Reading from Kull: Exile of Atlantis, Del Rey, 2006, pages 250-51

This heavy handed poem of six 12-line verses outlines the exile period of a taboo young hunter, Am-ra from a stone age tribe, as told by his skin-clad publicist, Gaur. It is story of alienation from the tribal hierarchy, exile, revolution and race war. Below are the bare bones

“Out of the land of the morning sun,

Am-ra the Ta-an came.

Outlawed by the priests of the Ta-an,

His people spoke not his name.”

“A slim, young warrior, Gaur

And he hated the high priest’s face.

Till at last with the spear he smote him,

And fled from the land of his birth race.”

“Into the land of the tiger,

There came an alien race,

Stocky and swart [1] and savage,

Black of body and face.”

“Back from the hunt came Am-ra

And he found the black men there.

More like apes than men were they

Furious grew he then,

For he would not share his country

With a band of black ape-men.”

At this early stage one can detect that Howard’s fiction would be grounded in racial concepts and steeped in race war, with the ultimate expression of this being Gods of the North, featuring Am-ra as an iron age warrior Conan prototype and in the Bran Mak Morn cycle. Conan, his most complete creation, lives and strives largely in a civilized world, an interloper from the barbarian race war zone of his birth, who judges men by deeds not race. Beyond the Black River, The Black Stranger, People of the Black Circle, and Red Nails, all later Conan stories, depict him closer to his savage roots, the place he would always gravitate to when in ultimate peril, just as the civilization he had risen within would one day be submerged by barbarian invasion.

1. Swart is an archaic term related to the German swartz for black and is the root for the English swarthy.