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The First Barbarian
by Lin Carter
From the Introduction
by Roy Thomas
Last issue, Lin Carter - himself the co-author of several Conan and Kull tales as well as the creator of the popular Thongor and Jandar of Callistro series - explored the Dunsanian, Lovecraftian, and Clark-Ashton-Smithian roots of Robert E. Howard's fantastic fiction. And now, Lin likewise examines REH's creation of the entire sword-and-sorcery genre in the pages of Weird Tales pulp magazine in the 1920's and 30's starting with the Atlantian outcast who became King Kull - !
The first genuine story of sword-and-sorcery which Robert E. Howard ever published was The Shadow Kingdom, which appeared in the pages of the legendary Weird Tales in the issue dated August 1929.
We don't know exactly when Howard wrote the story, but it was most likely sometime during 1928. The idea of writing a story of heroic fantasy laid in barbaric, gorgeous, exotic kingdoms of the forgotten dawn age may have come to him through his friendship with Clark Ashton Smith. Smith's first Atlantis story, The Last Incantation, was published in Weird Tales in the issue of June 1930; however, from a record of completed stories found among Smith's papers, we know that he actually wrote the tale during September of 1929. We have no way of knowing how long before that the story was fermenting in his imagination, and, lacking relevant correspondence, we can't establish beyond all doubt the fact that Smith may have mentioned to Howard that be was cooking up a yarn, to be the first of a cycle, set in the last age of Atlantis.
To me it seems very likely that the first Atlantis stories of Smith and Howard were written with full knowledge of what the other writer was planning to do. Why else should Howard have established the dawn age of Atlantis for his period, unless he knew that his friend planned to employ the twilight of that same civilization for some new stories of his own, and did not wish to impinge on his fellow-writer's domain?
At any rate (leaving the question of who influenced whom to future scholars of the genre), when Howard stumbled upon the notion he sat down and wrote an entire cycle of stories in one white-hot burst of enthusiasm. Kull was a savage, magnificent warrior from the barbaric wilderness of primitive Atlantis; he fled to the mainland of Thuria (Europe and Africa, which were still joined together in one continent in these pre-Cataclysmic times) and warred and intrigued and battled his way to the throne of Valusia, an ancient, pre-Atlantean kingdom, now falling into gorgeous decadence. All these things have happened before The Shadow Kingdom actually begins, of course, but then The Shadow Kingdom is the second story in the King Kull sequence, not the first.
In all, Howard wrote or began at least thirteen narratives laid in the world of King Kull. Three of these were left unfinished, and a fourth is a heroic poem; so we can conjecture that what Howard actually sent off to Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, was a batch of some nine stories. Wright accepted The Shadow Kingdom for his August 1929 issue, and another yarn, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, for the issue following it, and rejected all the others.
Editor's Note:On the other hand, Glenn Lord - in his piece in Savage Tales #1 - feels that only the published stories were submitted to Weird Tales, and that the series may have been originally aimed at Argosy and Adventure. -RT
Looking back on the incident, it's difficult to figure out why the King Kull stories were so rudely rejected. Granting that some of them, such as Exile of Atlantis and The Striking of the Gong, are so slight as to be scarcely more than sketches, still others like By This Axe I Rule! and Swords of the Purple Kingdom are fine examples of Howard's work at this period, and very good stories indeed, filled with vigorous strokes of color and told with exciting narrative gusto. Wright was unpredictable in such matters, and regularly rejected stories, even stories by H.P. Lovecraft, without rhyme or reason. Disheartened by his failure to sell the cycle, Howard did no further work on the three unfinished stories, Wizard and Warrior, Black Abyss, and Riders Beyond the Sunrise, and these three, together with the seven completed stories, were stuck on the shelf and stayed there. It was not until many years after Howard's death that Glenn Lord, the agent for his estate, discovered the manuscripts and passed them along to me. I rewrote or completed them and the entire cycle eventually got into print as a book called King Kull, which Lancer Books published in 1967.
The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune is a slender, poetic, moody sort of story - much more the sort of thing Clark Ashton Smith might have written, or even Lovecraft, during his early Dunsanian period. But The Shadow Kingdom is a different matter entirely - robust, violent, bloody, filled with rip-roaring action, eerie mystery and sensational discoveries, it is one of Howard's most vigorous and successful stories. It seems to me completely fitting that the history of sword-and-sorcery begins with so memorable a saga of fantastic adventure.
On the surface, it must be admitted that the issue of Weird Tales dated August 1929 was distinctly second-rate, if not actually a flop. We are accustomed, in these benighted days, to envisioning Weird Tales in its golden age through rose-colored spectacles; each and every issue (we fancy) was a roster of unforgettable masterpieces, contributed by a pantheon of immortals.
The real thing, however, is depressingly different. So it was, at least, with the August issue. Most of the stories which appeared in that issue neither you nor I have ever heard of. Edith M. Almedingen had a yarn, and so did John Horne, and W. C. Morrow and someone with the rather unbelievable name of Lois Lane. The cover spot was given over to Mildred Gleason Prochet's translation of The lnn of Terror by the French author Gaston Leroux. There was a story in that issue by Bassett Morgan titled, in an ungainly fashion, Demon Doom of N'yeng Sen, and an article by Alvin F. Harlow. Hardly a line-up to set your eyes sparkling with enthusiasm, is it?
Not counting the Leroux story, which was a reprint anyway, the only recognizable names in the whole issue were that of the minor English master, E. F. Benson, present with a story called The Hanging of Alfred Wadham, and the omnipresent August Derleth, who seems to have had something in virtually every issue of the magazine. His effort for August was a forgettable, mediocre story called Old Mark.
You can see what I mean, then, when I say that it is only in retrospect that we think of the August 1929 Weird Tales as sort of milestone, since it contained the first real sword-and-sorcery story ever published. Had it not been for Kull, the issue would have been quite unimportant.
It would be nice if I were able to say that the publishing of The Shadow Kingdom created an immediate sensation, and was instantly recognized as the first story in a brilliant new genre of fiction.
But nothing could be further from the truth. The letters published in the next few issues praise, as often as not, the stories by Benson and Leroux. Howard comes in for words of praise, of course, but hardly the torrent of excitement we expect in hindsight. No one at the time seems to have realized just what he had done.
What, exactly, had Howard accomplished with the creation of sword-and-sorcery - and what precisely is sword-and-sorcery, anyway?
In the first place, Howard welded together three different kinds of story into one. He took the Clark Ashton Smith sort of yarn laid in fabulous, glimmering dawn kingdoms of magic and sorcery, and the Lovecraftian horror tale of prehuman, eldritch evil, and grafted them onto the swashbuckling heroica of Harold Lamb and Rafael Sabatini and the Talbot Mundy of Tros of Samothrace fame. The Shadow Kingdom serves up an equal share of the kind of thrills and fun we expect from each of these three very different kinds of fiction. The seams are invisible; the welding is perfect; the three kinds of story merge together flawlessly.
And he gives us a vision of the world of prehistoric legend such as none we have ever read before. Not just a tale of Atlantis - there have been hundreds of stories about Atlantis, some good, some fair, some awful - but of his Atlantis. An Atlantis still a howling savage wilderness, in an age when primordial, mythic, forgotten civilizations (the Seven Empires of Valusia, Grondar, etc.) are crumbling into decay. An Atlantis we have never vicariously visited before, in an age of which we have never even dreamed.
And the story is one headlong, thrilling surge of narrative action that leaves you breathless and holds you spellbound. When he found his true medium, as he finally did with this great story, Howard achieved a pulse-pounding excitement, an utter realization of mood and atmosphere and scene, that makes him what he finally became - the last, and one of the greatest, of the masters of the pulp adventure yarn.
Tuzun Thune, which followed in the September issue, was a let-down from the heights of mood and tension and eerie mystery the first King Kull story attained. The readers who did like The Shadow Kingdom could not help but be disappointed. It is interesting to speculate whether or not they looked forward to future issues of Weird Tales with considerable excitement, anticipating the return of King Kull in another story that would live up to the spectacular standards of imagination and entertainment set by the first.
If so, they were to be disappointed. For King Kull never returned to the pages of Weird Tales in another solo story (though he did guest-star in the Bran Mak Morn tale Kings of the Night in November 1930). Nine years later, in 1939, he did make a sort of reappearance in one of Howard's poems called The King and the Oak, but never again in story form.
It was to be thirty-eight years before the remaining King Kull stories were discovered in manuscript, edited and completed, and finally published.
Howard continued writing at a tremendous rate; story after story flowed from his battered old Underwood. But seldom in the years that followed did he again reach the high-water-mark of heroic adventure he had achieved with The Shadow Kingdom.
Deep within himself, he was aware that his true fictional medium lay in the mysterious world of prehistoric antiquity, with its barbarian warriors, exotic princesses, bandits and barons and buccaneers. He hungered to explore crumbling ruined cities of ancient evil, to cut his way through roaring battlefields, to penetrate the murk of savage jungles, to sing his epic song of kings and sorcerers and champions.
Four years after writing the King Kull stories, he found his way back to the world of legend. He wrote a story called The Phoenix on the Sword.
The hero of that story was a man named Conan.
