Robert E. Howard frequently refers to Solomon as a “wanderer,” as in the most well-known, and probably best, description of the character, from “Red Shadows”:
“You-who are-you?” her words came in gasps.“Naught but a wanderer, a landless man, but a friend to all in need.” The gentle voice sounded somehow incongruous, coming from the man.
In the earlier stories (earlier in chronology; Howard wrote “Red Shadows” first) set in Europe, Kane appears as a kind of Puritan superhero, but he cannot find his purpose. It ultimately drives him to Africa, where he begins to find himself. His adventures and experience throw his beliefs into question, and we see Solomon grapple with a world altogether more ambiguous and nuanced than the harsh, monochromatic outlines of black and white he finds in Europe. Though an Englishman, Solomon sums up an American mythos of where the country came from:
As we’ve been taught by the gods of our copybooks, the Puritans founded the first distinctly American colony, looking for religious freedom and creating a society distinct from the more typical Virginia colonial settlements. Kane might be an Englishman, but he was the sort of Englishman who would become an American: an expert swordsman and pistol-shot, a righter of wrongs, an explorer of new frontiers stalking terra incognita in his black clothes and slouch hat with a blade of Toledo steel in his scabbard, pistols at his belt. Tall and wolf-lean, grim and measured of voice, he was a proto-cowboy in hip-boots and cape, a plain man in a time of ruffed frippery.[1]
I agree, and I would take it farther, because the Columbian crisis threw two worlds together. From the European point of view, the New World offered a fresh start, new hope and new opportunities. Our campaign, beginning in 1610, takes place 20 years before John Winthrop would give his famous sermon about the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “City Upon a Hill,” but the general sentiment certainly existed. As I usually do, I see this as a matter of ecological relationship. As William Catton put it in his book, Overshoot:
Discovery of the New World gave European man a markedly changed relationship to the resource base for civilized life. When Columbus set sail, there were roughly 24 acres of Europe per European. Life was a struggle to make the most of insufficient and unreliable resources. After Columbus stumbled upon the lands of an unsuspected hemisphere, and after monarchs and entrepreneurs began to make those lands available for European settlement and exploitation, a total of 120 acres of land per person was available in the expanded European habitat—five times the pre-Columbian figure!Changelessness had always been the premise of Old World social systems. This sudden and impressive surplus of carrying capacity shattered that premise. In a habitat that now seemed limitless, life could be lived abundantly. The new premise of limitlessness spawned new beliefs, new human relationships, and new behavior. Learning was advanced, and a growing fraction of the population became literate. There was a sufficient per capita increment of leisure to permit more exercise of ingenuity than ever before. Technology progressed, and technological advancement came to be the common meaning of the word “progress.”
...
Most of the people who were fortunate enough to live in that age misconstrued their good fortune. Characteristics of their world and their lives, due to a “limitlessness” that had to be of limited duration, were imagined to be permanent. The people of the Age of Exuberance looked back on the dismal lives of their forebears and pitied them for their “unrealistic” notions about the world, themselves, and the way human beings were meant to live. Instead of recognizing that reality itself had actually changed—and would eventually change again—they congratulated themselves for outgrowing the “superstitions” of ancestors who had seen a different world so differently.
From the European perspective, the world suddenly opened up, and the stories of Solomon Kane focus on those empty spaces in the map, where any kind of wonder (or horror) might still dwell. But this also suggests something of the nature of our Wanderer, as well. Europe, at the time, must have seemed like hell. People died of old age in their 30’s and 40’s. The Black Death struck a few times during the span of Kane’s wanderings, and famine, war, torture and violent death marked regular parts of life. When Europeans encountered American Indians, they marveled that people could look so strong, healthy, tall, long-lived or clean. Your average European had never taken a bath in his life; many Indian tribes positively preened over their appearances. Charles Mann provides a stark contrast between the two in his descriptions in 1491, a book which simply demolishes many of our misconceptions about pre-Columbian Indian life.
In short, Solomon Kane wanders because he cannot find his place in overpopulated, polluted Europe. Most of the early colonists seem driven by the same desire: to escape a life of misery and squalor in Europe.
How does this connect with someone like me, trying to rewild, a process that positively despises wanderlust and preaches the importance of, as Kirkpatrick Sale used the term, querencia?[2] As the quote above suggests, Kane’s wanderings, pushing him ever over the next frontier, make him a prototypical American. In our national mythology, we value the frontier spirit and the wanderer. We make him a hero, like Solomon Kane. Simply repudiating this will do us little good; that myth strikes too deep into our mythology and psyche at this point. Instead, we need to see it through and reconcile that idea, creating a new mythology. My proposition simply insists that our story has not finished. Yes, when you see your home destroyed, you wander. But wandering must remain a temporary state. You wander to find a new home. So Solomon’s story did not properly finish. I think you can see a hint of it in the last Kane story, Robert E. Howard’s poem, “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming”, but at the poem’s end, the Wanderer finds that he still cannot rest in his beloved Devonshire. He still has no connection to the land of his birth; he may remember it fondly, but it has never become his home. So his wanderings begin again, and will continue on. Kane never knows what drives him, but ultimately, the drive comes from having no land to call his own.
That wanderlust comes from Kane’s mythic core as the prototypical American, because the American experience has come from that wandering. Europeans migrated to the New World to escape the increasing horrors of the Old, but they brought with them such prejudices and hatreds that they could not become native,[3] and so, though we’ve lived here now for five centuries, we still look to the frontiersman and the wanderer as our heroes, because we still haven’t come home.
For a short time in my youth, I live in Virginia, near Jamestown, but we’ve begun rewilding to western Pennsylvania. That journey illustrates not only our own personal and family journey, but in some way echoes a good deal of the American experience, and the American mythology that we’ve grown up in. The campaign begins with Jamestown and the lost colony of Roanoke, with Virginia Dare and the beginnings of English life on Turtle Island, but it quickly draws the heroes into the interior of the deep Virginia Wilderness. This follows the path of many of the Solomon Kane stories, but it also draws the story through our own lives personally, though our national mythology, and ultimately brings them to the important places of our own locale: the Elder Peaks, the Serpent Mound, the Place of the Ponkies, the Three Rivers. The heroes begin as wanderers who have lost their homes, seeing them destroyed, laid waste, or turned to ruin; they wander to find a new home, a new place they can connect to. Solomon Kane can begin them along that journey, but the challenge for our heroes will lie in finally closing the loop and completing that story, by finding a new home and becoming native to it.
Comments