It is not quite accurate to label The Shadow Kingdom, which introduced Weird Tales readers to King Kull in the August 1929 issue (the untitled vignette many of us first met as Exile of Atlantis, with its glimpse of the Kull who would be king, was not published until 1967), the original sword-and-sorcery story. To do so is to overlook an earlier masterpiece, Lord Dunsany’s 1910 The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth, in which a swordsman invades the hellish, dragon-guarded stronghold of an archmage.
