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Post by Bartholmew Quarrels on Jun 1, 2018 17:50:05 GMT -5
Mu and Lemuria figure into some of Howard's earliest yarns, like Men of the Shadows, The Shadow Kingdom and "The Isle of Eons" fragment. "IoE" is quite interesting because REH kept coming back to it, rewriting it over a span of several years (something he very rarely did). In that fragment we encounter "facts" about Howard's Thurian Age that we find nowhere else. We can also see Howard's evolving views regarding Mu and Lemuria (the histories of which are major concerns in that story).
As I'll show in future posts, "Mu", as REH used the concept, was a very new thing when he began using the "lost Pacific continent" as a background/setting within his yarns. The "Lemuria" concept had been around for about a century, but Howard radically redefined it for his stories. It would appear his concepts of both landmasses evolved somewhat over the 1925-1932 time-period.
Howard, in his "The Hyborian Age" guideline, had this to say about the Lemurian Isles:
The barbarians of the [Thurian] age were the Picts, who lived on islands far out on the Western Ocean, the Atlanteans, who dwelt on a small continent between the Pictish islands and the Thurian continent, and the Lemurians, who inhabited a chain of large islands in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Sorry Lin Carter (and Helena Blavatsky). No "Lemurian continent".