This may have encouraged him to wrap up long-unresolved loose ends from the original series, such as the stranding of Walter Bayard in the world of Irish mythology, and to resolve the unaddressed complication introduced by L. Ron Hubbard's "borrowing" of Harold Shea for use in his novel The Case of the Friendly Corpse.
•
The "worlds" so examined include not only the Norse world of "The Roaring Trumpet," but those of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in "The Mathematics of Magic," Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (with a brief stop in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan) in "The Castle of Iron," the Kalevala in "The Wall of Serpents," and finally (at last), Irish mythology in "The Green Magician."
Harold Pinter | Harold Wilson | Shea Stadium | Harold Macmillan | Harold Bloom | Harold Godwinson | Harold Lloyd | Harold Stassen | Harold Prince | John Shea | J. Harold Ellens | Harold Holt | Sir Harold Hillier Gardens | Harold Washington | Harold Hitz Burton | Harold Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis | Harold Peto | Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle | Harold Arlen | Harold | Harold Budd | John O'Shea | Harold Eugene Edgerton | Harold Bauer | Shea Zellweger | Harold von Schmidt | Harold Robbins | Harold Laski | Harold Gould | Harold Gillies |
Modern fantasy literature has used the Matter of France far less than the Matter of Britain, although L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt set one of their Harold Shea stories (The Castle of Iron) in the world of the Matter of France, and Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions references the Matter of France.
Following publication of The Complete Compleat Enchanter, the Harold Shea series was continued by de Camp in partnership with Christopher Stasheff and other authors in the anthologies The Enchanter Reborn and The Exotic Enchanter.
In the stories collected as Wall of Serpents, the authors' protagonist Harold Shea visits two such worlds, those of Finnish and Irish mythology.