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Study 166 - The Voyage of King Euvoran - Part 2 (Patreon)

Published:
2026-05-16 16:17:25
Imported:
2026-05
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Content

We're in the home stretch of The Voyage of King Euvoran by Clark Ashton Smith, wherein we face the horrors of BIRD COURT!

Special thanks to our reader Andrew Leman! New from the HPLHS and featuring Andrew: The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe Audiobook!

Check out Inside the World Taxidermy Championships

Next up: Changeling by Dorothy K. Haynes and an extra-credit chat with the fellas at the HPLHS!

Comments

Bret Kramer

Here is the world's least-likely filk, combining the wonders of Clark Ashton Smith and a 70s AM rock ballad about the joys of sex with a nameless drifter. Please forgive my song, "Eurovan":

Bret Kramer

Eurovan… err Euvoran Gazolba bird crown (as per Clark Ashton) Until a curse made it to fly Then it went east, heading towards the dawn And this caused us all to die… ‘Cause our king was a despot’s heir Trying to hide his thinning hair. Ordered us to a distant land We were the fleet of Eurovan, And we all died at sea We fought with tribesmen, gnats, and vampires And many a crewman drowned But we kept on a sailin’ Ever eastwards, just to find that stupid crown ‘Cause our king was a despot’s heir Incompetence beyond compare Ordered us to a distant land We were the fleet of Eurovan, And we all died at sea At long last, past the bird-isle of Ornava Our once-great fleet was wrecked at last Eurovan was the sole survivor I wish he too had been “unalived” ‘Cause our king was a despot’s heir He ruled without skill or flair Ordered us to a distant land I’m told his name was actually “You-vor-an” Either way we died at sea… [Repeat and fade]

Karsa Torvald

Andrew Leman's voice work is top tier. The other castaway? Gtfo. it made me stop in my tracks and then almost run over fellow grocery shoppers, too good!

Cole Caron

My favorite detail is when Euvoran is given birdseed to eat while imprisoned on Ornava. It’s a funny image on its own, made funnier when you consider that the bird kingdom actually treats their prisoners better than Euvoran would have were he back in his kingdom.

Jb Lee

First time I read this I was ASTONISHED by the ending -- I mean, we all knew this guy was going to get his, end up a stuffed exhibit or food for gazolba chicks or who knows what -- but he doesn't. He just spends the rest of his life with the sea captain, being no one and nobody. VERY surprising in a CAS story, where the mordant irony of some doom or other lurks around every exotic adjective.

Sean McGivern

I laughed so hard at ‘this helpeth not thy case’. I am absolutely going to use this with the kids in future.

Lars Backstrom

A court of the the birds features in Aristophanes satirical comedy The Birds from 414 BCE. Smith appears to have read it, as it shows quite clear influences on this story. He is not the only one, as it appears to have influenced the authors of some books in the New Testament

Sludgecrawler

Winged vampire beasts reminds me of Citizen Kane fighting African vampires in "Hills of The Dead" from 1930

The Lonely Sand Person

I'm mildly disappointed that the king wasn't defended in bird court by a spikey-headed phoenix.

GG2025

Your hand discovered in the actual cookie jar helpeth not your case!

Ethan Cordray

Your grammatical discussion of "builded" makes me contemplate a English-as-a-second-language curriculum based entirely upon the stories of Clark Ashton Smith. Its most successful students sadly end up being even less understood by average native speakers than they were beforehand.

Jim Cannon

I used to work in a natural history museum with a lot of dioramas and taxidermied animals. I was actually the guy who dusted and cleaned them, in fact. The main hall has dioramas that were installed in the 1930s, and the museum had them evaluated by a crew from the Smithsonian in the early oughts. The verdict was basically: the creation of these things is a lost art, and the dioramas are the kind of thing that, if they weren't already in a museum, you would say they belonged in a museum. Museums exist to preserve art and knowledge, after all. The other thing about using replicas in place of the real thing is... replicas are not the real thing. That's what makes museums cool. Especially these days, when so many museum collections are digitized, and you can look at images of the things. But being in the presence of the actual thing is very different from seeing a replica of it, or a picture of it. And you can get much closer to a stuffed giraffe or elephant than you can to one in a zoo, too... I mean, you still aren't allowed to climb into the exhibit, but the full effect of being close to once living megafauna is not to be discounted too easily. For example, I've seen so many images of Olmec head sculptures I am fairly familiar with the art form, but two summers ago at the Yale Peabody I came face to face with an actual Olmec head for the first time and it was as close to a religious experience as I've ever come. I could see the marks of the carver on the surface of the stone. It was amazing.

Rick Hound

Chris denying his bird crimes with the excuse of “they were unfertilized” is definitely something seen in a birdesque Law & Order episode.

It's a Ghost.

Yes, except the bird king did seem to intend on eventually taxidermying Euvoran.

Cole Caron

Is taxidermy after death inherently less moral than execution the long way via torture? Euvoran wasn’t going to give the necromancer a last meal.

Ben A

Honestly, I completely forgot that this story exists in the Zothique cycle. The encounter Euvoran has with the birds immediately brings to mind Arthur Dent's encounter with the bird people of Brontitall in the radio version of HHGTTG. In Douglas Adams' telling, civilizations reach their capitalistic zenith at the Shoe Event Horizon, when shoes become impractical, unendurable, and discarded into massive trash heaps. To escape this, people evolve into birds and shoes become taboo. Not as horrific as human taxidermy or as absurd as the end of Smith's tale, but I do find both stories are satirical commentaries on capitalistic demand, the need to accumulate physical objects, and the perils of perceived status.

Pagurus

I think I can never again read Clark Ashton Smith without hearing Andrew Leman's declamatory voice in my head.

Joe Webb

Isn't THAT the mordant irony, though? As noted, this king, this great man above the laws of man and nature, in his own view, ended up just a common man, hunting birds for his dinner. The worst possible outcome for him, since he accepts it, him becoming a 'common man', his bird cloak a mockery of his former glory, which itself turned out to be a mockery, with his former crown being made out of, essentially, a rather nice looking chicken.

Our old pal Brendan Gardiner

Regarding the verbal tip-offs Chad laid out in the hypothetical exchange between the king and the birds as the king is trying to escape: Chad, you breezed right past the fact that a real bird wouldn’t say “bird seed.” To them it’s just seed.

Our old pal Brendan Gardiner

Otherwise, and that “otherwise” is doing a lot of work there considering what you missed there, great job guys.

margarks

Listening to you guys sometimes makes me feel like I don't have as much empathy as I thought I did. Your thoughts on how maybe if Eurovan had never gotten the crown/kingdom to begin with he wouldn't have been (such) a bad person, feels generous, lol. Just like Chris's (hopeful) interpretation in All She Said Was Yes that the narrator was horrible because she wanted to protect herself with some distance. Personally I think they are both just bad people. The craziness of this story did remind me of Candide, and I enjoyed it, but I also would have been happy if it had ended with some human taxidermy...