The Scarlet Citadel
core short fiction 1933 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1933 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | short fiction |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.92 (1,007 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 52 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781633553569 |
Synopsis
In The Scarlet Citadel, King Conan of Aquilonia rides out to aid a neighboring ruler who claims his kingdom is threatened by an invading empire, only to discover too late that the plea for help was a trap. The supposed ally is secretly conspiring against Conan alongside a powerful and malevolent sorcerer, and the ambush that follows leaves Conan captured and imprisoned deep within a dungeon riddled with dark magical horrors and forgotten monstrosities. With Aquilonia left leaderless and vulnerable to the conspirators' next move, Conan must find a way to survive both the dungeon's supernatural dangers and his captors' schemes if he hopes to reclaim his throne.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 2 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 2 of 20: previous The Phoenix on the Sword (1932) · next The Tower of the Elephant (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_Scarlet_Citadel
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