Dr Simon Reads... Appendix N Part Five: Edgar Rice Burroughs
Dr. Simon Reads
Appendix N: Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Of all the authors featured so far, ERB probably needs
the least introduction since at the very least people will have heard of his
most famous creation, Tarzan, if not some of his other characters and stories
such as John Carter of Mars, or The Land That Time Forgot, At The Earths Core,
and other films starring Doug McClure.
Born in Chicago in 1875, died 1950, most of ERB’s copious body of works spans the period between the beginning and end of the two World Wars. ERB doesn’t seem to have taken his writing too seriously as an art form, getting into it as a way of making money after seeing the kind of pulp nonsense that got published, and marketing his creations (especially Tarzan) cannily. According to his Wikipedia bio (never the most reliable of sources), he tried to see how lurid and histrionic he could make his stories and get away with it.
Appendix N suggests the Mars (Barsoom) series, the Pellucidar series and the Venus series. I got hold of a Collected Works ebook which contains a lot of Mars, a couple of Pellucidar, no Venus, the Caspak series, a chunk of Tarzan and some other one-off works, notably The Outlaw of Torn, The Monster Men and the Lost Continent. And, frankly, that is more than enough. I’m going to look at common aspects of his works as well as each series as a whole, more than individual books because ERB does a lot of recycling.
The Heroes
ERBs protagonists all tend to be Men of Action in the classic pulp style. Faced with a problem, they don’t stop to think or plan, they act, and this usually serves to drive the story forward as each action leads to a new situation to face. Sometimes they succeed (and ultimately always do), sometimes their forward movement gets them captured or stymied in some way, but always they act.
They fall into two broad categories; either they are civilised explorers facing a savage lost world, such as the Barsoom, Pellicidar or Caspak series, or they are Rousseau-esque mighty savages such as Tarzan or Number Thirteen in the Monster Men. If in the latter category, these characters generally turn out to have some kind of "civilised" (white European or American) heritage that gives them their superior intelligence and drive. In a twist on this, Jack aka Korak, son of Tarzan, is raised as a highly urbanised, civilised child but his father’s genes give him the capacity to survive in the jungle when he is abandoned there without training.
Beyond this, the characters tend to have little else in the way of personality. Most of them are shy with women in some form or another, but act chivalrously towards them, they generally show little compunction about killing enemies or acting ruthlessly, they combine aspects of Rousseau’s “noble savage” with Thoreau’s rugged individualism, representing a kind of male fantasy of the freedom to act as one sees without the censure of civilised rules or the restraint of women, but at the same time also recognising a need for a certain degree of honour and restraint towards the “weak”.
The Heroines
Conversely ERB’s female protagonists fall into two broad
camps. Either they are fainting maidens who need rescuing, or they are savage
wild women who need taming. This depends on the male protagonist – Tarzan and
Number Thirteen prefer the gentle civilised women, the protagonists of Caspak
and Pellucidar fall for warrior women. There are notable exceptions. Dejah
Thoris, Princess of Barsoom, falls somewhere in between, being a proud princess
in her own right but also needing frequent rescue by John Carter. By the time
of Chessmen of Mars, their daughter Tara is a much more capable and wilful
character. The love interest of Korak, son of Tarzan, is a character called
Meriem, a daughter of a French general kidnapped by Arabs, and she is arguably
as adept at jungle survival as Korak. Tarzan’s own Jane starts life as a
somewhat hapless victim, but during Beasts of Tarzan effects her own escape
(and ERB reminds us that, as an American, she’s no slouch with a rifle). Only
later, in Tarzan the Terrible, does she become the skin-clad jungle queen as
portrayed by Maureen O’Sullivan.
The other main role for women in ERB’s works are as High Priestesses or Queens (or both) of lost civilisations. Quite often these desire the hero, as with La the Priestess of Opar and Tarzan, or Phaidor the daughter of Matai Sheng who is jealously in love with John Carter. Sometimes these characters have a final redemption, sometimes not.
Race
ERB has a, shall we say, troubled relationship with race,
especially in the Tarzan stories. In the earlier tales “the blacks” are
portrayed as cartoonish savages, with bone piercings, filed teeth, all dancing,
drumming cannibals given to displays of eye-rolling superstitious cowardice.
The original Tarzan story also features Jane’s maid, Esmerelda, the alternative
“lawdy lawdy” stereotype given to malapropisms and panicked fainting.
That said, ERB does also grant the Waziri tribe some dignity and bravery, and the character Mugambi is given some agency of his own, despite mostly being relegated to a sidekick of Tarzan. In the later Jungle Tales of Tarzan, recounting Tarzan’s formative years, the local tribesfolk are given a full gamut of humanity and despite some lingering uncomfortable colonial sentiments, come across as much more fully realised as characters.
To a certain extent also ERB plays to stereotypes of other cultures too. Arabs are untrustworthy slave dealers but also have strong rules of hospitality. Many of his villains are shifty Russians or Belgiums, but also amusingly in Tarzan the Untamed (called in my anthology Tarzan Unchained) is a venal Englishman that ERB refers to ironically as “The Honourable Smith” when he is anything but. The same story also features what is probably ERB’s most notoriously egregious bout of racism where Tarzan engages in a bit of WWI wish-fulfillment of mercilessly slaughtering German soldiers (“the hated Bosche”). This also features a supposed German spy, Bertha, whom Tarzan has a hard time reconciling with her being a decent person but it’s okay in the end, she’s a British double agent and so she’s allowed to be a decent person after all.
In the non-terrestrial stories things are less clear-cut. Although the “black martians” are a terrible lot led by an evil false goddess, they are not necessarily meant, as with all of the Martian races, as being a particular equivalent of humans, and once free of their “goddess” Issus they become decent citizens of Mars. Meanwhile the savage green Martians, as exemplified by Tars Tarkas, may have a brutal culture but they also become good friends and allies of John Carter.
Finally, The Lost Continent presents an interesting twist. It supposes a Europe devastated to wilderness by WWI where America has isolated itself between forbidden longitudes in the Atlantic and Pacific, and where a technologically advanced Africa has conquered the primitive and savage white Europeans. Which is not, interestingly, played as being a bad thing.
I don’t know what ERB’s own opinions on race were, but to be honest it looks to me like he was at first playing up to stereotypes both of his time and of the genre but later exploring the idea that folks is folks, and coming to be a lot more sympathetic and less stereotypical. It does make some of his work awkward reading from a modern perspective, but I have a hard time accusing the man of particular prejudice and ill-feeling on his behalf.
For the last part of this I’m going to look broadly at each series and suggest elements that either were, or can be, adapted to RPG use.
Tarzan
The most obvious elements that can be taken from the
Tarzan stories are the various Lost Civilisations. The city of Xuja in Tarzan
the Untamed is one good example. It lies in a hidden canyon deep in the desert,
the male inhabitants are all insane (with comically spiked hair), they have
tame lions (which they worship) and also worship the parrot and the monkey.
Inevitably, also, they are led by a beautiful high priestess who needs new
blood to combat the inbred insanity of her people (spoiler alert: she wants
Tarzan).
This pattern is matched in the city of Opar, referenced in several Tarzan stories. Opar is a lost colony of Atlantis, again with insane inbred males and a beautiful Queen La, High Priestess of the Shining God. Jewels and gold abound, as does human sacrifice. My favourite, and the most well-developed at least in the stories in my collection, is Pal-Ul-Don in Tarzan the Terrible, home of the tailed hominids the Pithecanthropes (with various stages of civilisation) and the Gryfs, carnivorous ceratopsian dinosaurs. There are some great moments, especially involving the cliff-side habitation of one of the pithecanthrope tribes, fighting techniques for people with prehensile tails, and the hilarious moment when Jane’s kidnapper, mentally fraying at the edges, finally goes completely insane and drifts around naked in a small boat proclaiming himself to be a god. Best of all it comes with a glossary of the constructed language that ERB uses throughout.
Pellucidar
In my collection there are only two of the Pellucidar
stories; At the Earth’s Core (turned into a film with Peter Cushing and Doug
McClure) and Pellucidar, but these are enough to get the measure of the
setting. Aside from the Hollow Earth setting in the first place, the most
interestingly usable elements are the Mahar, psychic pterodactyl people and
their brutish slave race, the Sagoths. The Mahar and their Sagoths rule over
the hapless humans, using them in ritual feasts, and as slaves for their
underground cities. But the Mahar are an all-female race that use “secret
science” to reproduce. The film is enjoyable nonsense with shocking special
effects, but also follows the story quite closely and could also be used for
inspiration.
Caspak
All three “Caspak” stories are included in my anthology – The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot (both also turned into films starring, naturally, Doug McClure), and Out of Time’s Abyss. The setting, the island is Caspak, is a cliff-ringed Lost World of prehistoric creatures and people, with a kind of hyper-evolutionary tier where the dinosaurs exist at one end of the island, moving up through extinct mammals to people of increasing stages of sophistication (with the pinnacle, the Galu, being somewhat Caucasian in appearance – see Race above). The Lost World style setting and the strange metamorphic evolution of the inhabitants could be used as elements, but perhaps the best concept is the bird-man Wieroo, a pale, flying mutant offshoot of humanity that live on an city on an island in the central sea of Caspak, raiding the sub-humans with their ability to fly. There are some great alien concepts to their city that could be adapted to, such as the sewer-pits where they dump corpses from their violent and cruel society.
Barsoom
There are lots of elements that could be used from the
Mars stories, the flying ships that sail on light not being the least of the
fun concepts. The various secret civilisations are also a good source of
inspiration – the White Martians that use legends of a sacred river to entrap
slaves, and the Black Martians that prey upon them under the guidance of their
false goddess Issus, or the Yellow Martians with their lodestone pillar that
traps flying ships, not to mention the entertainingly brutal society of the
Green Martians. Then there are the Khaldane, creatures consisting of a head and
stubby tentacles that ride another creature that is all body but no head (you
may be reminded of Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). I’m inclined to
suspect that the Carnivorous Ape and perhaps the Girallon are inspired by the
fearsome White Apes of Barsoom, ubiquitous foes for John Carter. Oh, and the
disturbing Plant Men as well, they’re fun.
Miscellany
There are, then, quite a few settings and creatures that could be adapted from ERB stories. Many featured creatures are fairly simple – dinosaurs, dinosaur-like creatures and lions. Lots and lots of lions. There’s even a creature (I forget the name) in the Barsoom stories that gets referred to as a Barsoomian Lion (as I recall Thuvia Maid of Mars can tame them). I forgot one other pretty cool character that could be stolen whole-cloth, Bukawai the insane shaman from Jungle Tales of Tarzan who has at his disposal two barely tamed hyenas.
Beyond that, the endless captures, escapes and close shaves are a good source of plotting ideas for pulp-ish campaigns. The spirit of ERB (among others) is evident in classic adventure modules like X1 Isle of Dread, I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City, D2 The Shrine of the Kua-Toa, and B4 The Lost City.
You aren’t going to glean any great wisdom from ERB’s writings, and there’s a lot of recycling of plot elements across all his settings, but they’re also about as pure an example of pulp adventure as you could hope to find.
This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.
This time around, I have reached the works of:
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Born in Chicago in 1875, died 1950, most of ERB’s copious body of works spans the period between the beginning and end of the two World Wars. ERB doesn’t seem to have taken his writing too seriously as an art form, getting into it as a way of making money after seeing the kind of pulp nonsense that got published, and marketing his creations (especially Tarzan) cannily. According to his Wikipedia bio (never the most reliable of sources), he tried to see how lurid and histrionic he could make his stories and get away with it.
Appendix N suggests the Mars (Barsoom) series, the Pellucidar series and the Venus series. I got hold of a Collected Works ebook which contains a lot of Mars, a couple of Pellucidar, no Venus, the Caspak series, a chunk of Tarzan and some other one-off works, notably The Outlaw of Torn, The Monster Men and the Lost Continent. And, frankly, that is more than enough. I’m going to look at common aspects of his works as well as each series as a whole, more than individual books because ERB does a lot of recycling.
ERBs protagonists all tend to be Men of Action in the classic pulp style. Faced with a problem, they don’t stop to think or plan, they act, and this usually serves to drive the story forward as each action leads to a new situation to face. Sometimes they succeed (and ultimately always do), sometimes their forward movement gets them captured or stymied in some way, but always they act.
They fall into two broad categories; either they are civilised explorers facing a savage lost world, such as the Barsoom, Pellicidar or Caspak series, or they are Rousseau-esque mighty savages such as Tarzan or Number Thirteen in the Monster Men. If in the latter category, these characters generally turn out to have some kind of "civilised" (white European or American) heritage that gives them their superior intelligence and drive. In a twist on this, Jack aka Korak, son of Tarzan, is raised as a highly urbanised, civilised child but his father’s genes give him the capacity to survive in the jungle when he is abandoned there without training.
Beyond this, the characters tend to have little else in the way of personality. Most of them are shy with women in some form or another, but act chivalrously towards them, they generally show little compunction about killing enemies or acting ruthlessly, they combine aspects of Rousseau’s “noble savage” with Thoreau’s rugged individualism, representing a kind of male fantasy of the freedom to act as one sees without the censure of civilised rules or the restraint of women, but at the same time also recognising a need for a certain degree of honour and restraint towards the “weak”.
The Heroines
The other main role for women in ERB’s works are as High Priestesses or Queens (or both) of lost civilisations. Quite often these desire the hero, as with La the Priestess of Opar and Tarzan, or Phaidor the daughter of Matai Sheng who is jealously in love with John Carter. Sometimes these characters have a final redemption, sometimes not.
Race
That said, ERB does also grant the Waziri tribe some dignity and bravery, and the character Mugambi is given some agency of his own, despite mostly being relegated to a sidekick of Tarzan. In the later Jungle Tales of Tarzan, recounting Tarzan’s formative years, the local tribesfolk are given a full gamut of humanity and despite some lingering uncomfortable colonial sentiments, come across as much more fully realised as characters.
To a certain extent also ERB plays to stereotypes of other cultures too. Arabs are untrustworthy slave dealers but also have strong rules of hospitality. Many of his villains are shifty Russians or Belgiums, but also amusingly in Tarzan the Untamed (called in my anthology Tarzan Unchained) is a venal Englishman that ERB refers to ironically as “The Honourable Smith” when he is anything but. The same story also features what is probably ERB’s most notoriously egregious bout of racism where Tarzan engages in a bit of WWI wish-fulfillment of mercilessly slaughtering German soldiers (“the hated Bosche”). This also features a supposed German spy, Bertha, whom Tarzan has a hard time reconciling with her being a decent person but it’s okay in the end, she’s a British double agent and so she’s allowed to be a decent person after all.
In the non-terrestrial stories things are less clear-cut. Although the “black martians” are a terrible lot led by an evil false goddess, they are not necessarily meant, as with all of the Martian races, as being a particular equivalent of humans, and once free of their “goddess” Issus they become decent citizens of Mars. Meanwhile the savage green Martians, as exemplified by Tars Tarkas, may have a brutal culture but they also become good friends and allies of John Carter.
Finally, The Lost Continent presents an interesting twist. It supposes a Europe devastated to wilderness by WWI where America has isolated itself between forbidden longitudes in the Atlantic and Pacific, and where a technologically advanced Africa has conquered the primitive and savage white Europeans. Which is not, interestingly, played as being a bad thing.
I don’t know what ERB’s own opinions on race were, but to be honest it looks to me like he was at first playing up to stereotypes both of his time and of the genre but later exploring the idea that folks is folks, and coming to be a lot more sympathetic and less stereotypical. It does make some of his work awkward reading from a modern perspective, but I have a hard time accusing the man of particular prejudice and ill-feeling on his behalf.
For the last part of this I’m going to look broadly at each series and suggest elements that either were, or can be, adapted to RPG use.
Tarzan
This pattern is matched in the city of Opar, referenced in several Tarzan stories. Opar is a lost colony of Atlantis, again with insane inbred males and a beautiful Queen La, High Priestess of the Shining God. Jewels and gold abound, as does human sacrifice. My favourite, and the most well-developed at least in the stories in my collection, is Pal-Ul-Don in Tarzan the Terrible, home of the tailed hominids the Pithecanthropes (with various stages of civilisation) and the Gryfs, carnivorous ceratopsian dinosaurs. There are some great moments, especially involving the cliff-side habitation of one of the pithecanthrope tribes, fighting techniques for people with prehensile tails, and the hilarious moment when Jane’s kidnapper, mentally fraying at the edges, finally goes completely insane and drifts around naked in a small boat proclaiming himself to be a god. Best of all it comes with a glossary of the constructed language that ERB uses throughout.
Pellucidar
Caspak
All three “Caspak” stories are included in my anthology – The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot (both also turned into films starring, naturally, Doug McClure), and Out of Time’s Abyss. The setting, the island is Caspak, is a cliff-ringed Lost World of prehistoric creatures and people, with a kind of hyper-evolutionary tier where the dinosaurs exist at one end of the island, moving up through extinct mammals to people of increasing stages of sophistication (with the pinnacle, the Galu, being somewhat Caucasian in appearance – see Race above). The Lost World style setting and the strange metamorphic evolution of the inhabitants could be used as elements, but perhaps the best concept is the bird-man Wieroo, a pale, flying mutant offshoot of humanity that live on an city on an island in the central sea of Caspak, raiding the sub-humans with their ability to fly. There are some great alien concepts to their city that could be adapted to, such as the sewer-pits where they dump corpses from their violent and cruel society.
Barsoom
Miscellany
There are, then, quite a few settings and creatures that could be adapted from ERB stories. Many featured creatures are fairly simple – dinosaurs, dinosaur-like creatures and lions. Lots and lots of lions. There’s even a creature (I forget the name) in the Barsoom stories that gets referred to as a Barsoomian Lion (as I recall Thuvia Maid of Mars can tame them). I forgot one other pretty cool character that could be stolen whole-cloth, Bukawai the insane shaman from Jungle Tales of Tarzan who has at his disposal two barely tamed hyenas.
Beyond that, the endless captures, escapes and close shaves are a good source of plotting ideas for pulp-ish campaigns. The spirit of ERB (among others) is evident in classic adventure modules like X1 Isle of Dread, I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City, D2 The Shrine of the Kua-Toa, and B4 The Lost City.
You aren’t going to glean any great wisdom from ERB’s writings, and there’s a lot of recycling of plot elements across all his settings, but they’re also about as pure an example of pulp adventure as you could hope to find.
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