The Tower of the Elephant
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 | 4.11 (1,809 ratings, collected 2026-08-06) |
| Page count | 94 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781633553583 |
Synopsis
In the lawless City of Thieves, Conan overhears tavern talk of a fabulous gem called the Heart of the Elephant, said to be kept within a heavily guarded tower belonging to the feared sorcerer Yara. Drawn by the promise of the jewel's wealth, Conan partners with Taurus of Nemedia, a renowned and experienced master thief, to infiltrate the tower and steal the gem for themselves. As the two thieves make their way past Yara's defenses, they discover that the tower conceals far stranger and more dangerous secrets than either of them anticipated, tied to Yara's true source of power. First published in 1933, The Tower of the Elephant belongs to the Conan the Barbarian series.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 3 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 3 of 20: previous The Scarlet Citadel (1933) · next The Pool of the Black One (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_Tower_of_the_Elephant
← Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.