The Phoenix on the Sword
core short fiction 1932 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1932 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | short fiction |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.90 (1,724 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 48 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781633553545 |
Synopsis
A middle-aged Conan rules the kingdom of Aquilonia after overthrowing its previous tyrant king in an earlier, unchronicled uprising, but his foreign birth and unconventional rise to the throne have left him surrounded by resentful nobles who consider him unfit to rule. A conspiracy known as the Rebel Four forms among these nobles with the goal of removing Conan and replacing him with a ruler of proper royal blood, and they recruit the cunning outlaw Ascalante to organize an assassination. Unknown to the conspirators, Ascalante has his own hidden agenda involving sorcery far older and more dangerous than their palace intrigue, placing Conan's throne and his life in greater peril than the nobles themselves realize.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 1 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 1 of 20: next The Scarlet Citadel (1933)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_on_the_Sword
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