Donn Othna in “The King’s Service”
Saturday, March 27, 2010
posted by Keith Taylor
I announced in my first post (fanfare of trumpets, there) that back in the early 1980s I had the honour, and pleasure, of working with the then-treasurer of SFWA, Andrew J. Offutt, on a couple of novels featuring the fifth-century Robert E. Howard hero, Cormac Mac Art. In our novels The Tower of Death and its sequel, When Death Birds Fly, we harked back from 490 to 486, when Cormac and his Danish pal, Wulfhere the Skull-Splitter, were still outlawed pirates just about everywhere. The first novel took them to the Suevic kingdom in north-western Spain, or Galicia, which neatly enough, was once a Celtic land. North-western Spain was very likely the orginal homeland of Erin’s Sons of Mil.
Those Gaels got around.
The REH fragment, “The King’s Service,” had made me wonder if Cormac and Wulfhere, fifth-century reivers, ever encountered the protagonist of “Service”, the British prince, Donn Othna. After all, Cormac more than once used the alias “Partha mac Othna.” Did he know him? Or had he at least heard of him?
