A Witch Shall Be Born
core novella 1934 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1934 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novella |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.75 (775 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 56 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781681463773 |
Synopsis
A witch named Salome, abandoned as an infant because of a birthmark believed to mark her as evil, returns as an adult to the kingdom of Khauran and usurps the throne from her identical twin sister, Queen Taramis, by taking her sister's place and imprisoning her in secret. Salome's rule quickly grows into a reign of corruption and terror, bringing her into direct conflict with Conan, the queen's loyal guard captain, who refuses to accept the impostor's authority once he begins to suspect the truth. Conan is captured and subjected to brutal punishment for his defiance, setting him on a path toward reclaiming Khauran from Salome's grip.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 11 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- From the series record (The Conan Stories): 20 works wholly written by Robert E. Howard himself (16 published in his lifetime, 1932-1936, plus 4 complete manuscripts he finished but that were rejected by Weird Tales and only published posthumously in his own unaltered text, 1954-1996), the modern Del Rey 'Original Conan' trilogy (ed. Patrice Louinet, 2002-2005) presents all 20 together as the definitive, textually-restored, Howard-only edition. No internal in-story chronological order is recorded here: at least six independent, mutually disagreeing chronologies have been proposed by different editors/scholars since 1936 (Miller/Clark, de Camp's two versions, William Galen Gray, Joe Marek, Dale Rippke), and Howard himself is documented as having 'had little more than a general idea of the character's career path' and deliberately wrote the stories out of sequence, the same principled non-invention applied to Steven Brust's Dragaera. Book order here follows first-publication-of-the-actual-registered-text year, which is a sourced fact, not an invented reading order.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Conan Stories: position 11 of 20: previous The People of the Black Circle (1934) · next Jewels of Gwahlur (1935)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Witch_Shall_Be_Born
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