Fiction that has been called Heroic Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery found itself in a wide variety of digest-sized pulps, including science fiction titles and even WEIRD TALES.
The stories by Robert E. Howard are always standouts and many other authors paid tribute to him by pastiche. Howard's character, Conan of Cimmeria, was a cross between a viking berserker and cunning thief. Howard returned to this virile character many times during his short life.
After his suicide in 1936, Howard left reams of stories and poems, many that were unpublished. A trunk stuffed with just this type of material was kept by fellow fantasy author, E. Hoffman Price. The trove was tracked down by Glenn Lord, a literary agent dedicated to Howard's work and he arranged to publish these works that would perhaps otherwise been eventually lost, along with his own source notes and commentaries.
The following story, of which the first part is posted today, was written in the 1930's and had an interesting history of title and character changes over the years. It was not published in the form as you see here until 1953, almost 20 years after Howard's death. After failing to find a publisher after he had finished writing it, a re-write featured another of Howard's characters, the pirate Terence "Black" Vulmea as "Swords of the Red Brotherhood." It was then later "edited", this time by L. Sprague deCamp, to turn it back into a Conan story. The story also goes by the name in some anthologies as "The Treasure of Tranicos".
(To be continued...)
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