Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle

Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle was published in 1928 and revives a strange historical conceit. Tarzan stumbles across the descendants of medieval English Crusaders who got lost on their way to the Holy Land in the twelfth century and settled in the remote African mountains, where they have maintained a working Norman-French feudal society for seven hundred years. Two of these mountain settlements, Nimmr and the City of the Sepulcher, have been at war with each other since their founding.

Tarzan is captured first by one side and then becomes involved in their generations-old conflict. A separate plotline follows a contemporary African expedition that includes a young American woman who eventually becomes the love interest for the rightful Nimmr heir, Sir James Hunter Blake. The historical anachronism is the central joke of the book, and Burroughs plays it surprisingly straight. The medieval-Africa setting was unusual enough that the book has stayed in print as a curiosity even when the main series has fallen out of fashion.