Wall of Serpents
core novel 1960 The Harold Shea Series
Record
| First published | 1960 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.70 (209 ratings, collected 2026-08-26) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780932096005 |
| Internal chronology | 3 |
Synopsis
In the third Harold Shea installment, Shea and his companions travel via their established symbolic-logic method to a world drawn from the Finnish Kalevala, where they encounter shamans, shape-shifters, and a landscape governed by that mythology's distinctive magic. A separate strand of the book carries characters into a setting rooted in Irish legend, where sorcery again follows its own internally consistent rules. Shea must adapt quickly to unfamiliar magical systems and local customs while managing threats from rival practitioners of magic in each realm. The stories continue the series' premise that literary and mythic worlds exist as fully realized alternate realities, reachable through Shea's logical framework, and that surviving them requires mastering each world's particular rules rather than relying on knowledge from earlier journeys.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Harold Shea Series
- Series: The Harold Shea Series core; position 3 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: L. Sprague de Camp
- Author: Fletcher Pratt
Notes
- From the series record (The Harold Shea Series): A classic-era pulp portal-fantasy series, originally serialized as five novellas in Unknown and other magazines between 1940 and 1954 and gathered into these three novel-length volumes. Psychologist Harold Shea uses a symbolic-logic method to travel into worlds built from real mythologies and literature (Norse myth, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the Kalevala, and Irish legend). Both authors are deceased; the sequence was later completed and reprinted in full as an omnibus, The Complete Compleat Enchanter.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Harold Shea Series: position 3 of 3: previous The Castle of Iron (1950)
Sources
← The Harold Shea Series dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.