Robert E. Howard's story 'Red Shadows' introduces the character of Solomon L. Kane. But what does that mysterious middle initial stand for?
The first we know of this man is when we find Jean, the most desperate bandit unhung, nailed to a tree with his own dagger through his breast, and the letters S.L.K. carved upon his dead cheeks.
-- Robert E. Howard, ‘Red Shadows’
The L word
The short story ‘Red Shadows’ saw the first appearance in print of Robert E. Howard’s Puritan avenger Solomon Kane.[1] In that story, the character known as ‘the Rat’ recounts the various grisly deaths that his fellow outlaws have met at Kane’s hands. He describes how the bandit Jean was found dead with the letters S.L.K. carved into his face.[2] This is, I believe, the only time that we get a reference to Solomon Kane having a middle name, and it inevitably invites speculation about what that name might be.
If the L represents a second given name, then we can find a few possibilities in the historical record. Leonard, Lawrence, Lionel and Luke (together with their variant spellings) are well-attested names of the sixteenth century.[3] However, although these fit the character’s cultural background, I can’t help wanting a name that’s more dramatic.
Maybe Lancelot would fit the bill. It was used in England in the sixteenth century,[4] and fits with the knight-errant aspect of Solomon Kane’s character. In ‘Red Shadows’, Le Loup repeatedly refers to Kane as Galahad,[5] another of the legendary Knights of the Round Table. Le Loup is on the right track when he mocks Kane with that name, but I think that Lancelot, with his flaws, fits Kane better than Galahad (a knight so improbably pure that he ascended bodily into heaven).
Puritan passions ... for strange names
However, let’s not forget that Kane is a Puritan avenger, and some Puritan families of Kane’s era baptised their children with unconventional names. Although these unusual Puritan names were fairly rare,[6] it is possible that Solomon Kane might have been blessed with one.
Some Puritans christened their children with the more obscure Biblical names (as opposed to John or Thomas, which were ubiquitous in Elizabethan England), one example being Ezekiel.[7] Other Puritan names were exhortatory, expressing the parent’s wishes for how the child might conduct their life. Typical names of this type were Be-strong and Fear-not.[8] Perhaps Solomon Kane’s parents set him on his path by giving him a middle name such as Likes-killing-demons or Likes-fighting-evil, but these names are not attested in the historical record.
However, there are plenty of historical Puritan names that start with an L. The question is whether any of them seem suited to our fearless avenger. The name Lively[9] hardly fits with the dour Puritan that we know. Other names, such as Learn-Wisdom, Love and Love-well,[10] don’t particularly fit the impulsive and frequently brutal character. Neither does the name Live-well[11] really match Kane’s lifestyle.
More apt is the name Living,[12] which could be a reference to Kane’s resilience, and his survival of many hardships and adventures. Alternatively, Love-God[13] could be said to apply to Solomon Kane -- although, to my mind, the man is motivated more by anger towards evil and the lure of adventure than by the love of god. Two other Puritan names, Lament and Lamentation,[14] seem quite suited to Kane, with his life of hardships, of grim tasks and frequent injuries. With a name like Lamentation, how could he have been anything other than dour?
The Proverbs of Solomon
There is one other serious contender for Solomon Kane’s middle name: Lemuel.[15] This is a name that appears in the Bible, and the interpretation of the relevant passage is a subject of debate. It is unclear whether Lemuel is the correct reading of the word, and, if it is correct, who this Lemuel might be.[16] (The name is only found once in the Bible.) The author Jonathan Swift clearly thought that Lemuel was a valid name, as he gave it to the eponymous hero of his novel Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726.
Intriguingly, there is a long Rabbinical tradition that considers Lemuel to be another name for King Solomon.[17] Were Solomon Kane’s parents so enamoured of the Biblical Solomon that they gave their son not one but two of his names (or his given name and the epithet Lemuel)?[18] If so, it makes you wonder which qualities of that ruler they so admired. King Solomon is renowned for his great wisdom, as well as his wealth and power, although he had other qualities that would have been less appealing to the Puritans. (Later in his reign, Solomon committed idolatry and turned away from God.[19]) King Solomon was also reputed to be a great magician, who used his powers against the forces of evil -- although, unlike Solomon Kane, he preferred to control the demonic forces for his own ends, rather than destroy them.[20]
With both barrels
All of the speculation so far has been based on the assumption that Solomon Kane’s middle initial represented a second given, or Christian, name. However, it’s possible that it was the first part of a double-barrelled surname, in which case there are many possibilities: compared to the limited number of given names in use at the time, there was a much greater variety of surnames in Elizabethan England.
One type of surname was not inherited from a parent, but was a byname, a kind of nickname that was assigned to a person as a way of identifying him. Some of these bynames identified a person by their place of origin. In Kane’s case, plausible examples might be Langtree or Lee (places in Devon, Kane’s native county), or London. (The works of Jack London were an influence on Robert E. Howard’s writing, and Howard acknowledged him as one of his favourite authors.[21]) Another type of byname described a physical or behavioural quality of a person. For Solomon Kane, this might have been Long, as Kane was a tall man.[22]
However, bynames were normally used to identify a person who only had a given name and no inherited surname. Solomon already had the surname Kane, so it is unlikely that he would have needed an extra byname to identify him. That leads to the conclusion that if Kane’s middle initial did indeed represent the first part of a double-barrelled surname, then both parts must have must have been an inherited family surname. In that case, there is really very little to go on, other than the possibility that that name might have been of Celtic Irish origin, the same as Kane.[23]
Overall, I’m inclined to doubt that Kane has a double-barrelled surname. I would expect him to be referred to by his full surname, not just Kane, as is often the case in Howard’s stories. It could be argued that using both parts of his surname would have been unwieldy in prose, but I still think that Kane’s having two given names is a simpler solution than his having a double surname.
A landless man of Devon?
Having two given names was extremely rare in Elizabethan England, although it was more widespread in continental Europe at the time. Only a handful of examples of these double Christian names are known, and they are all found amongst the gentry, especially those born abroad.[24] That makes me wonder whether Solomon Kane was truly ‘a landless man’, as he says in ‘The Blue Flame of Vengeance’.[25]
After all, that same story makes it clear that duels were fought between men of rank, not the lower classes.[26] Yet Solomon Kane fought and killed Sir John Taferal in a duel, as he states in ‘The Moon of Skulls’.[27] Of course, it is possible that Kane had challenged Taferal, rather than the other way around, and that Taferal had chosen to accept the challenge (in the same way that Sir George Banway agreed to fight Jack Hollinster in ‘The Blue Flame of Vengeance’). Even if that were the case, though, ‘Wings in the Night’ reveals that other gentlemen have challenged Kane to duels in the past.[28]
Apart from Kane’s duel with Sir John Taferal, ‘The Blue Flame of Vengeance’ gives the impression that the Puritan is a friend of the Taferal family: he used to dandle young Marylin Taferal on his knee, and when she was kidnapped her brothers trusted Kane to search for her alone.[29] It is doubtful whether Lord Hildred Taferal and the rest of the family would have shown such trust and friendship towards a mere commoner, even one as remarkable as Solomon Kane.
Could Kane have belonged to a respected family among the Devon gentry? There is nothing in the stories that directly contradicts this. After all, a younger son might not have inherited any land. Alternatively, Kane might have chosen to give away his lands (perhaps to the church) before leaving England, or he may have lost them during the years spent roaming the world.
One last thing
While researching Puritan names, I stumbled across the wonderfully-named Hate-evill Nutter, a settler in New England in the 1640s.[30] I couldn’t help imagining a young Robert E. Howard including this name on a list of possible monikers for his Puritan hero (before finally crossing it out and writing Solomon Kane). After all, no one hates evil like Solomon Kane hates evil, and even his creator acknowledged that at times he went a little mad.[31]
1 Wikipedia (2016), “Solomon Kane”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Kane [accessed 16 November 2016].↩
2 R.E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, New York: Del Rey 2004, p. 34.↩
3 S. Smith-Bannister, Names and Naming Patterns in England, 1538-1700 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 191-2.↩
4 S. Smith-Bannister, Names and Naming Patterns in England, 1538-1700 (Oxford, 1997), p. 101.↩
5 R.E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, New York: Del Rey 2004, pp. 40, 41 and 54.↩
6 S. Smith-Bannister, Names and Naming Patterns in England, 1538-1700 (Oxford, 1997), p. 4.↩
7 C.W.E. Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (London, 1880), p. 45.↩
8 C.W.E. Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (London, 1880), pp. 159 and 161.↩
9 C.W.E. Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (London, 1880), p. 153.↩
10 C.W.E. Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (London, 1880), pp. 119, 137, 141, 163, 165 and 203.↩
11 C.W.E. Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (London, 1880), pp. 164 and 200.↩
12 C.W.E. Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (London, 1880), p. 170.↩
13 C.W.E. Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (London, 1880), p. 164, 165 and 200.↩
14 C.W.E. Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (London, 1880), pp. 163, 164, 174, 176 and 187.↩
15 In Proverbs 31:1. I suspect that Solomon Kane would have been most familiar with the Geneva Bible (published in 1560), which was the most popular English-language version of the book until the publication of the King James version in 1611. For more on the history of these different editions, see Wikipedia (2016, “Geneva Bible”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Bible [accessed 16 November 2016].↩
16 A good summary of the various interpretations can be found in C. Mariottini (2009), “Who Was King Lemuel?”, https://claudemariottini.com/2009/05/18/who-was-king-lemuel/ [accessed 16 November 2016].↩
17 For a summary of those publications supporting this interpretation, see Wikipedia (2016), “Lemuel (biblical king)", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemuel_(biblical_king) [accessed 16 November 2016]. The Rabbinical text known as the Avot of Rabbi Natan says ‘Six names were applied to Solomon; namely, Solomon, Jedidiah, Koeleth, Ben Iokoh, Ogur, L'muel’. (M.L. Rodkinson, The Babylonian Talmud, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/FullTalmud.pdf [accessed 16 November 2016].↩
18 The name Lemuel translates as ‘to God’ (as in ‘(devoted) to God’), or ‘for God’. (C. Mariottini (2009), “Who Was King Lemuel?”, https://claudemariottini.com/2009/05/18/who-was-king-lemuel/ [accessed 16 November 2016].)↩
19 Wikipedia (2016), “Solomon”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon [accessed 16 November 2016].↩
20 Spurious artefacts supposedly related to King Solomon were found in Jewish, Islamic and Renaissance magic, and have survived into modern occultism. For information on the Seal of Solomon, see Wikipedia (2016), “Seal of Solomon”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_Solomon [accessed 16 November 2016]. For the grimoire known as the Key of Solomon, see Wikipedia (2016), “Key of Solomon”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_of_Solomon [accessed 16 November 2016].↩
21 Wikipedia (2016), “Robert E. Howard”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard [accessed 16 November 2016].↩
22 In ‘The Blue Flame of Vengeance’, Kane is described as ‘inches taller than Hollinster who was considerably above medium height.’ (R.E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, New York: Del Rey 2004, p. 185.)↩
23 Wikipedia (2016), “Kane (surname)”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_(surname) [accessed 16 November 2016].↩
24 S. Smith-Bannister, Names and Naming Patterns in England, 1538-1700 (Oxford, 1997), p. 8.↩
25 R.E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, New York: Del Rey 2004, p. 186.↩
26 Randel tells Hollinster “Sir George is highly connected -- you are but the son of a retired sea-captain … Sir George need not have fought you at all. He might have claimed his rank and had his serving men flog you forth.” (R.E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, New York: Del Rey 2004, p. 183.)↩
27 R.E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, New York: Del Rey 2004, p. 122.↩
28 ‘Along that grim skyline dwelt some evil foe to the sons of men, and that mere fact was as much a challenge to the Puritan as had ever been a glove thrown in his face by some hot-headed gallant of Devon.’ (R.E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, New York: Del Rey 2004, p. 286.)↩
29 R.E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, New York: Del Rey 2004, pp. 126-7.↩
30 C.W.E. Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (London, 1880), p. 163.↩
31 This is especially true in some of the later stories, set in Africa. In ‘Wings in the Night’, Kane goes temporarily mad when the akaanas massacre the village he was trying to protect. As the creatures finish feasting on their victims, Howard describes how ‘Kane’s last vestige of reason snapped’. (R.E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, New York: Del Rey 2004, p. 312.) In ‘The Footfalls Within’, Howard tells of Kane’s sudden, infuriated attack on a group of slavers, as ‘Madness overcame the Englishman’. (R.E. Howard, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, New York: Del Rey 2004, p. 329.) One last last thing: yes, I do know that “nutter” had a different meaning in the seventeenth century. ;) ↩
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