Robert E. Howard wrote a good deal about the Picts. He mentioned them in his tales ofConan, Kull, and, naturally, Bran Mak Morn. The Picts are also mentioned in several short stories where they do not play a large role. He may have been enamoured with them for personal reasons, believing he was connected by blood. Howard’s interest in Picts may also have been spurred on by the poem A Pict Song by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was a favorite of Howard and probably influenced the El Borak stories. It looks like A Pict Song also influenced Howard’s The Song of a Mad Minstrel, particularly the first two stanzas.
A Pict Song
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| Rudyard Kipling |
I am the worm at the root, I am the thief in the night.
I am the rat in the wall, the leper that leers at the gate;
I am the ghost in the hall, herald of horror and hate.
I am the rust on the corn, I am the smut on the wheat,
Laughing man's labor to scorn, weaving a web for his feet.
I am canker and mildew and blight, danger and death and decay;
The rot of the rain by night, the blast of the sun by day.
I warp and wither with drouth, I work in the swamp's foul yeast;
I bring the black plague from the south and the leprosy in from the east.
I rend from the hemlock boughs wine steeped in the petals of dooms;
Where the fat black serpents drowse I gather the Upas blooms.
I have plumbed the northern ice for a spell like Frozen lead;
In lost grey fields of rice, I have learned from Mongol dead.
Where a bleak black mountainstands I have looted grisly caves;
I have digged in the desert sands to plunder terrible graves.
Never the sun goes forth, never the moon glows red,
But out of the south or the north, I come with the slavering dead.
I come with hideous spells, black chants and ghastly tunes;
I have looted the hideen hells amd plundered the lost black moons.
There was never a king or priest to cheer me by word or look,
There was never a man or beast in the blood-black ways I took.
There were crimson gulfs unplumbed, there were black wings over a sea,
There were pits where mad things drummed, and foaming blasphemy.
There were vast ungodly tombs where slimy monsters dreamed;
There were clouds like blood-drenched plumes where unborn demons screamed.
There were ages dead to Time, and lands lost out of Space;
There were adders in the slime, and a dim unholy Face.
Oh, the heart in my breast turned stone, and the brain froze in my skull--
But I won through, I alone, and poured my chalice full
Of horrors and dooms and spells, black buds and bitter roots--
From the hells beneath the hells, I bring you my deathly fruits.
