Some of Howard’s creative magic, whether in the Bran stories or Conan’s Hyboria or any of the myriad other historical fantasies he produced, grows out of the freedom of his time to fill in the gaps of the historical record with imagination – wild speculation on Atlantean colonies and strange transpositions of race had not yet been put to rest by modern archaeology, a field more or less still in its infancy at the time. But that, believe it or not, is a good thing: for the Picts that captured Howard’s imagination are a mysterious people with a strange past rooted in lost continents, trans-world migrations, and civilizations long vanished. And yet Bran is, unquestionably, one of Howard’s major creations representing not only the best of what Howard was capable of producing, but also exemplifying deeply personal themes that would inform the entirety of Howard’s writing life.īran Mak Morn emerges out of Howard’s fascination with the Picts – but not the Picts of modern, sober archaeology – rather the Picts of turn-of-the-century pseudo-scientific conjectural anthropology, the sort of thing that was available for a young Howard to read.

Bran Mak Morn, last king of a dying race, is a hero that Howard spent fewer words on than Conan, Solomon Kane, and Kull, or even many of the somewhat lesser known characters from his historical and boxing stories, such as El Borak, Steve Costigan, or Brekenridge Elkins. Kull is perhaps the most well known ancestor of Conan for, after all, it was a Kull story that served as the basis for the first Conan tale, “The Phoenix on the Sword.” But all of Howard’s creations are different, as he was too good a writer to spin the same yarn twice – even when he directly rewrote one character’s tale into another – and all of his characters are informed by the age and circumstances in which they find themselves. As is only natural, they tend to look at Howard’s other heroes in terms of their relation to the Cimmerian, and look for those elements that later make their way into the much more famous stories of the Hyborian age.

Howard from the perspective of his most famous creation, Conan. Most new readers approach the work of Robert E.

Bran mak morn the last king