The dream as a dramatic device is essential to “The Phoenix on the Sword,” in which the sage Epemitreus thereby comes to warn King Conan that “your destiny is one with Aquilonia. Gigantic happenings are forming in the web and the womb of Fate…” and marks the king’s sword with the sign of the phoenix to protect him when Conan battles the baboon-like demon sent by Thoth-amon to assassinate him.

Here we have a transition from the dreamy work of Gonar and Tuzun Thune to a more nearly solid or physical aspect of the sorcery and magic Howard employs in the Conan series. This deeply physical and actual sense of the unnatural manifest is certainly there in “The Shadow Kingdom,” and it’s there in the character of Atla, the were-woman of the moors in “Worms of the Earth.” Mysticism and a sense of wonder inform the remarkable “The Tower of the Elephant,” which itself comes alive for us as one strange dream or nightmare. But “The Phoenix on the Sword” offers us both the mysticism of Epemitreus and the actual, ground-level sorcery of Thoth-amon, the slave of Ascalante when we first meet him but very soon, by means of the powerful Ring of Set, returned to the front rank of Stygian sorcerers. This ground-level sorcery is ancient in its wisdom and abilities, born in the darkness of tombs and in the pages of diabolic tomes. Surely Howard borrowed from Clark Ashton Smith as well as H.P. Lovecraft in developing such a faux-historical dimension to these evils, in the same way that Talbot Mundy’s influence is present in “The People of the Black Circle.”

The evil sorcery in “The Phoenix on the Sword” imperils Conan’s throne, and a look at the seventeen Conan stories published in Weird Tales in Howard’s lifetime shows us that they fall very generally into two types, the personal adventure story and the imperiled throne narrative. The personal adventure stories are those in which Conan finds himself in an immediately troublesome situation—for example, “Queen of the Black Coast,” “Xuthal of the Dusk,” and “The Pool of the Black One.” In these, Conan largely fights monsters. The imperiled throne stories, by contrast, are those in which malignant sorcerers provide an essential service to the events. These stories are large scale; armies clash as thrones rock. These are also the stories in which Howard frequently provides useful details regarding the geography of the Hyborian kingdoms: “The Phoenix on the Sword,” “The Scarlet Citadel” (the Kothian wizards Tsotha-lanti and Pelias), “Black Colossus” (Natohk the Veiled One, or Thugra Khotan), “A Witch Shall Be Born” (Salome, who has created the monster Thaug), “The People of the Black Circle” (the Black Seers of Yimsha), and “The Hour of the Dragon” (the resurrected Thothmekri in the temples of Luxor, the vampire Akivasha, and especially Xaltotun, who means to upend the earth with the Heart of Ahriman).

I find it interesting that, by and large, Howard incorporated sorcerers into his stories of clashing armies and threatened thrones. Not exclusively, however, as mentioned; there are no outnumbered armies in “The People of the Black Circle,” although we definitely have an imperiled throne; and there are neither an imperiled throne nor landscape-sized waves of armies in “Beyond the Black River,” which deals with Aquilonian territorial aggression, or in “Red Nails,” which features two warring communities. Both stories present formidable figures in Zogar Sag, Tascela, and Tolkemec—who actually does have a magic wand that shoots a crimson beam of mummification—as well as monsters. The scale of both stories, however, is human, not imperial or majestic.

Am I right in judging that Howard’s tales of royal tumultuousness largely coincide with his using in them powerful sorcerers? These characters are essential dramatically in stories of such scale. Likewise, there is no need dramatically for such wizards in “Rogues in the House,” for example, or “The Devil in Iron,” or “The Servants of Bit-Yakin.” Howard’s superior powers of invention provide other elements to strengthen these stories. As a rule, if a small-scale yarn requires a crawling monster or weird creatures blowing on pipes and turning living people into shrunken dolls, he goes for it. What Howard is doing thereby is delivering the goods, bringing gut punches of utter strangeness, to readers who expected just those things when they read Weird Tales. These readers—of Weird Tales and the science fiction pulps—were, after all, the first generation to be able to indulge regularly in such wonders and adventures. Edgar Rice Burroughs had broken new ground with his stories of John Carter and Tarzan, but the really odd stuff was in the horror and sf publications. Those readers weren’t as jaded as we have become; audiences now are immersed in this stuff. But imagine reading “The Shadow Kingdom” or “The Scarlet Citadel” or “The People of the Black Circle” for the first time when there was nothing else around like them. Their sorcerers are essential both to story structure and to Hyborian Age history. And if I recall correctly (I could certainly be wrong), only the Black Seers of Yimsha dress in the proverbial wizardly robes. We could probably imagine the others attired similarly, although, as Salome says in “A Witch Shall Be Born,” “Skin as many as you like. I would like a dress made of human hide.”

Howard with his sorcerers, and in his fiction generally, therefore delivered the goods in the manner Farnsworth Wright intended for the stories he bought for Weird Tales. In The Eyrie for the August 1926 issue, Wright offered the following in introducing that month’s published letters: