The Shadow Kingdom/Il regno fantasma - August 1929 - Published in Howard's lifetime

I found no textual changes between the Weird Tales, Lancer, or Del Rey versions of this story. Editor Glenn Lord made very minor changes here capitalizing “Tribal” in one occurrence and changing “surprized” to “surprised.”

De Camp made a keen observation about REH’s writings in Dark Valley Destiny. De Camp was commenting on REH’s Turlough Dubh character:

https://spraguedecampfan.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/scan_20220810.jpg

https://spraguedecampfan.wordpress.com/2022/08/10/the-lancer-kull-series-the-shadow-kingdom-by-robert-e-howard/

“The Shadow Kingdom”, the first of his Kull stories, is set in his fictional Thurian Age. It was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in August 1929. Howard got $100 for the story.

Howard completed this in the summer of 1927 and laid it aside. In the late summer, he rewrote it and laid it aside again.

The first we learn of the story from the letters is when he wrote Tevis Clyde Smith, circa mid- to late-September 1927 (letter #054):

P. S. Since writing you that other letter I’ve sold another mss. I got a hundred dollars for it; that is, I am to get it on publication. I don’t know when it will be published or whether you’ll like it or not. I enjoyed writing it more than any piece of prose I ever wrote. The subject of psychology is the one I am mainly interested in these days. The story I sold before this3 was purely a study in psychology of dreams and this ms. deals largely in primitive psychology. I don’t know whether they’ll publish it as a serial or as a “complete novel.”

The first story mentioned is “The Shadow Kingdom”, the second is “The Dream Snake”.

Howard mentions the story in a letter (#086) to Harold Preece, dated October 20th, 1928:

All my views on the matter I included in a long letter to the editor to whom I sold a tale entitled “The Shadow Kingdom,” which I expect will be published as a foreword to that story — if ever. This tale I wove about a mythical antediluvian empire, a contemporary of Atlantis.

Howard mentions the story in a letter (#107) to Tevis Clyde Smith, circa April 1929.

Farnsworth said he intended publishing a sonnet in the next issue after that and then “The Shadow Kingdom” which is a $100 story, and after that a shorter story.

He mentioned it again in a letter (#123) from circa March 1930:

I received a letter from Farnsworth today accepting my “Kings of the Night” — $120, on publication of course. I rather expected him to take it for the new magazine, as it’s full of action but has no really weird touches. However he accepted it for Weird Tales; possibly because the central figure is Kull of Atlantis, featured in “The Shadow Kingdom” and “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune.” It was rather a new line for me, as I described a pitched battle.

and again to Harold Preece in a letter (#144) in October or early November 1930:

But to return to the Mediterraneans of the Isles, where these tribes remained a race apart longer than anywhere else. These aborigines are popularly known as Picts, and by this name I have designated them in all my stories — and I have written a number in which I mentioned or referred to them — “The Lost Race,” “The Shadow Kingdom,” “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” “The Dark Man,” “Kings of the Night,” to say nothing of several which I have not marketed.

On February 20th, 1933 Howard wrote (letter #235) to Mr. August Lenninger regarding ‘The Shadow Kingdom’:

Dear Mr. Lenniger:

Here are the copies of “The Shadow Kingdom.” I assume that you have arranged with Weird Tales for the reprint rights. That magazine owns all rights to the story. Please let me know by return mail what arrangements you have made with the magazine company. I enclose a stamped envelope for your convenience.

E. Hoffmann Price wrote Howard telling him that he and Mashburn were attempting to promote a sort of anthology of weird tales (see letter #173).

Howard later informs Mr. Lanninger that he has permission to allow the story to be published in the proposed anthology (letter #239):

This is to inform you that I have the permission of Weird Tales to allow “The Shadow Kingdom” to be published in the proposed anthology.

Lovecraft commented on Howard’s Kull stories (this letter does no longer exist) and in a letter (#294) Howard says:

Thanks for the kind things you said about the Kull stories, but I doubt if I’ll ever be able to write another. The three stories I wrote about that character seemed almost to write themselves, without any planning on my part; there was no conscious effort on my part to work them up. They simply grew up, unsummoned, full grown in my mind and flowed out on paper from my fingertips. To sit down and consciously try to write another story on that order would be to produce something the artificiality of which would be apparent.

Howard is acknowledging only the three stories published in Weird Tales: “The Shadow Kingdom,” August 1927; “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” September 1927; and “Kings of the Night,” November 1930.

This story is also referred to after Howard’s death, in Fantasy Magazine, September 1936 in their ‘In Memoriam’:

Always a keen student of Celtic antiquities and other phases of remote history, Mr. Howard began in 1929—with “The Shadow Kingdom,” in the August Weird Tales—that succession of tales of the prehistoric world for which he soon grew so famous.

And E. Hoffmann Price brings the story up in his ‘Diablerie’ from May 1944 about Robert E. Howard:

Howard lived in a realm of wonder and fantasy. After hearing my reasons for considering certain early yarns, such as “Kings of the Night,” “Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” “Shadow Kingdom,” and the “Brule the Spear Slayer” epoch, far superior to the Conan series, he agreed and said, “I dreamed them, so they’re naturally more realistic than those I deliberately wrote.”

He does the same for The Ghost, published in May 1945 by W. Paul Cook.

This can’t be the man who wrote “The Shadow Kingdom,” or “Kings of the Night,” this can’t be the man who composed the tremendous lines at the climax of “Sowers of the Thunder”: poetry in the form of prose, and with all the ring of Elizabethan drama.

https://reh.world/stories/the-shadow-kingdom/

https://www.fantascienza.com/catalogo/opere/NILF1039352/il-regno-fantasma/

Glenn Lord provided an introductory bridge between “Exile of Atlantis” and “The Shadow Kingdom” similar to the way de Camp used excerpts from “A Probable Outline of Conan’s Career” between the stories in the Lancer Conan series.

Il primato

“The Shadow Kingdom” has been called the first “American Sword & Sorcery” tale. There could be some small dispute about that. What about Solomon Kane? What about Conan?

In the introduction to Conan the Buccaneer, Lancer Books, 1971, Lin Carter writes: “Howard founded [my emphasis] his private literary domain in 1932. In December of that year, Weird Tales published a story called, “The Phoenix on the Sword” under his by-line.”

There is merit in concluding that the first Conan story was the start of Sword & Sorcery since Conan became the most popular character identified with the genre.

But what about the term itself?

L. Sprague de Camp, even though he edited the first Sword & Sorcery anthology called, appropriately enough, Swords & Sorcery, Pyramid Books, 1963, preferred to call it all “Heroic Fantasy.” In Dark Valley Destiny, Bluejay Books, 1983, de Camp credited REH as the creator of American Heroic Fantasy.

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De Camp later uses the broader term Heroic Fantasy to encompass REH and Tolkien alike:

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Like de Camp, I prefer to gather it all under the rubric Heroic Fantasy. Sword & Sorcery started as a marketing term among the writers (and later publishers) of these stories. Its popularity quickly produced knockoff books, comics, movies, and games that took the lowest common denominator tropes of the genre: muscles, tits, and gore as the main things to showcase. Thus ghettoizing the genre. These elements are perfectly fine, in an otherwise good story, but they shouldn’t be the main focus.

Calling it all Heroic Fantasy, as de Camp did, may be the wisest course of action. For new Conan pastiche I like “Heroic Fantasy in the Pulp Tradition” as a description since Heroic Fantasy has changed from its pulp roots (but we all know the pulp stuff is the best). Classifications like Epic Fantasy, Grimdark, New Edge, etc. have created unnecessarily confusing divisions and schisms among fans as to which is best. Frankly it is all Fiction and that is a good enough term for me but since necessity seems to demand it, Heroic Fantasy seems best..

Anyway, onward. Despite all this fruitless discussion, Kull came before Conan and Kull has stood in Conan’s shadow for far too long, so let’s go ahead and agree that “The Shadow Kingdom” is the first American Sword & Sorcery tale for whatever that is worth.

La storia ha ricevuto due adattamenti a fumetti ad opera della Marvel Comics nel 1971 e della Dark Horse Comics tra il 2008 e il 2009.

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