had made a quantum leap forward in quality compared with his earlier Kull stories as he transitions from working in familiar genres to blazing a trail none had attempted before him. More than his gift for well-turned phrases and imagery so powerful, it literally sears itself in the reader’s mind; Howard reaches for a depth of character and achieves a work that is both psychologically and philosophically rewarding. Sadly, as the author would later tell his friend, Clyde Smith that he was disappointed in the result and had resolved to never attempt anything so deep again.

The tale starts off with Kull, plagued with ennui and yearning for something more substantive than riches, power, and transient beauty. The brooding king rejects the company of loyal Brule, the Pict who won the king’s respect and friendship in “The Shadow Kingdom,” but foolishly takes the advice of an alluring Eastern female. In Howard’s world view (and in truth, a pulp convention of the day), the exotic female generally proves untrustworthy and the nameless beauty who appears at the beginning and the conclusion of “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” proves no exception.

The girl appeals to Kull’s desire for spiritual sustenance. She promises him that the wizard, Tuzun Thune possesses hidden knowledge of what was and will be and is able to converse with the dead. The allure of the occult is enough to send Kull, whose pagan faith in Valka is apparently as unfulfilling as his earthly riches, in search of the hidden knowledge promised by the Eastern wizard. Yet when Kull visits the house of Tuzun Thune, he finds the wizard interested in little more than verbally sparring with the barbarian king.

Just as Kull appears to tire of the wizard’s bantering, Tuzun Thune tempts him into gazing into his mirrors with the promise of wisdom for “mirrors are the world.” Kull gazes and is bewitched by his own reflection and is immediately confronted by the thought that his reflection might in fact be the real him and that he is only the reflection. This is more than just a passing primeval fear, but the recurring thought that keeps Kull mesmerized day after day even at the exclusion of viewing the distant prehistoric past or the far-flung future.

Kull is momentarily distracted to see the world map of the present radically altered in centuries to come. The wizard responds with what might be the author’s own code of existence,

“Time strides onward, we live today, what care we for tomorrow or yesterday? The Wheel turns and nations rise and fall; the world changes, and times return to savagery to rise again through the long ages….The nations pass and are forgotten, for that is the destiny of man….I brood not over the lost glories of my race, nor do I labor for races to come. Live now….The dead are dead, the unborn are not. What matters men’s forgetfulness of you when you have forgotten yourself in the silent worlds of death?”

Recognizing the barbarian’s fears, Tuzun Thune asks him the very thought Kull fears to voice, “…is it in truth you?” Kull expresses his deepest fear when he replies, “Which of us is the ghost of the other? Mayhap these mirrors are but windows through which we look into another world.” This is indeed the truth of fiction rendered in terms of pure poetry. As much as Kull may be Howard’s alter ego, so too is Tuzun Thune for it is the wizard that, like the author, draws readers into other worlds of both dream and nightmare and dares to make us question who we are and what is real.

Kull asks the question that man asks today as much as in centuries past, “Tell me, wizard who are wiser than most men, tell me, are there worlds beyond our worlds?” The wizard’s enigmatic reply links us back to the spiritual yearning that gripped Kull’s consciousness at the story’s outset, “A man has eyes, let him see, who would see must first believe.”

Howard’s father was intrigued by the writings of Madame Blavatsky and the author shared his father’s interest in Theosophy. Howard expresses this here by having Kull on the verge of astral travel when Tuzun Thune tells him (sounding exactly like a student of Theosophy, himself), “See and believe, man must believe to accomplish. Form is shadow, substance is illusion, materiality is dream; man is because he believes he is; what is man but a dream of the gods? Yet man can be that he wishes to be; form and substance, they are but shadows. The mind, the ego, the essence of the god-dream – that is real, that is immortal. See and believe, if you would accomplish, Kull.”

It is fitting that it is the noble Pict, Brule who rescues Kull from dissipating into astral nothingness and passing forever into the world hidden behind the mirrors. Brule rejects belief in the occult and shuns any sign of its reality. Kull recognizes the wisdom of this, but is haunted by having come so close to answering one of man’s eternal questions. There remains a lingering regret that he did not complete the experiment. It is also fitting that Howard, who would explore similar territory in “The Tower of the Elephant,” initially determined to avoid returning to theosophical stories in the future and yet as the later Conan adventure demonstrates, like Kull, Howard longed to peer behind the veil of this life and into the next.

Kull and the Quest for Identity

Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” is a remarkable advancement upon “Exile of Atlantis” and the “Am-ra of the Ta’an” fragments. Howard’s first published story of what will later be known as the Pre-Cataclysmic Age leaves behind the derivative world of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches to mine new territory in terms of character and setting as well as genre. Kull, the barbarian who has recently seized the crown and now must struggle to keep it, marks a significant break from both Howard and the fantasy genre’s past while continuing to build upon the age-old theme of the outsider as noble savage. Howard was hardly the first young man who felt a sense of kinship with such characters. It is not hard to imagine the aspiring young writer, alienated in Cross Plains, pouring his feelings into the exiled Atlantean who remains an outcast even after rising to the throne of Valusia.

The story opens with Kull making a proper royal entrance. Unsurprisingly, the barbarian king’s empathy rests not with Valusia’s finest archers and trumpeters, but with the mercenaries paid to act as foot soldiers – men who show the king little respect, but who demonstrate integrity for all their brash honesty and disdain for pretence.

This sets the stage for the introduction of Brule, the noble Pict destined to become Kull’s most loyal companion. While Brule enters the series as a figure of suspicion, Kull soon modifies his opinion of his character. Brule, like Kull, is a man of integrity. It is not hard to imagine Howard crafting his story through the eyes of his protagonist starting out with a prejudice against Brule only to have the Pict prove his loyalty. Howard the writer literally became Kull the character. This intense and unique identification between creator and creation is part of what gives Howard’s best work its strength for the author imparts to the reader his genuine surprise at unforeseen developments. The world of Howard’s stories was real to its author and this is what separates him from perhaps every other fantasy writer with the exception of Tolkien.


Kull agrees to dine with Ka-nu, the Pictish envoy grown fat and debauched from his years in the Valusian capital. Kull’s initial assessment of Ka-nu, as with Brule, is negative but circumstances again prove Kull (and thereby Howard) to be a rash judge of character for Ka-nu does behave with honor.

Tales of court intrigue were common at the time Howard wrote “The Shadow Kingdom.” The adventure stories of Alexandre Dumas, Anthony Hope, and Henry Bedford-Jones were among the staple diet of many young men and women. Howard broke with convention once again with this tale by having the duplicitous members of Kull’s court not only be likened to serpents, but actually be unmasked as serpents disguised as men. This wrinkle in the plot would be ridiculous in the hands of most writers. The difference is that Howard passionately believes in his fiction and consequently, the reader is willing to suspend their disbelief.

“The Shadow Kingdom” still inspires excitement in readers over eighty years since its publication when the story concludes with Kull vowing to hunt the Serpent-Men all over the world to destroy them once and for all. The tale which first introduced Kull to readers in 1929 was a long time coming for Howard who had taken Kull from supporting player in tribal dramas to a principled exile to an unlikely king on his arduous path to publication.

The quest to destroy the Serpent-Men is a conceit that would later inspire L. Sprague de Camp to expand the role of the Stygian sorcerer, Thoth-Amon and the cult of Set into a comparable recurring plot device in his revised and expanded Conan stories of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. That particular version of Howard’s more famous barbarian hero is one that rankles many purists today, but it is a vision de Camp borrowed from Conan’s predecessor and Howard’s original noble savage. The 1929 publication of “The Shadow Kingdom” ushered in the new era of Kull, exile of Atlantis and his alter-ego, Robert E. Howard, exile of Cross Plains.

Robert E. Howard, Exile of Cross Plains

The transformation of literary genres in the early twentieth century was marked by a series of intriguing parallels and recurrences. When Raymond Chandler, displaced as much in England as California, started down the mean streets of writing pulp fiction, he used an Erle Stanley Gardner story as his template. Chandler prepared a detailed synopsis of Gardner’s story and then re-wrote the story himself, comparing the results to the original. Chandler’s first published pulp story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” (1933) introduced the prototype for the hardboiled private eye who emerged six years later in Chandler’s landmark first novel, The Big Sleep in the form of Philip Marlowe. Likewise Chandler’s literary heir, Ross Macdonald, displaced as much in Canada as California, would use The Big Sleep as the template for his own first novel, The Moving Target (1949) and, in the process, introduced Marlowe’s successor, Lew Archer who would arguably represent the hardboiled detective realized to its full potential.
When Robert E. Howard, an outcast in his native Cross Plains, started down the path that would eventually give the world the genre now known as Sword & Sorcery, he used Paul L. Anderson’s story, “En-ro of the Ta-an” as the template for his various “Am-ra of the Ta-an” story drafts. Anderson would likely be a completely forgotten literary figure but for the efforts of Howard scholar, Rusty Burke. Even without Anderson as a reference point, Howard’s first attempts at creating a noble savage are instantly familiar to the modern reader as being works that are highly derivative of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, Pellucidar and Caspak novels. Just as the seminal Black Mask writers took the western and successfully brought it to an urban setting creating modern detective fiction in the process, so Burroughs and those he influenced took Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli tales and laid the foundation for modern myth-making by cross-breeding jungle adventures with the lost worlds tales of Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. Rider Haggard.

Howard’s early efforts with Am-ra distinguish themselves from mere imitation by their vivid and, at times, poetic descriptions of primitive life in all its terrible beauty. The Ta-an fragments culminate in the posthumously published story, “Exile of Atlantis” in which Am-ra is supplanted by Kull, originally conceived as a supporting character. This subconscious usurping of the central role is foreshadowed by the introduction of the character of Gaur who dogs Am-ra’s footsteps in an early formation of the storyline as an epic poem. Just as Howard’s Am-ra followed Anderson’s En-ro so Gaur (as Kull) was destined to overtake Am-ra. Perhaps in recognition of this transference, Howard would contrive for Kull to usurp the throne of Valusia. More significantly, Howard later rewrote the Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule!” as “The Phoenix on the Sword.” It is this rewritten version that introduces the character who will successfully establish the new fantasy sub-genre as Conan usurps the throne of Aquilonia and fills Kull’s sandals (and thereby fulfills Kull’s promise) as the noble savage turned king.

The parallels do not begin and end with usurpers in these early works, there is also Howard’s recurring theme of mercy killings. By far the most vivid scene in “Exile of Atlantis” is the climactic moment that decides Kull’s fate. He spies a nubile young woman being prepared for execution for marrying outside her tribe. Knowing he cannot save her life and wishing to spare her a more painful death, Kull hurls a dagger through her heart in an act of mercy that the victim herself welcomes. This act seals Kull’s fate and makes him an outcast among his own people. Interestingly, it is Am-ra who now follows Kull’s example just as Kull’s predecessor, Gaur once followed Am-ra’s example in the early Ta-an fragments. A similar action on the part of the hero can be found in the early Conan story, “The Tower of the Elephant” where Conan will likewise mercifully take the life of Yag-kosha, the elephant man to release him from his unending misery. This recurring theme of mercy killing is one that Howard himself would embrace when he ended his own life in the face of his mother’s death.

Howard’s suicide seems inevitable in light of the world-view contained in his stories. His fiction, like Chandler and Macdonald, is the work of the eternal outsider. The tragedy in Howard’s case is that his exile was only temporal and not physical. Had he left Cross Plains behind as his idealized selves, Kull and Conan had done with Atlantis and Cimmeria, he might have recognized that the unbearable loss of his mother would heal by gradations and unlike the nameless victim of small-minded prejudice in “Exile of Atlantis” or poor crippled Yag-kosha trapped in a cruel, unforgiving world in “The Tower of the Elephant,” Howard could and should have escaped the pain of his childhood home and learned to live a richer, fuller life where his gift for depicting the world in all its splendor and wanton savagery might have given him the peace and acceptance that he hungered for, but was denied in the twelve short years he gave himself as a writer. Clinical depression and creativity often walk the same path. Howard’s talent outlived him, but his own hour of the dragon concluded not with a noble mercy killing, but rather a tired resignation from one who fought a solitary war against a world he feared to conquer.