The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune
core short fiction 1929 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1929 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | short fiction |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.47 (137 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 10 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781406572766 |
| Internal chronology | 2 |
Synopsis
The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune finds Kull, now settled but restless on the Valusian throne established in The Shadow Kingdom, drawn to a strange, ancient wizard named Tuzun Thune who lives in a long-abandoned part of the city surrounded by mirrors of uncertain origin. Kull becomes fascinated, and increasingly consumed, by the mirrors, which seem to show him other versions of reality and draw him away from the duties and concerns of kingship. His swordsman companion Brule, wary of the wizard's influence, tries to pull Kull back from his growing obsession before it costs him his grip on the throne and his own sense of self, making the story less an action tale than an early meditation on identity and the seductive pull of illusion within Robert E. Howard's Kull cycle.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: Kull of Atlantis (lifetime-published stories) core; position 2 of 2 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- From the series record (Kull of Atlantis (lifetime-published stories)): The only 2 Kull-as-protagonist stories Howard sold and saw published in his own lifetime (both Weird Tales, 1929) -- confirmed via a dedicated Howard-scholarship source (The Pulp Super-Fan) and Wikipedia. A third lifetime-published story, 'Kings of the Night' (Weird Tales, November 1930), features Kull as a time-displaced guest character in a story primarily about Bran Mak Morn -- registered under Bran Mak Morn's own Core Canon instead (admitted separately, this same run), with the crossover noted here rather than the same book double-registered under two universes.
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 Kull of Atlantis (lifetime-published stories): position 2 of 2: previous The Shadow Kingdom (1929)
- Internal chronology, within Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn: position 3 of 7: previous The Lost Race (1927) · next Kings of the Night (1930)
Sources
← Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.