Kazh and Kahless

I’ve read in one “tech fandom” booklet, From the Files of Star Fleet Command (1980), the idea that smooth-headed Klingons are from the planet Kazh and bumpy-headed Klingons are from the planet Kahless. It suggests that control of the Empire had passed back and forth between the two species a couple of times, i.e., obviously Kazh was dominant during the TOS era, and Kahless by the time of the TMP.



The name Kazh comes from another fan source, The Best of Trek (1978).

I’m fine with the various other explanations (Ford’s Imperial Race and Human-Fusion Klingons, or what ENT went with), but honestly the Kazh/Kahless explanation is the cleanest, simplest, and most flavorful, to me.

 

That is an interesting idea, but it kind of falls apart once we start seeing formerly smooth headed Klingons with ridges in the later series.

 

Yeah, "Blood Oath" pretty much put paid to that notion....

 

I’m aware of that, though I’ve not seen it. I’m still a huge fan of the earlier fiction.

 

Why was Kahless the home of the bumpy-head Klingons, when onscreen Kahless was a smooth-head? It seems like the opposite would make more sense.

 

On the contrary, it would be quite a coincidence if Kahless were a native of the planet Kahless. It would make more sense if the smoothie Klingons from Kazh conquered the bumpy people's planet and renamed it Kahless after their great leader, and then the bumpy people were assimilated into the empire and took the name "Klingon" for themselves.

 

Well, that was Kirk and company's imagination of what Kahless would look like, no doubt influenced by all their recent encounters with smooth-headed Klingons.

 

I meant in 1980, when the tech booklet was produced and all we knew was that Kahless was a smoothie based on his appearance in "The Savage Curtain". Of course, Kirk and Spock may not have known anything about Kahless but his name, which is the assumption we have to use nowadays, but in the episode itself, there's nothing to suggest that that wasn't what Kahless looked and acted like.

It seems pretty forward thinking if the tech booklet assumed that Kahless was actually a bumpy-head. I'm inclined to believe Mr. Bennett's take that it was a sign of past smooth-head conquests.

 

I think I saw the original statue in a Mission: Impossible episode once, so it was probably a prop from the Paramount warehouse.

 

The same map appears in U.S.S. Enterprise Officer’s Manual (1980), as well as Star Trek Maps (1980) with additional detail. Hard to tell who drew it. I’d guess whoever wrote about the Kazh and Kahless factions/species was not also the author of the map, just someone who identified the two most prominent names from the map. So I’m not sure a huge amount of thought went into it, but, I could be wrong. Maybe the article in “The Best of Trek” would shed some light on it. I wonder how long ago people imagined Kahless to have lived, and whether they thought he could have been a semi-mythical Arthur type who could have been from just about any time and place. Of course he’s wearing a contemporary Klingon fleet uniform on Excalbia.

 

In the FASA work by John Ford, and The Final Reflection, Kahless united the Klingons around 1990 and died in 2003 fighting the Romulans. He was the Emperor when they discovered Warp Drive.

Some of that can be salvaged if we assume that it was a later emperor also named Kahless.

 

The separate planets thing is a nice, clean explanation. Wish they could've stuck with it.

 

The map is pretty much word-for-word (or star-for-star) on what they used in the officially published Star Trek Maps, except the star Kazh is renamed to Klingon. The Klingon Empire map on Star Charts (and the slightly updated Stellar Cartography) doesn't use any of these star names, which is kind of a shame because they would help fluff up the Klingon Empire a bit (which is noticeably void of star names). Star Charts and Star Trek Maps were both by Geoffrey Mandel, so it's not like he'd be unaware of this map.

I don't have any FASA sources on-hand, nor other late '70s/early '80s stuff, so I don't know if Kazh was ever used outside of fandom publications for the Klingon Homeworld. I see there was a character named Kazh, probably named for the planet, in some FASA stuff, but nothing beyond that.

 

Star Trek Maps renames Kazh to Klingon on the map itself, but just to the right of the map is this note:



I suppose they are calling the star Klingon and the planet Kazh.

 

The article from The Best of Trek sheds no light on 70s views of Kahless, except perhaps that he wasn’t remembered much or at all. It’s kind of an interesting article, though I don’t like all of it. For example, she avoids the concept of an Emperor, even though they are an Empire. The author, Leslie Thompson, calls the species (TOS Klingons—this was several years before TMP) Kazhians until the time of a mighty and visionary leader named Kling. He unites the planet under his rule, and so Klingon is the name of a society or civilization or nationality, as it were, like “Roman.”

As an aside, I note that she names “the five shows that are generally considered to be Star Trek’s best” to include The Menagerie, Shore Leave, The Squire of Gothos, The City on the Edge of Forever, and The Trouble with Tribbles. Also, she is positive that “the absolute best Klingon of them all was undoubtedly William Campbell’s Captain Koloth.” I mean, she gushes on and on and on about him. I get that these magazines were the original message boards, but dang! Did she really speak for the majority, here? I admit I never quite got the delirious joy people see in “Tribbles.”

There’s an interesting note from The Best of Trek 2, which republishes a follow-up article: “I took the name Kazh mainly because Star Trek had established the practice of alliterating the names of Klingons with the first letter K. Kazh sounds fairly alien, has a strong single syllable, and could conceivably be a curse of some sort. If the Klingon home planet is the inhospitable place I describe, then its inhabitants would be unlikely to have any strong affection for it. Therefore, ‘Kazh,‘ spat out gutturally, would make an excellent curse. (The next time some Trekkie bothers you, tell him to go to Kazh.)”

 

Konom refers to the Klingon homeworld as "Kazh" in "New Frontiers" (aka The Mirror Universe Saga), and he may have also done so in other DC Comics stories from that time period.

The reason I recall that so clearly without looking it up is because it was the first time I'd encountered the name.

 

I have long wondered where the name Kazh for the Klingon homeworld came from. Learn something new every day.

 

Starting in 1984, the homeworld was called Klinzhai. I gather this comes from The Final Reflection.