The Castle of Iron
core novel 1950 The Harold Shea Series
Record
| First published | 1950 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.65 (189 ratings, collected 2026-08-26) |
| Page count | 190 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780722129296 |
| Internal chronology | 2 |
Synopsis
The second Harold Shea novel reunites Shea with fellow researcher Reed Chalmers as they attempt to travel to the world of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Coleridge's unfinished poem Kubla Khan, using their symbolic-logic method for shifting between mythic realities. A miscalculation strands their wives alongside them, complicating an already precarious arrival among warring paladins, sorcerers, and the court of Kublai Khan. Shea and Chalmers must navigate courtly intrigue, rival magicians, and the political tangle of two overlapping literary worlds while trying to protect their families and find a way home. Along the way they contend with a scheming enchantress and shifting alliances among knights, drawing on Shea's growing skill with the setting's internally consistent magic to outmaneuver enemies who have their own designs on the travelers.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Harold Shea Series
- Series: The Harold Shea Series core; position 2 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: L. Sprague de Camp
- Author: Fletcher Pratt
Notes
- From the series record (The Harold Shea Series): A classic-era pulp portal-fantasy series, originally serialized as five novellas in Unknown and other magazines between 1940 and 1954 and gathered into these three novel-length volumes. Psychologist Harold Shea uses a symbolic-logic method to travel into worlds built from real mythologies and literature (Norse myth, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the Kalevala, and Irish legend). Both authors are deceased; the sequence was later completed and reprinted in full as an omnibus, The Complete Compleat Enchanter.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Harold Shea Series: position 2 of 3: previous The Incomplete Enchanter (1941) · next Wall of Serpents (1960)
Sources
← The Harold Shea Series dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.