Tarzan the Terrible — Background and Themes

A Tail and a Mask: Biological and Artifactual Detail

The first excerpt describes a humanoid with a “long hairless, white tail” and feet that would be at home on a climbing primate. Burroughs spends paragraphs on the creature’s anatomy, then on its equipment: a “broad girdle which glittered in the moonlight as though encrusted with virgin gold.” Later, Tarzan examines a priest-mask that combines human and gryf features, with “three white horns” and a red hood. The mask is not just a disguise; it is a crafted object with cultural weight, made from a single block of wood and fitted with shoulder aprons. These passages show the author’s interest in the physical props of his invented world—more so than in psychological depth.

The Forbidden Garden and the Priesthood’s Power

In the second excerpt, Tarzan hides in the Forbidden Garden of A-lur. He observes that the priesthood “constituted a privileged class that seemed to come and go at will and unchallenged.” The garden is a place of concealment and danger, where the princess O-lo-a walks “with bowed head as though in meditation—sorrowful meditation.” The priests who confront her are agents of Lu-don, who has “exposed” Tarzan’s claim to be the son of Jad-ben-Otho. The excerpts do not reveal the outcome of this confrontation, but they establish a clear hierarchy: the high priest holds authority over both temple and palace, and the garden is a liminal space where power is contested.

Catalog Subjects vs. Actual Content

The Project Gutenberg record lists Tarzan the Terrible under “Fantasy fiction” and “Adventure stories,” with Tarzan as a “Fictitious character.” These labels are accurate but incomplete. The excerpts depict a world where the protagonist spends more time examining a mask and evading priests than fighting lions. The tailed humanoids, the gryf (a creature with three horns), and the ritual use of scalps push the story toward speculative biology and anthropological fantasy. Readers expecting a straightforward jungle romp may be surprised by the density of invented culture. The catalog subjects do not prepare one for the detailed descriptions of costume, architecture, and social structure that dominate the provided text.

The excerpts from Tarzan the Terrible suggest a novel that is less about Tarzan’s physical prowess than about his ability to read and manipulate an alien society. Pay attention to the objects—the mask, the girdle, the knife—and to the way Burroughs uses them to build a coherent, if bizarre, world. The incomplete excerpts leave many questions unanswered, but they offer a clear sense of the story’s texture: ritualistic, material, and strange.

There’s a particular loneliness in Tarzan the Terrible, all that ritual and strangeness hiding a man behind scalps. It reminded me, oddly, of another quiet oddity I once kept nearby, Toppleton's Client; Or, A Spirit in Exile — Reading Notes, where even a ghost feels misplaced. Both leave you with that ache of not quite belonging anywhere.