The Vale of Lost Women
core short fiction 1967 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1967 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | short fiction |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 2.83 (156 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 20 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780345461520 |
Synopsis
In a coastal region contested by rival tribes, Conan, serving as chief of one faction, encounters Livia, a civilized woman held captive after being shipwrecked and taken by a neighboring tribe. Agreeing to rescue her in exchange for her favor, Conan leads an assault to free her from her captors, setting the story's action in motion. Much of the tale is related from Livia's own perspective as she witnesses Conan's raid and the surrounding tribal violence firsthand, giving an outsider's view of the brutal, unfamiliar world she has been thrust into and of Conan's role within the conflict between the two tribes.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 19 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- Complete Howard manuscript rejected by Weird Tales in his lifetime, likely for its racially charged content; not published until The Magazine of Horror, Spring 1967. No other-author rewriting involved.
- 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 18 of 20: previous The Frost-Giant's Daughter (1954) · next The God in the Bowl (1975)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vale_of_Lost_Women
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