Showing posts with label Picts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Picts. Show all posts

Saturday, February 5, 2011

The Picts and the Lost IX Legion : Realism vs. Sword & Sorcery Representations

  • Who were the Picts? The mystical Picts were iron-age Caledonians, the indigenous people of Scotland. Labeled barbarous, the tribes were never conquered by the Romans; instead, they were eventually isolated by Hadrian's Wall. Picts consistently influence fantasy tales, including many Arthurian legends, Howard's Bran Mak Morn, Arthur Machen's Litte People, and Kuttner's Pikht's of Atlantis. This alone makes their aura sufficient to work with, but my fascination lies with their name since Picti means 'colored people' in Latin. Julius Caeser's documentation (de Bello Gallico ~ 45AD) indicates that the local Picts marked their bodies with vitrum before going to battle, though many think they were painted with woad (a blue dying plant akin to indigo). The Legio_IX_Hispana is a roman legion that mysteriously disappeared ~120 AD.
  • The Pict are appearing in films more frequently, though not in a mystical context:
  1. In 2004, they appeared in the Historical-Fiction-Action movie King Arthur in which Guinevere is portrayed as a Pict (played by Kiera Knightley); I recommend the Director's cut which includes short, but worthy extra scenes fleshing out Arthur's motivations.
  2. The Centurion 2010: This movie explicitly tackles the mystery of the missing IX Legion, and also blames the Picts. Olga Kurylenko
  3. The Eagle (2011): Obviously, I haven't seen this yet, but the trailers indicate a slant toward another pseudo-historical/non-sorcery representation of the Picts. 
  4. Hammer of the Gods (2013): This brutal Viking movie depicts the Picts as cannibalistic.   

Guinevere is a Pict in King Arthur

Centurion Pict

A wild Pict attacks in The Eagle
Vikings are captured & tattooed by Picts in Hammer of the Gods
  • For the mystical “Sorcery” representation of the Picts, you will either:
  1. Need to pick up R.E.Howard's stories (short pulp stories written ~1930 and compiled in 1969) or Karl Wagner’s Legion From the Shadows (1988)
  2. ...or hope that the forthcoming Bran Mak Morn movie actually is produced ...and remains "true" to Howard's depiction
R E Howard's Brank Mak Morn

Wagner's Legion from the Shadows



Frazetta Cover art
  • R.E. Howard's Bran is less famous as Conan, but is a similar hero in many ways. Bran is arguably REH's darkest character, and David Weber did a fine introduction of him in Bran Mak Morn (1969 Bean compilation):
“Of all Robert E. Howard's characters, Bran Mak Morn may be the least known. After all Howard is the author who brought us Conan, Kull the Conqueror, and Solomon Kane. Yet in a sense, Bran and his Picts are more important to Howard's world than any of his characters, including Bran's ancestor Brule. The brooding darkness which clings to virtually all of Howard's heroic fantasy is nowhere stronger than in the case of Bran Mak Morn, last king of the oldest race-an alien among his own degenerating people, set apart by a pure bloodline they no longer share, who knows his entire race is going down into the dark no matter what he does. Yet for all his awareness of the inevitability of the Pict's doom, Bran refuses simply to submit to it. He fights it tooth and nail, as he downs his Roman and Norse enemies. However hopeless his future, all he asks of fate is the chance to meet it on his feet and fighting. ii


•Bran Mak Morn, King of the Picts, assumes epic stature as he is often not the primary protagonist in the tales but a iconic force overseeing the action; in The Dark Man, Bran had been deified in a stone effigy, thus allowing him to participate in the tale and realize the looming warrior-muse that peered over Howard's shoulder and inspired his weird accounts of dark heroes. Below, from the Dark Man, the hero Black Turlough fights to save his beloved Moria from her Viking kidnappers and Howard literally captures his vision of his muse:
And over all towered the Dark Man. To Turlough's shifting glances, caught between the flash of sword and ax, it seemed that the image had grown - expanded - heightened; that it loomed giant-like over the battle; that its head rose into the smoke-filled rafters of the great hall; that it brooded like a dark cloud of death over these insects who cut each other's throats at its feet. Turlough sensed in the lightening sword-play and the slaughter that this was the proper element of the Dark Man. Violence and fury were exuded by him. The raw scent of fresh-spilled blood was good to his nostrils and these yellow-haired corpses that rattled at his feet were sacrifices to him. iii

•If there is any bridge between Howard's work and Lovecraft, it is Bran and his Picts. Lovecraft and Howard had extensive conversations about the Picts and their historic origins. As Bran and his Picts constitute a majority of Howard's 'weird' sword & sorcery landscapes, they resonated with me.  Karl Edward Wagner is worth mentioning here. He constructed a convincing novel length pastiche of Bran Mak Morn called Legions of the Shadows (1976). He was also a well respected horror writer and anthology editor and, like his predecessors, had a fascination with art, which is demonstrated in his Kane story Dark Muse and his short story Sticks (1974). Although I enjoyed the extended insight into Bran Mak Morn's world, I still felt the need to build on the Pict's connection to divine art. 

•I needed to populate Lords of Dyscrasia, and what better civilization to extrapolate from than the Picts, the 'colored' aborigines of the haunted isles of England? There is a subtle reason Picts appeal to me: their evolution in fiction and myth has paralleled that of the artistic dwarf culture. The subterranean and artistic nature of the stereotypical dwarf has always appealed to me. Dwarves are the fantastical representation of demiurges, workers of the chaos of the universe, transmuting the nothingness and divinity of ether in material substance. In Norse tradition, the dwarves of Nidavellir lived in caverns working magical forges. These Norse myths mingled their way into the fairy tradition of the England, in which elves, dwarves, and fairies seem to descend from outcast natives that sought refuge underground. The precise cultural identity of the Picti is quite complicated, and Lovecraft influenced Howard's writing by educating him on the influence of Mongoloid cultures.i


•i Howard, R. E. (2005). Bran Mak Morn The Last King. New York, N.Y., Del Rey Ballantine Books. p327

•ii Howard, R. E. (1996). Introduction, Bran Mak Morn. Riverdale, NY, BAEN. p ix

•iii Howard, R. E. (1931). The Dark Man. Weird Tales, Popular Fiction Publishing