A Warrior Is Coming: The Klingon Death Howl as an Address to the Dead, and What Its Omission Says, in 38 Imperial Archive Accounts of Death, 2290–2375

1. Introduction

When a Klingon warrior dies, those present raise a howl. Observers from other species have met it in many places, on the field and in the ward, and have often described it as grief, or defiance, or a signal to the living. Each description has some support. Klingons give a different account, that the howl warns the dead that a warrior is coming. This essay asks whether the written record bears that account out, and in particular why the howl is raised at the moment of death and why it is sometimes omitted. We write in 2379, after the return of USS Voyager.

We argue that the howl is an address to the dead. It is directed at those who have died before, and it tells them that a warrior is coming and should be received. The proposal rests on how the Klingons who took part in the ritual described it, and it does not require that the afterlife exist. Sto-vo-kor, the hall of warriors who died with honour, is a belief, and the ritual is a practice that presupposes the belief. Our task is to read the practice.

A note on what the howl is not. It is not a funeral, which the Klingons hold separately, and it is not the rite that follows a death in battle. It is a brief act performed by the people present at the moment, and it is the part of the mortuary sequence that recurs most consistently across the accounts we read, in 31 of 38.

2. Corpus and Approach

The Klingon Imperial Archive holds written accounts of deaths that were kept by Houses, by ships and by the High Council (Klingon Imperial Archive, 2375). We drew 38 accounts from the register that gathers them, dated between 2290 and 2375. We chose accounts in which a witness, or a chronicler reporting from a witness, described what was done when the death occurred, and excluded those that gave only the fact of death. The accounts differ in length and in the status of the writer. Some are by companions, some by kin and some by chroniclers who were not present.

Thirty-one of the 38 concern an honourable death, in battle or in the service of the House, and seven concern a person who died while under a sanction or after conduct that the account calls dishonourable. The sanctions include discommendation, which fixes the loss of standing on the person, though its shadow may fall on kin, and is distinct from the forfeiture that falls on a House (an earlier study in this journal set out the difference between the two in High Council practice). For each account we recorded whether the howl was raised, who raised it, whether the dead were named, and whether Sto-vo-kor or Gre'thor was mentioned.

The approach is interpretive. We treat the accounts as statements of what Klingons of the period thought the ritual to be, and we count features only to show what the accounts share and where they differ. The counts are descriptive and are not offered as a sample of all Klingon deaths.

3. The Howl as Address

In 31 of the 38 accounts the howl is recorded. In the 30 honourable deaths in which it appears, the accounts describe it as directed at the dead, and none describes it as intended for the living or the enemy. A House chronicler writes that the companions of a fallen captain raised it so that those already in the hall would know to make room. A ship's record says that it was raised toward the ceiling of the ward, and that the writer understood the gesture as one of speaking upward.

Naming of the dead occurs in 27 of the 30. The naming is an announcement of who is coming. The accounts do not treat the howl as a lament, since the language they use is that of a report given to those who are waiting, and utterances addressed to the absent have a grammar of their own in Klingon (Petrakis-Oduya, 2370). In several the companions are said to have stood and said the name and the House after the howl, and the accounts describe a duty to do so before the body is moved.

Read this way, the ritual has a simple structure. A death occurs. Those present announce it to the dead who are already in Sto-vo-kor, and they name the one who is arriving. The announcement is the point of the act, and it is the reason that the accounts give for insisting that the howl come at the moment of death and not later.

4. Two Destinations and the Ferry

The address presupposes a destination that can be addressed. Klingon belief supplies two, and the passage of the dead to each has been studied as a matter of ferry and road (Ferrero-Achebe, 2372). Sto-vo-kor receives warriors who died with honour, and Gre'thor receives those who did not. A vision reported in 2374 by a Klingon-Human officer of USS Voyager describes a vessel that bears the dishonoured dead toward Gre'thor, and it was given by an officer who had come close to death (Starfleet Delta Quadrant Mission Records, 2378). We treat the vision as a statement of belief, and not as evidence of what happens to the dead.

That vessel matters to our argument because it makes the destination depend on the manner of death. If the dead go to two places, the announcement has to be made to one of them. The accounts show no case in which the announcement was made to both. Where the howl was raised, it was raised to the hall of the honoured, and in six of the seven accounts of dishonoured deaths it was withheld.

In seven accounts of persons who died under dishonour, the howl is recorded once. In that account a companion raised it and the writer records a dispute over whether the person had been justly dishonoured. In the other six the survivors decline to raise it, and three give the reason. One says that the dead were not owed a place in the hall and that it would be false to announce them. Another says that the person had been cut from the House and that no one of the House could speak for them. A third says that a howl for one who had betrayed the House would shame the living who raised it. The reasons agree with the reading in Section 3. To howl would be to announce a warrior to the honoured, and the survivors will not make an announcement that they hold to be false.

5. The Question of When

The address must be timed, and a timing rule requires a way of knowing that a death has occurred. Klingon physiology complicates this. An earlier study in this journal of Klingon casualties of the Dominion War found much lower thirty-day mortality after wounds to organs with a brak'lul counterpart, 7.0% against 24.1%. The study did not measure lingering at the moment of death, but the redundancy suggests that a dying warrior may linger.

Confusion on this point is not reported in the accounts. In 22 of the 31 accounts in which a howl is recorded (30 honourable and one dishonoured), the writer states a sign that told the companions that death had come, most often the last breath or the stillness of the chest, and the howl follows it at once. Two others mention a companion who checked the warrior before the howl was raised. The ritual keeps the timing, and the physiology makes it a matter for the person who judges the sign. That person carries a responsibility, since an announcement made too early would speak for a warrior who was still alive.

6. Counter-readings

We consider four alternatives. The first is that the howl is grief. Grief is compatible with the accounts, since several writers describe feeling it, and mortuary announcement is elsewhere treated as a witnessing duty that coexists with mourning (Havelock-Ndiaye, 2369; Ostergaard-Mbeki, 2365). But it does not explain the omission for the dishonoured, who were also mourned by some of the survivors. The survivors who withheld the howl were not without feeling. They gave a reason of a different kind.

The second is that the howl is a battle cry. Some of the accounts come from the field, and the howl can be heard there. But 12 of the howl accounts come from wards and from households and show the same act, and in these no enemy is present.

A third is that the howl is a signal to the living, a way of telling the ship or the House that a death has occurred. Nine of the howl accounts mention that others came after it. In these the writer describes the arrival as a consequence and not as the purpose. The fourth is that the ritual is a habit that Klingons perform without belief. We cannot exclude it for an individual, and the accounts that give a reason do not support it as the general case.

7. Conclusion

In the accounts that we read, the howl at a Klingon's death was an address to the dead. It announced a warrior to those in Sto-vo-kor, it named the arrival, and it was withheld when the survivors held that the dead were not owed the announcement. The ritual assigns to the living the duty of speaking for the dead, and it makes the duty depend on whether the dead can truthfully be spoken for.

The corpus has limits. It has 38 accounts, and the Archive's holdings favour the great Houses, whose members are more likely to have their deaths written down. The seven accounts of dishonoured deaths are too few to say how often the howl is omitted, and the finding is that the three reasons given agree. The reading applies to these accounts. Whether it holds for other Klingons, and for deaths that no Archive recorded, is a question for further work.