gash
tooth/tusk
go
black
gomi
root
gumado
sick
gumado b’nala
sick in the head
gund vando
good chief
har
battle
hay-ee
help
histah
snake
ho
many
jai
brave/Tarzan’s half-sister
jar
magic
kagada
surrender/I do surrender
kagado
surrender/do you surrender?
kak
or
kal
milk
kalan
female
kambo
jungle
kin-ga
mating
ko
mighty
kob
hit
koho
hot
korag
destroy
ko-sabor
mighty lioness
kudu
sun
lu
fierce
lu har
fierce battle
lul
water
manu
monkey
mat
of
mel-cot
hide/hidden
m’wah
blue
m’wah wa-usha
blue-green leaf
neeta
bird
nene
beetle/bug
numa
lion
olo
wrestle
osha
flower
pacco
zebra
palu
son
pan-tho
memories, tales, legends
popo
eat
rok
frog
rut
tough
sha-ka
beyond comprehension
sheeta
leopard
sord
bad
talu
daughter
tand
no
tandanda
forget
tantor
elephant
tar
white
tar-zan
white-skin person
tat
insect
tat
wing
tug
want
uglu
hate
unk
go
usha
leaf
uta
danger
utor
fear
vando
good
wa
green
walla
house
wappi
antelope
yad
ear
yat
eye
yati
sight
yud
come
yud b’zan
come groom fur
yuto
cut
yuto-gash
cut with teeth
yuto yat
cut eye
zabalu
sister
zan
skin
zu
big
zu-tat
insect
Zu-dak-lul
big water/Atlantic Ocean
zu-vo tand
defy
zu-zu-vo
strong
This glossary is an abridged version of
The Tarzan Encyclopedia,
a complete Mangani-English dictionary, its language created by Edgar Rice Burroughs and compiled by John Harwood and Allan Howard. The full encyclopedia can be found online at
www.robinmaxwell.com
or
www.tarzan.com
.
Author’s Note
Tarzan was my first heartthrob. After all, what girl wouldn’t crave the undying affection of a gorgeously muscled, scantily clad he-man (and an English lord, at that) living free from the confines of civilization in a lush paradise? Though an avid reader of Tarzan comic books, I’d never read a single Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. Yet Tarzan and Jane were as hardwired into my fantasy life and consciousness as any other characters in popular culture.
As an eight-year-old girl, I watched with slack-jawed wonder as a blond Amazon—Irish McCalla—in her tiny leopard skin dress and thick gold upper-arm bracelets swung through the vines in the thrilling TV series
Sheena Queen of the Jungle.
And who didn’t love the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films with the peppery sophisticate Maureen O’Sullivan as his “mate,” Jane? I waited breathlessly for
Greystoke
but was sorely disappointed by the filmmaker’s decision to keep their Jane (Andie MacDowell) from setting foot in Africa till the last frame of the movie.
I’d just completed my manuscript of
O, Juliet
when the question arose via agents and publishers as to the subject of my next novel. I’d had a ball with my take on Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet,
fleshing out the characters, their world and families, and expanding the time line from three days to three months. As I was riding down the road one day with my husband, Max, he wondered if I might want to choose another pair of literary lovers rather than a historical character. When I told him I liked the idea, he asked who they would be. Not three seconds passed before I blurted out, “Tarzan and Jane!”
“Where did that come from?” Max wanted to know. At the time I had no memory of Sheena or the old Weissmuller/O’Sullivan movies, but the images must have been bubbling in the depths of my subconscious just waiting to erupt like magma from a dormant volcano.
The new idea took me by surprise and started keeping me up at night. I was fortunate that two of my dearest friends—the writing/producing team of Alan J. Adler and Susan Jeter—had been dealing with the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate on a screen adaptation of ERB’s novel
The Outlaw of Torn,
and I knew from their experience that one trod on the copyright or trademark of any Burroughs creation at his or her own peril. Of course I desperately wanted the blessings and authorization for my idea from the heirs and estate of this iconic and massively prolific author.
To that end I had my trusted entertainment attorney, Phillip Rosen, contact ERB, Inc., on my behalf. Before I knew it, the two of us were on a conference call with the company’s president, Jim Sullos. “What’s this great new idea you’ve got?” he demanded. It was the easiest, shortest, one-sentence pitch of my entire writing career. “The Tarzan story from Jane’s point of view,” I replied. And with the same lightning speed as I had plucked the idea from my brain, Jim exclaimed, “I love it! It’s original. It’s never been done like this before.” I sagged with relief. The first and most important hurdle had been cleared.
I also learned in that phone call that the one hundredth anniversary of the first episode of
Tarzan of the Apes
—a serial in the pulp fiction magazine
All-Story
(October 1912), later published as the first Tarzan novel—was just three years away. Considering how long it would take me to write
Jane,
and how long it would take to see publication, we were on schedule for its fortuitous release in the “Tarzan Centennial Year.”
This was getting exciting.
After a marathon five-hour pitch session at the ERB office and archive in Tarzana, California (where else?), the estate approved my story line, and Jim Sullos became
Jane
’s first and most ardent champion.
A bona fide Tarzan fanboy with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the vast collection of the “Tarzan Universe”—books, comics, artwork, memorabilia, dictionaries, and bestiaries—Jim provided me with every resource I could possibly need to write my novel, a book he began referring to as “the next Tarzan classic.” He was as tickled as I was that this would be the first Tarzan title ever written by a woman.
We spent many long hours discussing the ERB novels (many of which I had, by now, read), comparing the original characters and stories with my own take, on such topics as the age at which Tarzan was abducted by the Mangani (not a year old but four years old); the reason Jane and her father go to Africa in the first place (treasure hunting versus paleoanthropological exploration); and how to handle the couple’s physical relationship (“tastefully”).
Jim always kept in mind the Burroughs Bibliophiles, a worldwide organization of aficionados who share a love for the works and characters of ERB—who would surely scour my manuscript with a fine-tooth comb looking for discrepancies or any desecration of their favorite author’s intent. I am eternally grateful for Jim’s understanding that while an homage to
Tarzan of the Apes, Jane
was a stand-alone novel, and a too-strict adherence to the original work would put a stranglehold on my creativity.
John R. Burroughs, the only living grandson of ERB, was another champion of
Jane
from the beginning. Having his support meant the world to me.
The research phase was more fun than a barrel of Mangani. Aside from my exotic and erotic jungle and wild man fantasies, I was for the first time free to indulge in some of my greatest longtime passions—human evolution and the mysterious “missing link” fossils and creatures found all over the world. From a very young age I’d also been fascinated by and read voraciously about ancient and antediluvian civilizations, and accounts of the geological cataclysms that had ended them. Had I not become a writer, I feel sure I would have made my career as a paleoanthropologist or archaeologist.
As it always—happily—happens when I’m researching a novel, exactly the right books find their way into my hands. Perhaps the most important one this time was
The Man Who Found the Missing Link: Eug
è
ne Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right
by Pat Shipman. The title tells it all. Dubois’s discovery of Java man (
Pithecanthropus erectus,
later redesignated
Homo erectus
) in 1891 gave me a plausible missing link species upon which to base the Mangani. But learning in Shipman’s book that Darwin’s insistence that the
real
missing link would be found in Africa gave Jane and Archie (faithful Darwinists) the motivation to go to the “Dark Continent” on expedition. It was heartbreaking to hear of the lambasting Dubois took from the scientific community—it nearly broke him—but the support of his old professor, Ernst Haeckel, kept him sane. While my dates are off by seven years (I needed to take some artistic license to make my story line work), Dubois did actually present
Pithecanthropus erectus
during the Fourth International Zoological Congress at Cambridge (1898) and was hooted and howled at by the audience until Haeckel stepped forward to defend his student’s thesis. Much of Haeckel’s speech in
Jane
are his words, verbatim, from that spirited defense.
A more glaring discrepancy in dates concerns the Boy Scouts of America, an organization that was not yet in existence when Archie Porter was a boy. Again, I unapolgetically claim poetic license, remembering the rich tradition of ERB. If a man can go to sleep in an Arizona cave and wake up on Mars, I reckon my readers will indulge me on a wonky fact or two.
In July 2010, just as I was about to write of Jane being introduced to the Mangani at the Great Bower,
National Geographic
published a story about a team of paleoanthropologists, Tim White, Berhane Asfaw, and Giday WoldeGabriel, who, fifteen years before, had discovered in the Middle Awash area of Ethiopia a full skeleton of
Ardipithecus ramidus
(“Ardi”). The female, with its straight leg bones giving it a human, upright, bipedal stance, also had opposable big toes perfect for grasping branches and the face and skull of a chimp. It was to my eye the closest creature to a missing link that I had ever seen. To my pleasure (and Charles Darwin’s, if he had been alive), it was found in Africa. While Ardi’s discoverers knew the species was too primitive to have the power of speech, I borrowed one of ERB’s most important conceits about the Mangani—that not only could they make meaningful sounds but they also had language. Asserting this kind of artistic freedom is one of the greatest joys of being an author of fiction. I cut out the artist’s rendering of what “Ardi” would have looked like and taped it over my desk. I dubbed her “Kala of the Mangani.”
Finding Mary Kingsley’s
Travels in West Africa
—in particular her exploration of the Ogowe River—was like striking gold. There was a reason I had Jane read directly from her well-worn volume. As she opined to Captain Kelly, she was unable to top Kingsley’s extraordinary descriptions. Neither could I.
I wanted the Waziri to have a basis in reality, so I followed to its end point one of the lines of the Bantu diaspora out of Cameroon (some four thousand years ago). There I placed the tribe’s village, a few days’ journey inland from the Gabon beach where ERB’s
Fuwalda
mutineers had set the Claytons with all their belongings.
Minnesota governor Ignatius Donnelly’s
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
was a big bestseller of the nineteenth century that sparked huge controversy about the lost continent. William Flinders Petrie—the premier Egyptologist of his time—did stumble on what he believed was the rubble of the ancient Egyptian labyrinth at the Fayum Oasis. He also famously bragged that when he died he wanted his head cut off and his brain studied for science. His wish was, in fact, granted, though the famous noggin was lost during the years of the Second World War … then later recovered.
I had also made contact with Helen J. Blackman, a scholar who had written extensively on the history of Cambridge University. She led me to several important books for my research about what life was like for an intelligent, progressive young woman during the Victorian and Edwardian years.
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
was insanely relevant, as it was an autobiography of Gwen Raverat—Charles Darwin’s granddaughter—who grew up in Cambridge society and was precisely Jane Porter’s age.