King Kull Fights Postmodernism and Wins
Before Conan, Robert E Howard wrote about another throned barbarian, Kull. The stories weren’t as refined as Conan, but they were clever, original, a little more introspective, and philosophically prescient.
Take, for example, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune. It opens with Kull on his throne, suffering some kind of existential boredom about being a king.
“They moved before him in an endless, meaningless panorama: men, women, priests, events and shadows of events; things seen and things to be attained. But like shadows they came and went, leaving no trace upon his consciousness, save that of a great mental fatigue. Yet Kull was not tired.”
Awesome.
But then, a slave girl with a cheeky grin suggests he seek out a great wizard (with a great name), Tuzun Thune, who knows the secrets of life and death.
Off he goes to see Mr. Thune, but when he arrives, the wizard gets all cryptic about life and tells him to look in a mirror. And so Kull looks in a mirror and sees his reflection, pondering its significance. After a time, poor Kull starts to wonder where the reflection goes when he’s not standing in front of it.
“Mayhap these mirrors are but windows through which we look into another world. Does he think the same of me? Am I no more than a shadow, a reflection of himself-to him, as he to me? And if I am the ghost, what sort of a world lives upon the other side of this mirror?”
Poor Kull. Soon he’ll be dreaming about butterfly dreams.
But it gets worse. He starts neglecting his kingly duties. People start to talk, but he doesn’t care. He’s lost his grip on what’s real. Is he the reflector or the reflection?
Kull decides to find out. He stares and stares at the mirror, drawing closer to the world beyond, but just as he’s about to slip through, BAM! In comes his companion Brule, a bastion of pomophobia, and smashes the mirror. Kull snaps out of his daze and sees Thune dead on the ground, blood dripping from Brule’s sword.
Good ol’ Brule had the truth of it, see. The wizard, who was evidently evil, wasn’t casting spells or throwing fireballs, he was just filling Kull’s mind with postmodernism, hoping he would be so engulfed in pondering meaningless drivel that he would just disappear!
In the end, Thule’s house of mirrors becomes a shunned place, a “prison of the souls of men,” and Kull seems to get over his bout of madness. Even then, he still can’t shake the taint of Thune’s witchery; he’ll never be free of the funk of postmodernism.
“For there are worlds beyond worlds, as Kull knows, and whether the wizard bewitched him by words or by mesmerism, vistas did open to the kings gaze beyond that strange door, and Kull is less sure of reality since he gazed into the mirrors of Tuzun Thune.”
Full text here. You can also find it in Shadow Kingdoms, alongside a bunch of Howard’s other non-Conan stories.
