The Rest Is History - 332: King Solomon's Mines

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

In 1885, H. Rider Haggard’s brother offered him a wager: five shillings if he could write a book half as good as Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”. By the end of the year, Haggard had penned a novel that would become the foundational text of the lost world literary genre. “King Solomon’s Mines” was one of the first English adventure novels set in Africa, a story brimming with treasure, bravery and romance, featuring all-action hero Allan Quartermain and his gang. Haggard’s work would inspire the likes of Conan Doyle, H.P Lovecraft, and many more.  Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss H. Rider Haggard and his literary legacy. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. At length the air began to grow grey with light, then swift golden arrows came flashing across the snow, and at last the glorious sun peeped up above the lava wall and looked in upon our half-frozen forms and upon Ventvergel, sitting there amongst us, stone dead. No wonder his back had

felt cold, poor fellow. He had died when I heard him sigh, and was now almost frozen stiff. Shocked beyond measure, we dragged ourselves from the corpse, strange the horror we all have of the companionship of a dead body, and left it still sitting there, with its arms clasped round its knees. By this time the sunlight was pouring its cold rays, for here they were cold, straight in at the mouth of the cave. Suddenly I heard an exclamation of fear from someone, and turned my head down the cave. And this was what I saw. Sitting at the end of it, for it was not more than twenty feet long, was another form, of which the head rested on the chest and the long arms hung down. I stared at it, and saw that it too was a dead man, and what was more, a white man.

So that, Dominic, is a thrilling moment from King Solomon's Mines, which was published in 1885, written by Henry Ryder Haggard. And basically, even if you've never read it, you will be familiar with it, because it was one of the best-selling novels of the Victorian age, continues to sell in bucket loads, massively, massively influential on everything from Tolkien to computer games. And I'm very familiar with your methods. You are a firm believer, are you not, Dominic, that it's the mass market kind of middle-brow literature that is a much better guide to the spirit of an age than, say, the great literary classics? I think that's, yeah, absolutely, Tom.

King Solomon's Mines is not just an enormously influential kind of text of empire, of the British empire and of Britain's involvement in Africa. But I would argue it's a foundational text of modern popular culture, actually. So, I mean, Indiana Jones films, countless video games. If you've ever played Tomb Raider or Uncharted, if your children have played those games, they are playing versions of King Solomon's Mines. It's enormously important. So can you just give a very quick outline of the plot? We'll kind of look at the details later, but just kind of, because it's basically, it's a quest plot, isn't it? Set in Africa. It is, exactly. So King Solomon's Mines is set in late 19th century Africa. Our hero is Alan

Quatermain. We'll go on to talk about him. He's a hunter, he's an explorer, he's an adventurer. And he teams up with a sort of little fellowship, Tom, I think it's fair to say. And they set off over this extraordinary, fantastical landscape. So incredibly parched desert, isn't it? Exactly. And they arrive at this mountain, and that's where the scene of the cave with the frozen white man. Exactly so. Exactly.

They are heading into the blank spaces of the map. Again, something we'll come back to a little bit later. And they're in search of King Solomon's treasure mines. They believe that there's treasure there. There are also two other quests that are kind of overlapping quests, as in other more familiar, more modern quest stories. One of them is looking for his brother who has gone missing and one of their party tom is in disguise isn't he he may or may not be the lost king of a lost kingdom yes so this is very exciting they they go on all

these adventures they they find this this lost kingdom terribly um wicked and formidable supervillain who is the king of it, who they fight. And an incredibly sinister witch, isn't that? Gagool, who I'm sure we'll be talking about. Yes, absolutely. They discover the mines, they discover the caves, but of course they go down into the caves and they're trapped. And there's all kinds of sort of terrors and threats down in the caves. And would you believe it? They emerged triumphant at the end of the story. I don't think I'm giving away the end by saying- Not too big a spoiler there.

No, that the heroes live to fight another day. Dominic, just one thing. One thing that really struck me when I reread it, because I read it as a child, hadn't read it since. It has the primal scene of white explorers coming to a distant land and impressing the natives with their knowledge of eclipses. So that is such a familiar trope. It appears in so many kind of adventure stories. And I checked, and this is the first time it's used, apparently. So that kind of gives an indication of how many... It's a massive cliche breeder. Yes, it is. In fact, almost every chapter... When you read King Solomon's Minds Now,

so I reread it, as you did for this this having originally read it as a child and thought well it was brilliant as a child and um when you read it now almost every chapter seems stocked full of stereotypes and cliches but often that's because it's the first time yeah they were so it's all the scenes of them going into the mines and the caves and they discover dead bodies which everybody has seen if they've ever seen a hollywood It's King Solomon's Mines that creates that. Although having said that, of course, there are a lot of cliches that are bred of the Imperial Age that are liable to seem offensive now. So we'll probably come to that as well. Anyway, so Ryder Haggard, who is he? Right. So we're a history podcast, not a lit crit podcast so let's root king

solomon's minds in history so henry rider haggard is a classic kind of child of empire somebody who goes out to seek his fortune in empire so he's the eighth of 10 children born to what's his name william haggard who claimed descent from a danish nobleman i read that's right yeah squat they were they're a family of kind of squires in norfolk and what's quite interesting about haggard is haggard not unlike his greatest fan who's jrr tolkien so you probably spotted many of the listeners the similarities with the lord of the rings in the in the story so tolkien was a massive fan of haggard haggard like tolkien from the very beginning has a sense of kind of loss and nostalgia and he's backward looking because

his family are one of those families who owns a lot of land in kind of rural England and with thanks to free trade and the the import of kind of cheap foreign food and stuff they their world is embattled and their world is kind of in decline well so Dominic did you did you read the Brandon Hall which was the setting of the go-between Harley's, Hartley's great novel, that was based on Ryder Haggard's childhood home. Do you know, I didn't know that at all. What a brilliant, well, The Go-Between is one of my favourite books. Well, there you go. It all connects. Very good. So anyway, they're sort of being squeezed. Now, Ryder Haggard's older brothers have gone to public schools and to Oxford or Cambridge. He was sent to Ipswich Grammar School. He was seen as

less bright than his brothers, but in fact, his father was extremely rude to him and said he was a complete failure and you're destined to be a greengrocer. Yes, harsh, harsh words. Like Margaret Thatcher's father, Tom, who was a greengrocer. Anyway, obviously, William Haggard, who was a barrister, was completely wrong about this. But his childhood, I mean, you can see is a breeding ground for a lot that's going to appear later in his novel so he's um as a child he was very kind of keen on hunting shooting fishing all that kind of stuff yes will reappear and he had um he had a very sinister rag doll didn't he he did called she who must be obeyed and his nurse used this this doll to kind of menace him into obedience. So that's all part of the mix.

It is very much part of the mix. She who must be obeyed will definitely reappear in this story. So anyway, in 1875, he's 19 years old, Ryder Haggard. And his father discovers that a family friend who lives nearby, who's called Sir Henry Bulwer, is going off to South Africa to become the lieutenant governor of Natal. And he writes to him and says, I've got this absolutely useless son. He's going off to South Africa to become the lieutenant governor of Natal. And he writes to him and says, I've got this absolutely useless son. Because he'd failed all his exams, hadn't he?

He'd kind of failed military exams. He'd failed his, he never took his foreign office exams. I mean, right. Yeah. I think people sort of now say his father was actually quite harsh. A bit like Churchill's father. Right. And he's not, I mean, clearly he's not that stupid because he writes two of the best selling books ever written but um anyway it's all arranged he will go out to south africa and he'll

basically be a dog's body for the lieutenant governor of natal he will do things like organize big banquets and talk to the servants and which is actually what he does so he goes out there and he does this he spends his spare time out there on the veldt hunting and you know riding around and whatever. And kind of basically falling in love with Africa and falling in love with the idea that here there is a sense of grandeur and adventure that you don't get in Norfolk. Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. And he particularly becomes an admirer of the Zulus, doesn't he?

He does. He sees in the Zulus a kind of a warrior class reminiscent of the ancient Spartans. I think that's absolutely right, Tom. Yeah, it's a very Spartans. I think that's absolutely right, Tom. Yeah, it's a very good comparison. I think that's exactly how he sees the Zulus. So at this point, the British who are there in South Africa, they are pushing ever further into the sort of north towards the heart of the continent, taking more lands.

They're drawn eventually by diamonds and by gold. But of course, they're in conflict with not merely the Africans who are there, so like the Zulus, but another group of settlers who are the Boers. And who were there first. Yeah, who were there first. So the tension between the British and the Boers we will come back to in a second. One of his first pieces, actually, Tom, is about going to Zululand. So the British are poised to basically annex Zululand. In 1876, he goes and he sees a war dance, and he writes about it, one of his first articles.

He says, it was like coming face to face with great primeval nature, not nature as we civilized people know her, smiling in cornfields, waving in well-ordered woods, but nature as she was on the morrow of the creation. That tells you something about the British attitude to Africa and Haggard's attitude to Africa. The idea that it's primeval, that it's unspoiled by modernity, that somehow it's truer, cleaner, more authentic, but also it's more, I hate to use the word, this is the word Haggard would have used, he would have said it was more savage. He would, he would, but equally this sense of a kind of pristine warrior potency that perhaps has been diminished in britain yes but among the

zulus is is you know it can stretch right the way back to as he says there the beginning of time and um there's this kind of amazing detail when he said britain and zulu go to war um british army gets wiped out at isambuana then there's a heroic a heroic defence by British soldiers at Rourke's Drift, which is the subject of the film Zulu. And Ryder Haggard actually goes and he visits the battlefield of Isandwana after the battle. And he reported seeing crushed there of that sense that you get with Kipling, who kind of despised muddy doves and flannel fools, that the British are in some way unserious as warriors compared to the Zulus. That the British win because they've got the Gatling loves the kind of romance of Africa, of exploration, adventure. But the formal empire, I think he always views as a bit of a disappointment, as kind of too bureaucratic, pusillanimous. There's a brilliant example of this. So as we said, at this point in the late 1870s, the British are pushing sort of north and absorbing territory. One of the places they absorb, they eventually end up annexing not just Zululand after the Zulu War, but one of the Boer

Republics, the Transvaal. And in 1877, Haggard is actually, as a sort of dog's body, he is part of the party that go from the Taal to north to the Transvaal to Pretoria, that he reads out because the official who's going to do it loses his voice. So Haggard, the junior person, is given the proclamation of annexation to read out in Pretoria, and he hoists the Union flag. And this is a very proud moment for him. He thinks our empire is a civilizing mission, all of this stuff. This is great. But three years later, the Boers rebel. There's a revolt in the Transvaal. There's been a change of government in Britain. So Disraeli, who was all for imperialism, has given way to

Gladstone, who's much more ambivalent about it. The British suffer a defeat at Majuba Hill. I mean, these are quite small forces, but they suffer a defeat. And meanwhile, Haggard has become an ostrich farmer, hasn't he? An ostrich farmer, yes, exactly. And he hears the sound of the fighting from his farm. He does. He does indeed. Exactly right. So he's settled down. He's married by this point. He's got this ostrich farm, which is near the border between the Transvaal and the Tull. The British are defeated. Gladstone doesn't want to pour in a load of money and men and all that stuff. He just says, fine, let the Boers have their independence, you know, Sodom. At that point, Haggard said, show how personal this is for him.

The peace terms are actually negotiated at his farmhouse, which is called Hill Drop. And Haggard writes himself later, it was a strange fate which decreed that the retrocession of the Transvaal, over which I had myself hoisted the British flag, should be practically accomplished beneath my roof. Dominic, do you think that writer Haggard is the only famous British novelist to have kept an ostrich farm? I guess he must be. I can't imagine Jane Austen keeping ostriches. I thought you were asking me that because you knew that Henry James or Graham Greene. No, I don't. It's a genuine question. I simply cannot imagine. Iris Murdoch had once. Yeah, no, I can't imagine anyone else keeping ostriches anyway. But he comes back then, doesn't he, to Britain? This is the funny thing. This is the end of Ryder Haggard and Africa. It's on pretty much. He's been there for five years.

He comes back and he says, this is a great betrayal by Gladstone and the liberals. He's like these people who are slagging off Gladstone because they see him as abandoning General Gordon. Anyway, this is the end of Ryder Haggard and Africa. He now comes back and he decides he's going to be a lawyer. So he's called to the bar. He's a barrister. He tries his hand at writing novels and he writes two that are pretty useless.

Yeah, not successful. Don't trouble the scorer. And then an amazing story. He is on the train one day going to London with his brother, one of his multiple, much more successful and impressive siblings. And they're talking about a new book, which has been a tremendous hit and the first of a genre, first of a new genre. That book is Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, which was published in 1883. Treasure Island was an enormous hit, and it appealed to an entirely new readership. So these are people who are newly literate because of the Education Act of 1870, which has expanded schooling in Britain. These are people who probably a generation

or two earlier would never have been able to read and write. But they are, you know, books are cheaper. There are new newspapers. They love Treasure Island. They can't get enough of this derring-do and blood and thunder and all this stuff. And the whole thing about Treasure Island is that, again, that it's about pirates, Spanish Maine. It's a world that is somehow more glamorous and more dangerous than England. England. It's pure escapism rooted in a sort of kind of fantastical version of history, I suppose. And opens with a map. And opens with a map. There's a degree of a quest about it. You know, people in the 1880s love this kind of stuff. Anyway, Ryder Haggard says to his brother, well, I think I could, I don't think it's that great. I think I could do better than that. And his brother said to him,

supposedly, there are two different stories. One, his brother says, I'll bet you, I think, a bob or something. And another is, he says, I'll bet you five shillings, whatever. He says, I bet you can't do it as well as Robert Louis Stevenson. Haggard says, fine, I'll do it. It takes him extraordinarily six weeks. I think you can sometimes detect traces of that in the writing, Tom, do you think? But authors are always saying that. Well, six weeks. I think you can sometimes detect traces of that in the writing, Tom, do you think?

But authors are always saying that. Well, I know. I say that about writing my vampire book. Did it take you six weeks? I always say it took me six weeks. Six years. And I realise it actually didn't. It took me slightly longer than that.

I think it's kind of shorthand for he wrote it very fast. He wrote it very fast. So he writes King Solomon's Mines, his own quest story set in a version of the Africa in which he had spent five years. Right. Because that's the key thing, isn't it? That actually, I mean, he's saying that, you know, there are unknown reaches, but that's not true. I mean, there aren't, he knows full well that there aren't these huge deserts and these mysterious mountains. And any possibility of a kind of lost paradisal kingdom um which kokoana land isn't it that when they arrive there it's kind of it's more beautiful

it's more intense everything is is kind of more glamorous and exciting the warriors are braver the women are more beautiful yeah um and it's a fantastical land but he knows full well that that doesn't exist uh he does tom but there are still blank spaces on the map kind of at the time that he's well we should come back to explorers we'll come back to explorers the thing that really puts publishers off actually is not the fantasy it's the violence so there's a lot of violence um there's a particular a scene which said that there's a brilliant um writer called katherine rundell yes uh the bug for of dunn Dunn, and also a prize-winning children's author. She wrote a wonderful essay about Ryder Haggard

in the London Review of Books a couple of years ago. She points out that, she says, the highlight for most children when they read it is a bit when a young boy, a Zulu boy, is literally torn apart by an elephant. She points out that most children love this, which anyone who's written for children knows that this is almost certainly true. But the publishers were appalled by this.

So one publisher said, never has it been our fate to wade through such a farrago of obscene witlessness. Nothing is more likely in the hands of the young to do so much injury as this recklessly immoral book. So lots of them turn it down, but Castle agreed to publish it. They bring it out in autumn of 1885. They have billboards around London that describe it as the most amazing book ever written. I mean, you'd love that, wouldn't you? I would, of course, as an author.

And it's a massive, massive hit. And it's a hit, not least because this is the year of the Berlin Conference, when all the European colonial powers are meeting to divide Africa between themselves. The onset of the scramble for Africa. Exactly. It gets brilliant reviews, by and large.

I mean, some people don't like it, but the Athenaeum, a journal, said the fighting scenes were hardly to be beaten outside Homer and the great Juma. Right. But the echoes of Homer again, the sense of primal warrior virtue and prowess at the beginning of time. Exactly. Still to be found in the heart of Africa. Now, funnily enough, Robert Louis Stevenson, who Haggard had set out to beat, he actually writes to Haggard and he says, you know, well done, tremendous book, you're fine, weird imagination. But he also says to Haggard, just be careful with your prose, you should slow down a bit.

Which Haggard presumably found very condescending. And Haggard completely ignored because in the next few months, he pours out more books. So he writes a sequel called Alan Quatermain and another book, which you'll come to a little bit later, called She, which is another absolutely foundational text in our kind of popular imagination. And that sets him off. Just to finish with Haggard, he becomes a full-time writer. He makes lots of money. He becomes a country landowner. He tries to become a Tory politician. So he stands in Norfolk in 1895, but he loses.

That's quite a feat, isn't it? To lose as a would-be Tory MP in Norfolk. Well, I think in those days, Haggard claimed that he said the area could not have been more unfriendly to the unionist cause. I think possibly because of food. Cheap food prices meant that for agricultural labourers in East Anglia, these were tough times in the 1890s. Well, let's not get into free trade or anything like that. Let's stick to… But he becomes a famous kind of Africanist. So he's the head of all kinds of commissions and panels even though as we said he's actually only spent five years he writes um he writes a whole the zulu trilogy as well doesn't towards the end of his life featuring um and this is alan quatermain again featuring

zikali the dwarf wizard known as the thing that should never have been born which is i haven't read that tremendous a tremendous name that's a great if you were called that that is a truly great name and then his trajectory is almost slightly predictable so by the 1910s and 1920s he spends all his time going on about radicals and bolsheviks and and sort of international socialism and stuff you can imagine the kind of stuff he would have been putting had he had the internet oh yeah absolutely um yes he would have been putting had he had the internet. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yes, he would have been cancelled, I think it's fair to say, Tom. Although not everybody had read King Solomon's Minds or She, it's a bit like Star Wars or James Bond today, or Spider-Man, dare I say, Tom. Never heard of it.

Almost every sort of thinking, reading person in the English-speaking world would have been aware of those books, of the Alan Quatermain character, and of the cliches and the kind of the tropes that- Yeah. Conan Doyle's Lost World, the idea of Tarzan, all that kind of stuff. The people going from the Imperial Metropole to distant reaches and discovering extraordinary treasures. And Dominic, I mean, going back to the book, one thing that we haven't explained is the title. What are King Solomon's mines doing in South Africa? It's quite a long way from Jerusalem. That is also a kind of enduring part. You mentioned Indiana Jones,

the idea that there are lost civilizations uh waiting to be discovered and that um and this is quite kind of atlantis we talked about this in the the atlantis thing the idea that if there are ruins and ancient civilizations to be found in africa the assumption is that they are not actually african in origin yeah that it is outsiders who have brought them that's in way, they've either brought mysterious powers, or they've brought mysterious technology or ways of, say, constructing mines. In this case, the argument is that Solomon and the Phoenicians together are working to build the temple, and they go to a place called Ophir or Ophet. And basically in King Solomon's mind, Ophir is

identified with Kukwana land. But in the Bible, Tom, doesn't it say Solomon received tribute of gold, peacocks, cedar wood stuff, yeah, general stuff from this place that has never been pinned down. And people were always, all through the medieval period, people were fascinated by the idea that there was some lost kingdom out there, which was the real Ophir or Ophet. And this place must be incredibly rich. And that sort of became conflated with the other idea, massively popular in medieval period, that there was a lost Christian king out there. Called Prestijon. Called Prestijon, which was clearly based on some garbled memory of Abyssinia, of Ethiopia. But there's also one other kind of Solomonic element, which is the Queen of Sheba.

Yes. And basically, everyone knew where Sheba was. It's Southern Arabia. But increasingly in the Middle Ages, people don't want to be satisfied with that. And they start thinking, where else could it be? And because Africa to Europeans is unknown, it's unmapped, people start thinking that in some way, Prestigion and Ophir and Sheba are somehow kind of blended and are to be found in the depths of Africa. So I mean, this goes right the way back to the 16th century when the Portuguese are starting to really go up river and they're basically the only Europeans to do it. So in 1552, there was this guy called Jao de Barros, who wrote a whole book in which he conflates Prestigion and the

Queen of Sheba and says that there is a ruined city in the middle of Africa. And this proves to be an incredibly potent idea. And over the centuries that follow, people keep looking for it. And then for Ryder Haggard, the key thing is that in 1871, an explorer called Karl Mauch, is it? Karl Mauch? I think it's Karl Mauch, isn't it? But Karl Mauch, he discovers a spectacular ruined city. But that's the thing, Tom.

People have been talking about, is there a ruined city in the middle of Africa, a medieval city for hundreds of years? And there is. There is. And this is Great Zimbabwe, which dates back to the 9th century. And as you said, Karl Mauck finds it. I think it had been found by,

there's another German guy who'd found it a few years earlier, but he takes Karl Mauck and Mauck popularises it, doesn't he? Yeah. And so this is happening um a decade or so before Ryder Haggard starts work on King Solomon's Mines and can I read you what Karl Mauck said about what he found there do okay so he he's writing here the tones of a sober and measured archaeologist it can be taken as a fact that the wood which we obtained from Great Zimbabwe actually is cedar wood, and from this that it

cannot come from anywhere else but from the Lebanon. Furthermore, only the Phoenicians could have brought it here. So that's the level of evidence. I mean, people now read this and they say, my gosh, this is pure imperialism. European observers just could not get their heads around the idea that people in what is now Zimbabwe could have built a medieval city because they didn't think Africans were capable of it. So they had to invent all these sort of ideas that people had travelled ridiculously long distances and established Phoenician colonies in South Africa or whatever. Yeah. I mean, it's clearly racist. It's clearly founded on the idea that Africans can't produce their own civilization.

But it is also, I think, expressive of a desire to join this beautiful to Europeans exotic land of adventure to reference points that they will understand. And so that's basically, in King Solomon's minds, the Homeric. So there's a kind of great war is fought in Kukuanaland, and it's described in very overtly Homeric terms. The Viking. So one of the heroes in King Solomon's mind, like Haggard himself, is a Viking descent. So Henry, he's often described, isn't he, with his big hair and his beard and his enormous muscles. Haggard absolutely has enormous physical enthusiasm, shall we say. Well, he absolutely does. And so this figure, what's he called? Sir Henry Curtis?

Sir Henry Curtis, yeah. Sir Henry Curtis joins up with the Zulu guy who we described at the beginning, who has been accompanying them as a servant. But when they arrive there, turns out to be the rightful king of Kokoana land, Ignozi. He's Aragorn, basically, isn't he, Tom? He is Aragorn. And he and Sir Henry both dress up in the same kind of war gear, and Rhyde Haggard is very, very keen on it. The dress was no doubt a savage one, but I am bound to say I never saw a finer sight than Sir Henry Curtis presented in this guise. It showed off his magnificent physique to the greatest advantage. And when Ignosi arrived presently arrayed in cinema costume, I thought to myself that I never before saw two such splendid men. And I think the thing there is the idea that Ignosi is part of a culture in Ryder Haggard's

view that is still on a level with Vikings and with Homeric Greeks. And Sir Henry Curtis, by going there, has been able to reclaim his own status as someone equivalent in a way that he would never have done had he stayed in his ancestral estate back in England. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. He has this idea, which I think is enormously potent. And actually, you can see in all kinds of popular culture today, this idea that by going to Africa, you will somehow turn the clock back, cast off the degeneracy of modern life and become more truly authentic. But also going back to Haggard and Great Zimbabwe, just before we go to the break, Haggard wrote a preface to a history of Great guzman barbara of this site he he absolutely

believed that it was phoenician i mean what would strike us as just an absolutely ludicrous bonkers idea sort of netflix worthy tom i think it's fair to say and haggard said um what was the condition of this empire and what the measure of the effective dignity of its emperor points rather difficult to determine i mean which, which is putting it mildly. But then he says, it is legitimate to hope, it seems probable even, that in centuries to come, a town will once more nestle beneath these grey and ancient ruins, trading in gold, as did that of the Phoenicians, but peopled by men of the Anglo-saxon race well and in fact that kind of does happen because in 1890 the region that um the great zimbabwe is standing in place called mashona land is occupied by um cecil roads

british south africa company and roads becomes absolutely obsessed with the idea that that zimbabwe was phoenician and he sets up a company, which is brilliantly called Rhodesia Ancient Ruins Limited, which claimed the exclusive tourist rights to it. And of course, Rhodesia, Meshonaland gets given Rhodes' name and Rhodesia will become a kind of white settler country. So exactly. So in some ways, Haggard got what he wanted because of course, gold was one of the things that was driving the British deeper and deeper into Africa. Listen, we should take a break, Tom. There's so much to just, I mean, it's such a fascinating subject. There's so much to unpack. And we shall return after the break with talk of explorers, big game hunters.

But also for any female listeners thinking this is all a bit masculine, we will also be discussing Ryder Haggard's attitude to the ladies. Exactly. We're like Mitt Romney. We've got binders full of women. And we'll be back after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. For there, not more than 40 or 50 miles from us,

glittering like silver in the early rays of the morning sun, were Sheba's breasts. And stretching away for hundreds of miles on each side of them was the great Solomon Berg. Now that I, sitting here, attempt to describe the extraordinary grandeur and beauty of that site, language seems to fail me. I am impotent, even before its memory. There, straight before us, were two enormous mountains, the like of which are not, I believe, to be seen in Africa, if indeed there are any other such in the world, measuring each at least fifteen thousand feet in height, standing not more than a dozen miles apart, connected by a precipitous cliff of rock, and towering up in awful white solemnity straight into the sky.

These mountains standing thus, like the pillars of a gigantic gateway, are shaped exactly like a woman's breasts. Their bases swelled gently up from the plain, looking at that distance, perfectly round and smooth, and on the top of each was a vast round hillock covered with snow, exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast. So, Dominic, deep waters. I mean, frankly, one of the weirdest passages in the whole of Victorian literature. And the weird thing is that Ryder Haggardard makes a boast doesn't he of there being no petticoats in king solomon's minds and he says the kind of the opening introduction that it is

dedicated to all the big and little boys who read it yes and yet actually a kind of nervousness about the female is is present throughout the book. There are some very deep waters here, Tom. Right, so there are a couple of things here. So one is that Haggard is like so many imperial writers. He is absolutely obsessed with the idea of masculine brotherhood, isn't he? Yes. And manliness.

So he believes that you'll become more manly by going to Africa, but it's also incredibly important that your manliness is connected to other men. So the idea of the fellowship, the brotherhood, which obviously Tolkien then copied, critics describe it as homosocial, don't they? Rather than homoerotic. But the way he talks about Sir Henry

with his rippling muscles and all this sort of stuff, there is an awful lot going on there. And that is actually very common among not just imperial writers, but all these imperial characters, General Gordon, Kitchener, Lord Milner, all of these people. It was all about kind of strapping young men common among not just imperial writers but all these imperial characters general gordon kitchener yeah lord milner all of these people it was all about kind of strapping young men you know

stripping off together and and stuff the the corollary of that is a certain nervousness about uh about women definitely so yeah i mean i don't think you'd have to be freud to recognize that in a way the whole journey is is a kind of trip across africa represented as a female body so yeah the breasts i mean literally she the queen of sheba's breasts and then they go into this beautiful kind of paradisal land and then they go deep underground into the tunnels and they get trapped there yes they can't get out there's a lot going on there and they get trapped there by the most memorable character in the whole book yeah who is this witch called gagool who is i mean fabulously ancient and when i say fabulous i mean literally so because i mentioned how they have the whole thing the stunt with the eclipse and things and

how this is impresses everybody with their ability to to kind of command deep magic. But Gagul is not impressed because she has already seen this happen, which implies that she is literally centuries old. Catherine Rundell in her essay in the LRB says that Ryder Haggard is obviously obsessed with monkeys because she is described as a monkey. and people who are so old that they've basically become like monkeys are a feature throughout rider haggard's fiction that's right so giggle by the way we mentioned tolkien i think giggle is i mean giggle is very golem like she kind of capers around like a monkey golem's often described as a monkey she's wizened and kind of wrinkled and it's as though by living so long, she has... She's become stretched.

She has. She's become stretched. And she's kind of degenerated into something that's not entirely human. And now, obviously, there are all kinds of things going on here. So she's a version of... She's a woman. She's also obviously... You know, she's black.

She's African. And there's all kinds of weird stuff going on in Haggard's mind. There is another woman called Fulata. She's a kind of love interest. So she has to die. She's killed. Yeah, she's very pretty and she dies.

And Alan Quatermain, now she's become obsessed with one of his travelling companions who is Captain Good. Who spends the whole time walking around without trousers on.

She's obsessed. All the characters are obsessed with his legs. And it's clear that she and Good are a couple or are going to become a couple. And so when she dies, Alan Quatermain says,

I feel bound to say that I consider her removal a fortunate occurrence since otherwise complications would have been sure to ensue in other words you can't shack up with an african woman right but and but the complications in haggard's mind are not just social they're biological right because this is an age when racism is scientifically based increasingly. Yes, absolutely. And there's quite a lot of that in Ryder Haggard's novels. So the masculine brotherhood and the idea of becoming more truly yourself when you're out with your friends, your male friends in Africa,

hunting elephants and having adventures, that goes hand in hand with this idea that back home in the cities surrounded by all the trappings of kind of urban industrial modernity the race is becoming degenerate that the white race this is the word terminology haggard would have used is losing its kind of vital sap and all of this stuff and this fear of degenerate of racial degeneracy runs right through i mean it's not just haggard but so much of the kind of culture of the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s. So every British defeat, but that defeat against the Zulus, the defeat in the First Boer War,

and then later on much more so in the Second Boer War, they're all explained by the fact that people say, well, what do you expect? All these people work in factories and they live in the cities. They don't hunt elephants. They become racially degenerate. And this is is now the character who epitomizes this the woman character is the the person from haggard's other big bestseller and that is she and that's another quest so we don't have time to kind of go into all the details of that but basically the lead

character and she is like a combination of gagu and and Fulata. And she's basically... So she's very beautiful, but thousands of years old because she's maintained the secret of eternal youth, but is an incredible witch. Yes. So she's Aisha. I mean, she's one of the dominating female characters in, I would say, in all popular fiction. She gets the name that was given to Ryder Haggard's rag doll

from his childhood, She Who Must Be Obeyed, and which in the Rumpel books, uh, Rumpel, that's right. His wife, she, who must be obeyed.

So, um, so if you read, she, I mean, she is an intoxicating book. It's very, I mean,

it's hard not to read it with your kind of Freudian hat on, isn't it? Tom Catherine Rundell had something very funny to say about Aisha though, because she subjects the characters who've gone on this quest at colossally long monologues. She says she rants like nigel farage and has only one point to make men are powerless in the face of beautiful women for women desire not men but power the greatest woman to have ever lived is a disappointment a heckling sex witch that's basically what um what happens to uh to the characters they just

are forced to listen to Aisha for all this time. But then at the end, there's more sort of this weird kind of degeneracy stuff because she bathes in this sort of the fountain of life and she shrivels in the flames

and literally turns into a kind of like a little wrinkled monkey before she dies. So this again, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff going on there with the kind of the undercurrents of of the imperial mentality i suppose you would say well yeah because um vm v is pritchett writing about um she said that um wrote mr em forster once spoke of the novelist sending down a bucket into the unconscious. The author of She installed a suction pump. I mean, it's so, it's very, very right. But She, I mean, She is the primary text of the Lost World genre.

In Brian Aldiss's history of science fiction, his kind of definitive canonical history of science fiction, he says, She creates this idea of the empress, the priestess, the sorceress that is at the heart of so many scientific romances. So you go to an alien planet and it's ruled by this terrifying, sexy, but deeply evil woman. I mean, that is pure Ryder Haggard. I mean, going even deeper into the subconscious, is there a sense in which Ryder Haggard is expressing something in the fact that she is published in 1887, which is the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, and Aisha is a reclusive white queen ruling over Africans, and so is Queen Victoria? Is there some sense? Lots of critics say this. Lots of post-colonial critics and whatnot are very interested in this.

And they say it's his own anxieties or Britain's anxieties about its own empire, about its legitimacy. What do you think? Well, you know, I can be a bit sceptical. So there's part of me that says, yeah, it's probably a coincidence. I don't think so, because I think the whole idea of white queens is so associated with Victoria. And even if he's not consciously doing it to make this villain the white queen. Well, she actually says, Aisha says, I'm going to go back to Britain with you, topple your queen, who's obviously useless, and become queen myself.

So, you know, maybe there is stuff going on there. There are a couple of other themes, I think, that we should talk about. So one is, obviously, these are books of an age of exploration. So Burton and Speak, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speak, a couple of decades earlier, had gone on these amazing expeditions to discover the African Great Lakes in the heart of Africa. Henry Morton Stanley, most famously, had found Livingston in 1872, and his book on Livingston had been a massive, massive hit. And this idea of this fascination with maps that you get both in She and in King Solomon's Minds, I mean, that's absolutely of

the age. So people love the idea of what Joseph Conrad talks about later on in The Heart of Darkness. And there's two ideas at once. One that africa is the heart of darkness that by going deeper into africa you penetrate into this sort of world of primeval wickedness i mean that's obviously very common in imperial mentality of the 19th century yeah so stopping slavery and and witchcraft right but also the the idea of blank spaces. There's a few blank spaces left and who knows what's there. But again, there is this tension. So if Africa is a land where the savagery is expressed through slavery and witchcraft, at the same time, it is a land where we talked before, where lost wisdom may be found, a

kind of primal freshness that warriors are braver bolder stronger i mean so there's a kind of tension there isn't there that is i suppose if you're writing novels it results in you not just writing kind of racist propaganda yeah i mean there clearly is enthusiasm for the british empire inder Haggard's books, and there is definitely quite a deep strain of racism there. But it's not just racist. It's not just imperial. It kind of reaps narrative fruit from those tensions. It does.

Because as you said, he regards the character of Ignacy in King Solomon's Minds, let's say, as noble, as impressive. And actually, at the end of the book, I mean, spoiler alert, Ignacy, surprise, surprise, regains his kingdom. But he explicitly says to the heroes, no white man other than you may ever come into my kingdom. You know, I know all you want is diamonds and gold. We won't have you. We won't have missionaries. We won't have people selling rum, you know, all of this sort of stuff.

That shows that Haggard is aware of the costs of empire and of what an African king would say about it. Again, spoiler alert, as you said, there are other missions. So Ignatius gets his kingdom. So Henry Curtis does find his brother. But actually, the quest for King Solomon's mines turns out to be a bit of a dud because essentially, many of the characters are not interested in the diamonds. Alan Quatermain is. I mean, he scoops up loads of diamonds and becomes ends up very rich and is made unhappy by it goes back to england builds it has an estate and is left kind of restless and and unhappy but so henry curtis doesn't take any any diamonds at all and throughout the book the obsession of europeans with diamonds and gold is relentlessly criticized really it is

i mean the fascinating thing about haggard and it's actually of so many of these imperial writers, Kipling, I think, is very similar, is that he's too good a writer to be just a racist propagandist. To be jingoistic, yeah. But when he's not writing novels, he's incredibly jingoistic. He writes again and again, kind of letters to the Times and things, saying, so in 1913, he says, the future of Africa will not be a conflict between the Britons and the Boers, but the inevitable, though let us hope, far-off struggle for practical supremacy between the white blood and the black. And he's always saying this stuff. 1924, in his diary, the great ultimate war, as I've always held, will be that between the white and coloured races. And that history will ultimately be the story of the bloody conflict

between implacably opposed races. But I suppose the tension there is that he's not taking for granted who would win a war between the black and the white races, because his anxiety would be that the white race is degenerate, and that the black race as a desandwana is braver stronger kind of less corrupted exactly that he talks again and again in his and other writers do as well um about how life is struggle he's a he's a darwin he's a social darwinist a classic social darwinist so he gives this these words to aisha and she in this world none but the strongest can endure those who are weak must perish the earth is to the strong and the fruits thereof um for every tree that grows a score shall wither that the strong may take their

share i mean that's you know it's like something from um nuremberg in the 1920s but this is absolutely what people are saying by the way at the time it's not unusual he's obsessed with the idea that in britain people are they've lost their kind of manliness and and actually the heroes that he likes are not generally traditional imperial figures they are big game hunters explore i mean there's this he's absolutely of that generation that fantasize about these kind of maverick virile sort of eccentric characters so there are two models for alan quatermain so quatermain says at the beginning of the king solomon'sines, I've been trading, hunting, fighting, or mining all my life, which is very Wilbur Smith.

But the real-life inspirations for Quatermain, there are two of them. One is a guy called Frederick Sellers, who was an explorer and big-game hunter from the 1870s onwards. He is an amazing character, actually. He'd never be big enough, I think, for the rest of his history on his own. But when he was 19, Frederick Sellers in 1870, I read, and I quote, he knocked unconscious a Prussian game warden who tackled him while he was stealing buzzard eggs for his collection. And he had to leave the country at once to avoid imprisonment.

So he left Prussia. He went off to Africa. He was British. He went off to Africa, ended up working for Cecil Rhodes he shot 78 elephants in three years the Natural History Museum to this day Tom has 524 animals shot by Frederick Sellers including 19 lions

wow and he died at the age of 65 fighting the Germans in the First World War in Tanganyika so he's one inspiration for Alan Quatermain and the other is a guy called Joseph Thompson, who was a Scottish geologist and explorer. Here's a nice telling link. He studied under Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog. Ah, yes, right. And he went off to Kenya. He was gored by a buffalo while trying to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

Of course he was. Then he works for Cecil Rhodes again, getting concessions and treaties in Rhodesia. And actually, Haggard was accused of plagiarising his book about travels with the Maasai. So all of this stuff is a sort of network of imperial connections and neuroses and anxieties. All this thing about people hunting, people simultaneously admiring and fearing native peoples whom they are displacing and ripping off the sense of a frontier that is slowly closing of course what it reminds you of is the wild west in america yeah and the role that that has played in the the american cultural imagination and there's a sense in which basically africa is is playing that role for british fiction writers i think i hadn't thought

of that but i think that's absolutely right. Now you mention it. It is, isn't it? The idea of hunting, the idea of the Indians in America, the Native Americans as sort of there to be feared, but also respected as, yeah. So obviously the legacy of the Wild West continues right the way into the future.

I mean, everybody is familiar with that. I guess it's more occluded, but the influence of King Solomon's mines and that tradition, I mean, that is also absolutely a part of, I mean, it remains a influence of King Solomon's mines and that tradition, I mean, that is also absolutely a part of, I mean, it remains a part of popular culture to this day, really, would you say? I think it absolutely is. So when Haggard died in the 1920s, the Edinburgh Review, I found this wonderful quote, Haggard's South African romance has filled many a young fellow with longing to go into

the wide spaces of those lands and see their marvels for himself. And they have thus aided far more than we can ever know in bringing British settlers and influence into the new country. They have helped to accomplish the dreams and aims of Cecil Rhodes. So there's two things, I think. One is that obviously Haggard is one of the two or three great writers of empire, like Kipling, I suppose. But also, I think the themes that you've just mentioned you know the things that are similar to the wild west but also the idea of being stuck underground archaeological discoveries lost worlds layers

upon layers of history that kind of adventurers are uncovering um terrifying sorceresses all these kinds of things. I mean, they're there all the way through, aren't they? Partly, I suppose, because at the end of Haggard's life, his works were being adapted for the screen in the first kind of Hollywood adventure films and talkies and so on. So all these people, even if they'd never read, you know, King Solomon's Minds or She, all these people who end up working in the

cinema or in tv or you know all these things they are intimately familiar with the kind of the themes of haggard's novels and that's why i think you see them again and again in popular culture running all the way through you know into the i suppose into even after the british involvement in africa has completely changed which obviously it does after World War II. Right, because it's there in Indiana Jones and you mentioned computer games. Yeah. And so I think that in recent decades, there have been two kind of massive reworkings of King Solomon's mines that have had global impact. The first is a kind of very British perspective. It's that of Wilbur Smith,

who's a massive selling novelist, probably the biggest selling, I think, African novelist of all time. I think he sold millions and millions. And so he's from Rhodesia. Right. So grew up in Africa, lived in Africa all his life. And Rhodesia is the place where Zimbabwe, the great ruins of Zimbabwe were. And of course, in due course, when white rule in Rhodesia gets toppled, comes to be called Zimbabwe. And Great Zimbabwe, which is kind of one of the inspirations

for King Solomon's Mines, I'm portraying here my intimate knowledge of the young Wilbur Smith, because in 1941, when the future bestselling writer was eight, I think, he went on this sort of nighttime expedition with his dad to go and see the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. And they obviously stuck in his mind because decades later, he wrote all these massively bestselling books in which kind of African history and lost cities and things like that all play a part, don't they?

Yes. And they're novels that are haunted by regret for the collapse of the British Empire. So, you know, in that sense, quite an unfashionable perspective, I think it would be fair to say. And maybe the success of his novels says something about how people in Britain and in the broader British Commonwealth feel about that legacy. Who can say? Well, I think they appeal to a particular kind of reader, probably sort of a reader who doesn't mind a bit of kind of pungent prose, Tom. Possibly. There's certainly a lot more sex in Wilbur Smith than there is in Ryder Haggard. But the other, I think, reworking, more recent reworking of the themes and traditions of King Solomon's Mines is perhaps for listeners a slightly more unexpected one,

because it's one that comes from a kind of American perspective on Africa, and that's Black Panther. Right. Interesting. because it's one that comes from a kind of American perspective on Africa. And that's Black Panther. Right. Interesting. So Black Panther is part of the Marvel franchise. Yeah. Part of the MCU, Tom.

MCU, whatever that is. Yeah. I don't know what that means, but I'm sure it is. It's the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Right. So that's what it is. As Spider-Man, you should know all about this. So Black Panther is from a lost city in Africa. And just as Ryder Haggard says that these great works of civilization derived from Phoenicians. So in Black Panther, the kind

of almost supernatural power that the people of this, what is it? Wakanda. Wakanda. Yes. You mispronounced it in an earlier episode of The Rest is History and got a lot of grief from the listeners. Yes, I did. So every time I say the name, I feel nervous, but it derives from some weird metal that's landed and somebody swallowed this metal and kind of obtained super power. Vibranium, I believe it is. Vibranium. Yeah. Okay. So what the Phoenicians are to King Solomon's mines, vibranium is to Black Panther, i.e. something that explains how a civilization has arised in the middle of Africa. And so therefore, I would say, a little bit

dubious, why should it need kind of outside cosmic intervention? You have an ancient civilization, you have a lost city that is in Black Panther, kind of literally veiled by a kind of high-tech screen, a paradisal land. You have all the kind of stuff that you get in King Solomon's mind. So you have this sense that people there, the warriors and their female as well as male in Black Panther are stronger, harder, tougher, cooler than you'd get in the West. They even have kind of combat between rival contenders, which is very much a theme of King Solomon's Mines. And so I think that even though, obviously, Black Panther, the very name is reflective of the racial politics of America from the 60s onwards. I mean, it does seem to me indubitably to be informed by that very unexpected

legacy of King Solomon's mines. And to find it there is a lot more unexpected, I think, than to find it, say, in the novels of Wilbur Smith. Doesn't that bear out the point though, that we've talked about sometimes that the pop culture of, let's say, 1870 to 1930, establishes the template for so many of the things that we take for granted today. I mean, anybody who plays a video game will probably have played some iteration of She or King Solomon's Mines. I mean, it comes from the same era that people are writing detective fiction, spy novels, all of these things. It's actually extraordinary to think how many of popular cultural themes and devices that we're all familiar with that they

date from those years either side of the turn of the 20th century and from actually british imperial pop culture almost like it's a league of extraordinary gentlemen oh that's very good tom that's very good i see what you're doing there you see that i mean you don't even know what that is i know because the producer told you about it yesterday. But Alan Quatermain is one of those. So that's a comic book in which Alan Moore takes all these heroes from the late 19th century, Mina Harker from Dracula and so on, and imagines them, you know, as forming a kind of Avengers-style combo. And Alan Quatermain is the chief figure.

Well, there you go. So his legacy lives on. And actually, Tom, we've been talking so long, and I'm as such gusto about Wilbur Smith and all these random things, that the producer has actually changed in the course of the podcast. So one producer has gone home. Theo has gone home and been replaced by Alex. Or it's the magical power of she.

It could well be. Well, let's not delve deeper into those very freudian depths tom of uh the powers of she so that's h rider haggard we will be returning what will be returning with tom uh with uh cromwell's cromwell's uh britain and indeed island cromwell's britain which i think cromwell would have loved all this stuff? I think a little bit of him. I think he'd have found it a touch ungodly. Yeah, it is a bit ungodly. But there's the bit of him that would have probably been well up for...

I think he'd have enjoyed an adventure, didn't he? This is madness. I mean, would Oliver Cromwell have enjoyed the novels of King Solomon's mind? These are the questions that we dare to ask. That no other podcast will bring you. Right. And on that note, we will say thank you very much for listening and goodbye bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip

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