In
Robert E. Howard’s The Little People
(1970), the protagonist reverts to a prehistoric Celtic tribesman at the sight
of his sister being harassed by the “spawn of Hell” near a Druid ruin. In People
of the Dark (1932), the narrator knocks himself out by falling down some
rocky steps. He regains consciousness as
an early Conan—before he obtained his credentials as ‘the Barbarian”. In Howard’s The Children of the Night (1931), an accidental blow to the head
with an ancient flint mallet transforms John O’Donnel into the murderous
Aryara, a blond haired, blue eyed Aryan
tribesman. In the latter two stories, the
concussion is accompanied by vivid, bloody scenes of carnage and mayhem, as
racial memories of epic battles are relived.
The
basic principle seems to be that a traumatic event or mild concussion is enough
to ignite prehistoric racial animosities and even ancestral personalities in an
otherwise educated, civilized individual.
Behind the rational eyes lies a brain seething with genetically latent
hatred for ‘the other’. In these stories
this ‘other’ is a humanoid race of creatures with “stunted bodies..gnarled
limbs…snake like beady eyes…grotesque, square faces with their unhuman features…”
The creatures live in caverns and tunnels beneath the English moors. As with H.P. Lovecraft’s ghouls, this devolved,
subterranean race is capable of interbreeding with respectable surface humans,
leading to unfortunate results later on.
The Children of the Night begins with a
gathering of friends. They are in a
study filled with occult books and ancient artifacts. The men are well educated, professorial types
whose primary interest seems to be skull and jaw structure, and the connection these
features have with racial distinctiveness.
“The Mediterraneans were as long-headed as the Aryans; would admixture
between these dolichocephalic peoples produce a broad-headed intermediate type?”
one of the men passionately asks. And so
on.
There
is some Lovecraftian discussion of ancient books that are present in the study—Von
Junzt’s Nameless Cults, for example—and
the survival of secret cults that worship Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, and the
like. But this is a digression from the
focus of the story, which is race. The narrator goes on to classify his friends
according to racial category: “Each of the
six of us was of the same breed—that is to say, a Briton or an American of
British descent.” But Ketrick, the
seventh individual was not. John O’Donnel,
the narrator, describes Ketrick in this way:
“…to
me the man always seemed strangely alien.
It was in his eye that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and
slightly oblique. At times, when one
looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman’s…I
remember Professor Hendrik Brooler once remarked that Ketrick was undoubtedly
an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and distant ancestor
of Mongolian blood—a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family showed
such traces…As for the man himself, this defect of his eyes, if it can be
called a defect, is his only abnormality, except for a slight and occasional
lisping of speech…”
Alert
readers will immediately identify Ketrick as probably a mongrel descendent of the
reptilian subterranean race described above.
He is the member of a minority.
While
wielding an ancient flint hammer in the study, Ketrick accidentally knocks O’Donnel
out cold with it—which seems awfully suspicious.
While unconscious, O’Donnel has a vision of an ancient skirmish in which
he is eventually overwhelmed by the evil ‘children of the night’, but not
before bludgeoning and hacking several of them to bits. When he awakens, he attempts unsuccessfully
to kill his fellow guest, Ketrick. He is
now O’Donnel, but also Arayara, a
prehistoric Aryan warrior. Both
personalities are now active and combined into one individual.
The
epilogue of the story is the most chilling part. O’Donnel’s experience does not bring greater
understanding, wisdom or peace, although he says that it ‘opened my eyes’. Rather, the narrator outlines a deterministic
Aryan racial theory that ensures his
kind will always be at bloody war with their
kind: “…the brand of the serpent is upon
him…” At the end of the story, O’Donnel intends to
keep faith with his tribe, hunt Ketrick down, and kill him. There is almost an Old Testament echo
here: “So you shall purge the evil from
your midst.” (Several sections of Deuteronomy, for example.)
The
story is remarkable, coming as it does near the outbreak of hostilities leading
to the Second World War. What we would
consider nonsensical racial ‘science’ was dismayingly popular on both sides of
the Atlantic, leading to horrible violence and oppression. Howard and his contemporaries certainly
breathed this air in the early thirties.
To be fair, Howard does not seem so concerned to rank or denigrate
different racial or ethnic groups as H.P. Lovecraft often does. His focus seems to be on the grim notion that
racial tensions are ancient, enduring and unavoidable, because in the
blood. The view is profoundly
conservative. Amid the blood and dashed
skulls it is nature, not nurture,
that wins.
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