Formerly published as ‘Dark Eyes Dreamed,’ revised and expanded

Reading from pages 79-81 of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, from Del Rey, 2005

Unpublished in his lifetime, A Song of the Race demonstrated Howard’s ongoing obsession with the fate of the slain tribes whose remnants often settled North America and formed much of its racial heritage.

It consists of 12 verses of four lines each, and evokes a sense of time and being lacking in much of his other verse. His use of a female bard invokes the great antiquity of the mythic race and serves him well—as it does in most of his top stories on barbarism—to juxtapose a feminine woman with a hyper-masculine man, achieving deep character contrast. The woman serves well as an allegory for the survival of a small swarthy tribe despite the tide of events sweeping on in its inhuman scale.

Below are quoted verses 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 11

“High on his throne sat Bran Mak Morn

When the sun-god sank and the west was red;

He beckoned a girl with his drinking horn,

And, ‘Sing me a song of the race,’ he said.”

“Her eyes were as dark as the seas of night,

Her lips were as red as the setting sun,

As a dusky rose in the fading light,

She let her fingers dreamily run

“‘First of the race of men,’ she sang,

‘Far from an unknown land we came,

From the rim of the world where mountains hang

And the seas burn red with the sunset flame.’”

‘An image of bronze, the king sate still,

Javelins of crimson shot the west,

She brushed the strings and murmured thrill

Swept up the chords to the highest crest.”

“‘As ye were first in the mystic past

Out of the fogs of the dim Time,

So shall the men of your race be last

When the world shall crumble,’ ran the rhyme.”

“Into the silence her voice trailed off,

Yet still it echoed across the dusk,

Over the heather the night-wind soft

Bore the scent of the forest musk.”

The best verse is the twelfth and last, evoking Howard’s sense of Time, as it so often was, conjoined with his sense of the character’s bloodline, just as the scenic imagery that so luridly tinged the day and unhinged the night of his heroes loomed horrific, most often at dusk.