Druids in the Pulps are almost always bad guys. The mysterious nature of the druidic magic, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, makes it a natural for the villains to use against your heroes. The Romans wiped out the Celtic priests (especially those at Anglesey) to help in conquering the people of Britain.Because of this we don’t really know much about them except what the Romans wrote. The Druids did not use writing but learned everything orally so we can’t read their books. Druids have been mistakengly associated with everything from Stonehenge to witchcraft.
There are exceptions to the villain rule, of course. Bran Mak Morn, the Robert E. Howard character, is not afraid of Gonar’s magic. In “The Kings of the Night”, it allows him to draw King Kull from the past. In “The Worms of the Earth” Bran has to seek older and more terrible powers to destroy the Romans. Howard based much of that series on Talbot Mundy’s Tros of Samothrace in Adventure.
I suppose it won’t surprise you that most of these stories come from Weird Tales. Also not surprising is that several of them are Cthulhu Mythos stories. Some feature characters who are druids, some have enemies that are druids, while others only have a smattering of druidic power.
“The Rats in the Walls” by H. P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, March 1924) has mysterious sounds haunting a house. HPL uses the druidic history of England for spice:
Piecing together the tales which Norrys collected for me, and supplementing them with the accounts of several savants who had studied the ruins, I deduced that Exham Priory stood on the site of a prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must have been contemporary with Stonehenge.
Oddly, no druids or rats appear in the story.
Tros of Samothrace by Talbot Mundy (Adventure, Beginning February 10, 1925 to February 28, 1926). The opening segment tells us of Tros’s allies against Rome:
The five men who sat by the rock were talking with interruptions, two of them being foreigners, who used one of the dialects of southern Gaul; and that was intelligible to one of the Britons who was a druid, and to the woman, who seemed to understand it perfectly, but not to the other men, to whom the druid had to keep interpreting.
I wrote about Tros and Howard here.
“The Shadow on the Moor” by Stuart Strauss (Weird Tales, February 1928) is technically pre-Druidic, but there are still people out on those moors dancing at night. When Jarvais investigates Gilbert’s disappearance he gets the same grisly end. He should have stuck to writing.
“The Black Druid” by Frank Belknap Long (Weird Tales, July 1930) has Celtic superstition including the Little People. Who is that man with the pointed ears? Long used druidic magic again for “The Druid’s Castle” in Fantastic Fears #3, September 1953.
“The Druid’s Shadow” by Seabury Quinn (Weird Tales, October 1930) has de Grandin and Trowbridge at it again. Reincarnation of druidic ancestors will answer here. Quinn portrays the ancient Druids as evil. (Not much fun if they were good guys, I suppose.)
“Kings of the Night” by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, November 1930) features Gonar the druid-like priest of the Picts. Howard peppers all his Bran Mal Morn stories with such but the influence is better seen in an early piece that wasn’t published until 1970. “The Little People” (Coven 13, January 1970)
“The Holiness of Azerdarac” by Clark Ashton Smith (Weird Tales, November 1933) is set in Smith’s strange version of France called Averoigne. This tale is considered a Cthulhu Mythos story because Azerdarc calls on the Old Ones and Iog-Sotat (Yog-Sothoth). Time travel allows him to see what the Druids really got up to. And with whom!
“The Druidic Doom” by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, April 1936) has Sir Charles messing with old Druid stones. He really shouldn’t have raise it! Bloch will appear again with druids three more times.
“The Dark Isle” by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, May 1939) is different in that it is set during the time of the Druids and Romans. Vincius takes on the terrors of Angelsey. This might be the closest he ever came to writing a Sword & Sorcery tale.
“Power of the Druid” (Strange Stories, June 1940) has Nero the Emperor face the power of the Druids. This was went to one of Weird Tales‘ short-lived rival, Strange Stories.
“Onslaught of the Druid Girls” by Ray Cummings (Fantastic Adventures, June 1941) is a good example of a writer co-opting a word for its strangeness. On Earth’s second moon, we have all kinds of Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff happening including “Druid-Girls”, each and every one of them a virgin. The Druids were all male so “druid-girl” is an oxymoron. As to their virginity…. But hey, when you get to Zonara, all bets are off!
“Notebook Found in a Deserted House” by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, May 1951) is another great Cthulhu Mythos tale and Bloch’s last druidic example. This tale is a first-person narration of the strangeness going on in an old house. Bloch ties the tree-worshiping Celts to the tree-like monsters of the Mythos. He also suggests that some of the Druids may have fled the Roman slaughter to relocate in North America.
Pulpsters in Paperback
The Pulps died in the 1950s, but the writers who filled them with exciting adventures went onto paperbacks and other forms of publishing. Two that stand out are Gardner F. Fox (who wrote plenty for Planet Stories as well as the comics) and Manly Wade Wellman (who wrote even more).
The Druid Stone (1967) by Simon Majors (Gardner F. Fox) is a horror novel set in modern times.
The Old Gods Waken (1979) and The Hanging Stones (1982) by Manly Wade Wellman are two novels in his Silver John series.
Conclusion
The Druids in these Pulps stories don’t fair well in the PR department. The stately and wise Merlin, who is a Druid if you ever met one, is not represented here. The Fantasy novels of Evangeline Walton, like those of Mundy’s Tros, offer a sympathetic view of the old religion before the Romans came. We will have to wait for the Fantasy boom of Tolkien and the 1960s before things really change. Gandalf will do much to repair the reputation of beardy dudes with staves in the coming decades. For the Pulpsters, and the Lovecraft Circle in particular, all those druidic figures are just the early version of crazy cultists we encounter so often in Call of Cthulhu scenarios.
