 When "Hellsgarde" was published in the April 1939 edition of Weird Tales, the C.L. Moore that weird fiction readers knew was almost gone. Bobby Derie points out that "Weird Tales had been sold and the offices moved to New York City; the editor Farnsworth Wright would soon be fired and, in 1940, would die. Moore’s connections to the magazine were fraying." Her final contribution to the Jirel mythos would also be her final contribution to the magazine. She married author Henry Kuttner in 1940 and collaborated with her new husband, mostly under his name, until his death in 1958 at the age of just 42. She had only a few years of fiction writing left, as she turned her prospects to teaching creative writing at the university level in southern California and then quit writing entirely in 1963. Moore stuck around the scene for a while, receiving the World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement Award in 1980 and the title of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master. She passed away in 1987 while battling Alzheimer's. And while her shelf was not completely devoid of hardware and she even has the honor of being one of the first women to be nominated for a Hugo Award, I can't help but feel like there's a dearth of C.L. Moore in the world.  There are no comprehensive biographies, no documentary films, no C.L. Moore House & Museum historical site in Indiana. She's certainly a big name to the insular sword & sorcery community and to retro science fiction lovers, but ever since I discovered her, I've felt like it's an injustice that she's limited to that. Her stuff in Weird Tales was generational. She produced incredible work in a very short amount of time. And then, for more than 80 years, Jirel sat quietly.  Art by Saprophial, from NESS #3 A few years back, publisher Oliver Brackenbury came knocking on the door of the C.L. Moore estate for his excellent New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine. There are a lot of interesting new, independent S&S mags popping up, by New Edge is the clear leader of the pack for me. Jirel's had a consistent presence in its pages; as early as the 2022 Issue #0 featured a piece from German Jirel banner-carrier Cora Buhlert entitled "C.L. Moore and Jirel of Joiry: The First Lady of Sword & Sorcery." That was actually my introduction to the character, causing me to track down and devour all of the original stories. But the more exciting thing was that issue #3 would feature a new Jirel story, written by speculative fiction author Molly Tanzer. The Moore estate apparently gave no guidelines and had no demands about how new Jirel material needed to be written. By all accounts, they were easy to work with and just seemed excited that there was new interest in the material. The first result of these talks was "Jirel and the Mirror of Truth," which debuted in 2024. Fret not about how difficult it might be to shake the dust of a character after so long; "Jirel and the Mirror of Truth" fully lives up to Moore's legacy. The action is exciting, Jirel's characterization is consistent, and the supernatural elements keep it grounded in the Weird Tales ballpark.  Art by Saprophial, from NESS #3 When writing her new story, the first in over eight decades, Molly realized that Jirel had always left her world and gone to another one in her original stories: an underworld, a magic painting, Pav's Dark Land, Hellsgarde, and then came back, so she wanted to reintroduce her by having her begin in this other world and then return to her own. Our lady of Joiry begins the narrative as the Lady of Coquaigne, seemingly a queen, in love with her consort Etizenne. The name Joiry means nothing to her. Tanzer adds the character of Thevin, Jirel's booze-loving stewardess, and I don't really think it's a spoiler to tell you that Etizenne is yet another dashing but diabolical man in the lady of Joiry's Tinder DMs. Thevin especially adds a lot to the story. It's really the first time Jirel's had another female as a confidant. When I first spoke to Molly about her new Jirel stories, I asked if she was trying to imitate Moore's style or just remain consistent with Moore's vision, and she said the latter. She doesn't try to ape C.L. Moore's writing style, but the change isn't jarring the way jumping from a Robert E. Howard to Robert Jordan Conan story might be. She still writes Jirel as a hothead with good intuition. And when it comes to style, Molly says she likes sword & sorcery because you can get florid in your prose and nobody tries to fight you. We're here for it.  Me meeting Molly Tanzer at a "And Side By Side They Wander" release event If you've read anything by Molly Tanzer, you know she's an extremely philosophical author. Her most recent novella, And Side By Side They Wander, is basically a sci-fi art heist that masks a really heady discussion of copies, art, reproduction, and AI. So imagine my surprise when I asked if she was trying to cook deep themes into her Jirel work and she said no, that she's just swinging blades around for fun. Actually, I'm not that surprised. One time I told John C. Hocking I spent his whole Conan and the Emerald Lotus novel thinking it was Conan Says No to Crack and he said no, too. So I've been way off before. Intentionally or not, Moore's work with Jirel is terribly interesting when it came to its themes, grappling with regret, bodily autonomy, revenge, and women's relationships to powerful men. I read a lot of those original stories as kind of obliquely feminist, but I'm not sure how much of that was purposefully done by C.L. Moore. It seems to me that "Jirel and the Mirror of Truth" picks up those threads. Because of the way the characters are released from a spell one by one and are originally broken from that spell through a conversation no one else can see or hear, I immediately thought that this was a depiction of whisper networks used by women to keep themselves safe from abusive men (you may know of those "Are we dating the same guy?" Facebook groups and the like). Sharing their experiences one at a time to clue people in breaks the spell a manipulator may have on a group. I bought this up to Molly at a brewery and she furrowed her brow, and stared past her beer for a moment before saying that wasn't what she'd had in mind, but that she didn't mind the interpretation. I've also asked her about the ending of the story, in which (actual spoilers ahead now) Jirel is shown by the strange Mirror of Truth an image of herself covered in glistening, silvery scars. The scars do not mar her image, but add to it, each one seemingly a beautiful stitch on her. I thought that this might be tied to one discovering a more true self-image, having broken free from one where you're seen as lesser. Perhaps you can finally appreciate yourself, scars and all. But nope, that seems to be my read on the story alone. Even when she says she's just doing it for fun, writing her take on the slightly meatheaded jock with terrible taste in men that is our lady Joiry, I think she can't help but produce really interesting stuff between the lines. If you haven't checked out New Edge, the digital editions are pretty reasonable in price, and the new Jirel novella, Blue Fire, has been recently fully-funded, so that should be out soon enough. 
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 We can argue about what the genre "sword & sorcery" is until the events of Jack Vance's Dying Earth actually come true if we want to. It's elusive, and like something being "punk" or "campy," people's definitions differ. Sure, a story populated with orcs, elves, and dragons seems to immediately move it into the "high fantasy" realm. But how much magic is too much magic? Can it be set in a fictional world, not just in an extremely young or old Earth? I'd argue it's probably more of a feeling than anything else. But I have a pretty solid marker of what separates sword & sorcery from other types of fantasy: S&S needs some kind of element of horror. Cozy worlds inhabit a lot of fantasy works, especially 2020s fantasy output. I don't know if I could tell you exhaustively what is and isn't S&S, but I know that a world where magic rings are sold in the market, where you want to live in Rivendell, where well-lit taverns are populated by friendly orcs... that's not it. Sword & sorcery needs seedy settlements, terrifying tombs, and un-behold-able black-eyed god creatures. As much as I love the Hyborian Age, I do not want to live there. I'd be dead in twenty minutes.  "Hellsgarde" debuted in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales. It had been a year and a half since the previous Jirel story, a Jirel-Northwest Smith collaboration between Moore and her future husband Henry Kuttner, and more than three years since the previous "pure" Jirel story, "The Dark Land." The first four stories had appeared over a timespan of just a year and two months, so I wonder if C.L. Moore why the long gap, and if she was having to dig deeper within herself to find ideas or gumption to finish this one. Additionally, she would marry Kuttner in less than a year and sadly disappear into his byline for most of the rest of her career. But "Hellsgarde" was a perfect Jirel story to leave us with. Not only is it by far the most horror-forward adventure of Moore's red-haired lady of Joiry, but it's also the best. In April 1939, horror was still coalescing into the form of the genre we know today. Frankenstein was over a hundred years old, Poe was nearing one hundred, Dracula was about fifty, and the first waves of horror had moved from silent German films into the first Universal Monster cycle, which was nearly finished. You can still see many vestiges of the Gothic genre in most of these works at the time, which was my favorite subject back in undergrad. You can see the influence especially in "Hellsgarde." We did not yet have the clearly-defined roles and lore belonging to vampires, ghosts, werewolves, zombies, etc. Instead, things were weird, which is one huge reason I'm drawn to this genre. You and I both know about a dozen ways to either kill or slow down a vampire, so it's usually not as scary. But what if your enemy is a set of strange, seemingly welcoming but ultimately off-putting normal people? What if you swore you saw them do something out of the corner of your eye, but when you look again, nothing seems to be there? That's the space "Hellsgarde" occupies. It is, in general, way scarier. At the same time horror was evolving, Weird Tales was inexorably on the downswing. The publishing company had been implementing tricks to try to improve sales and its champion Farnsworth Wright was not long for this world.  Jirel is pressured into finding Hellsgarde, a castle in a marsh that can seemingly only be approached at dusk. It is yet another controlling douchebag that Jirel- or at least the text of the story- is somewhat smitten with who sends her in that direction. In Hellsgarde is a mysterious treasure that Jirel must recover. The story is overflowing with atmosphere and spooks, starting from Jirel's approach to the castle. It appears as though there is a line of soldiers guarding the gate, but upon closer inspection, they're corpses propped up on the lances through which their entrails have been run. The inhabitants of the castle are no better. Alaric of Hellsgarde and his alleged family are creeps throughout. They're expecting the lady of Joiry when she arrives. This family unit is perhaps Moore's greatest Jirel antagonist because it works so well with her writing style. Every Jirel story features thoughts just entering Jirel's mind which we are privy to. There is much "Did I see...? Could it have been...? Surely not" throughout her adventures, and Moore uses that same convention to ratchet up the horror of Hellsgarde's hosts. "She could have sworn a look went round the semicircle before the fire, a swift, amused glance from face to face as if they shared a secret. Yet not an eye wavered from hers." In particular, I love the two young boys who terrorize Jirel with their very existence. "She saw the boys' features clearly for the first time, and her heart contracted a little. For naked evil was upon these two young faces. The others wore their shadow of deformity elusively, a thing more sensed than seen. It might be only a trick of her legend-fed imagination that put evil there. But the two young lads had the faces of devils, long faces with high cheekbones and slitted, lusterless eyes... What sort of company had she stumbled into, where the very children and dogs wore evil like a garment?" I've always loved how unsure of herself Jirel is. She's hotheaded and brash and frequently very confused, second-guessing herself, and that characterization is never used better than in "Hellsgarde." If you read all the stories in order, I can see that Moore's habit of resolving each conflict through a somewhat abstract battle of wills might have run a little bit thin by this time (Moore was always light on the "sword" in "sword & sorcery"), but the twists in this story about the true nature of the castle's residents more than makes up for it. "Hellsgarde" is Moore's crowning Jirel achievement. Bobby Derie, author of the best blog in the universe, Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, agrees that this one's a banger. I suspect it will always be overshadowed by "The Black God's Kiss" as the first tale, but it's her most bone-chilling story by far. It's the perfect encapsulation of the world created in her mind, a thing more sensed than seen.
And for the next 85 years, Jirel was gone. More on that soon.  It's hard not to consider modern ideas the impetus for a lot of C. L. Moore stories. Much of her work feels more recent than the 1930s, in the way that it anticipates second-wave feminism and even modern-day issues like consent. If I'm being a good former English major, I know that I shouldn't be presentist like that, but I think that speaks to the strength of C. L. Moore's creations: that they feel so prescient almost one hundred years later. "The Dark Land" is the fourth Jirel of Joiry story penned by Moore, appearing in the January 1936 issue of Weird Tales, sandwiched between a Paul Ernst Doctor Satan story and the second part of the serialized Hour of the Dragon. I can't find much about when Moore began "The Dark Land" but its seed apparently began with a drawing- the same one that graces the title page of the story in Weird Tales. She did her own illustration and meant to attach it to "The Black God's Kiss," but didn't end up using it. It worked similarly with "The Dark Land," and it seems she built the story around the idea of using the illustration again. After a bit of a dip in quality in "Jirel Meets Magic," the lady of Joiry returns with a vengeance here in what might be my second-favorite of the bunch. Jirel has been magically stolen out of her deathbed, bleeding out from a stab wound, when she's suddenly transported into the world of Romne, the Dark Land lorded over by the dark man (wizard? devil? god? demigod? dungeon master?), Pav. Pav is possibly the most terrifying antagonist in any of the Jirel stories, embodying this deep, endless blackness while also physically echoing pop culture depictions of Satan (short pointy beard, wide smile, halo of flame). He oscillates between a cool suaveness and a literal furnace blast of anger, based on how Jirel responds to him. Pav wants Jirel to shack up with him, but only if she wants to, oddly enough. He's determined to convince her to give herself over willingly. "What I take I do not lightly give up. No, there is in you a heady violence that I desire, and will not surrender. But I do not wish you against your will."  Croatian artist Saša Đurđević is doing the most incredible Jirel work today. This whole premise seems to me to anticipate the issue of bodily autonomy, not that I think that phrase even existed in 1936. In a lot of ways, it also anticipates the Roy Thomas version of Red Sonja, who will have sex with a man, but only if he bests her in combat (which Bobby Derie noticed as well). I don't think body autonomy is necessarily the right word here, though. Jirel, throughout her stories, sometimes refers to herself as "Joiry." She sits on the throne and is not just the Lady of Joiry, she is its whole. She does that here in "The Dark Land," too. "Do you think to take Joiry like some peasant wench to answer to your whims? I'm Joiry, man! You must be mad!" Jirel is Joiry and Joiry is Jirel. And interestingly enough, in this story, Pav is Romne and Romne is Pav. In this mystical place that is not a place, it's somehow an extension of Pav. The story doesn't really go into how this works (thank god) but Pav appears to be omnipresent and omniscient in Romne, able to mold the world to his liking with merely a thought. "For Pav was the center of that inferno's might, and he could be no human thing who radiated such an infinity of power. What was he? What could he be?"  With Jirel being Joiry and Pav being Romne, this question of marriage and ownership also becomes one of sovereign nations invading the other- a struggle between Joiry and Romne, so perhaps bodily sovereignty would be the better term to label what this story is about. It takes on a larger scope than just a conflict between two people, and brings it slightly more in line with most of the rest of Moore's Jirel stories, where there's usually an invading man from another realm. Jirel is defending Joiry by asserting her own agency.
And I haven't even gotten to the corpse witch, who is cool as fuck. I watched the New Edge Sword & Sorcery livestream with current Jirel author Molly Tanzer discussing this story with a few other writers, and they loved the corpse witch as much as I do. I'm inclined to believe that the story sets up enough contrasts (the white against the darkness of Romne, the line about how the witch seems so "apart" from the rest of the landscape) that she is Jirel's predecessor: the last woman that Pav decided to marry. It's cool as hell. By this point, "Hellsgarde" (which is up next) is my favorite of the Joiry stories, follow by "Black God's Kiss," "The Dark Land," "Black God's Shadow," and finally "Jirel Meets Magic." Anyway, I'm off to start a doom band called Corpsewitch.  Art by Clade Mirya I seem to be somewhat in the minority in thinking that "Jirel Meets Magic" is probably the worst of the Jirel of Joiry stories. It's a little bit hard to tell since there aren't a lot of people out there writing about Jirel, but most of the blogs and other reviews I can find really enjoy this piece, perhaps with the exception of Bobby Derie over at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, who calls it "a very generic heroic fantasy story" and "a solid, enjoyable potboiler." Published in the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales, this is the third Jirel story that had made the page, following October 1934's "The Black God's Kiss" and December '34's "Black God's Shadow." Bobby includes a quote from an HP Lovecraft letter that I think really nails it: "July W T is pretty mediocre—though it was refreshing to see Hectograph Eddie with a new plot. The Moore item was excellent—even though it seems to shew a tendency of C L M’s to drop into a rut." I agree: Jirel seems to be in a bit of a rut.  Looking back through the Weird Tales letters column, "The Eyrie" (which I always want to pronounce like "eye-ree," but I commonly hear people pronounce it the exact same as "eerie" and the WT staff themselves apparently pronounced it as a rhyme with "dairy"), it's clear that readers contemporary to publication also really loved this story. I love old-fashioned letters columns like this. I imagine that in a time like the 1930s, it provided a real sense of community in readership and a total rush if you happened to see your name published in your favorite mag. Clifford Shine of my home of Denver wrote in the September '35 issue, "My favorite stories in the July issue are Jirel Meets Magic by C. L. Moore, and The Avenger from Atlantis by Edmond Hamilton. My two favorite authors are Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore." B.M. Reynolds from up in Massachusetts wrote, "C. L. Moore, with a long line of successes already to her credit, certainly gave us the best to date in Jirel Meets Magic. Moore's stories are following, more and more, a trend toward sheer fantasy, of which there is a pitiful lack in present-day fiction. Parts of this story were strongly reminiscent of A. Merritt's imaginative descriptions, and I hardly believe a better compliment could be given a writer than to compare one with the incomparable." Carleton C. Ames from Minneapolis wrote, "I have just finished the July 1935 issue. The leading story therein, in my opinion, is C. L. Moore's Jirel Meets Magic. As far as that goes, Moore's stories are the best that you have published." A letter-writer known only as C. B. H. from NYC said, "Jirel Meets Magic was the best Jirel story, in my estimation, that I have ever read. Jirel is my favorite character." And sometimes writers ignorant of the fact that C. L. stood for "Catherine Louise" would sometimes assume that Moore was a guy while heaping praise on her, as Jerry Laird from Topeka does in the August '35 Eyrie: "I find your magazine highly entertaining, especially those masterpieces of fantasy by C. L. Moore. His inimitable style and word pictures, combined with an unbounded imagination, certainly put him in a class with Merritt and Lovecraft. Julbi, in my opinion, surpassed anything else he has written, with the exception, perhaps, of Shambleau." I wish I felt the same way about "Jirel Meets Magic." In speaking with modern-day Jirel author Molly Tanzer recently, she noted that in every Jirel story, Jirel enters some kind of magical land (except in one of hers!), and you can see that pattern here. In the first two stories, she crossed over into a hellish dreamland deep underground. In this one, she goes into a purple-skied world through a magic window. Soon, we'll see her go into The Dark Land and then into Hellsgarde, but all in good time. The setting here is, at least in my estimation, not quite as alien-beautiful as her underground hellscape or as utterly terrifying as the Dark Land, or as indelible as Hellsgarde. Unfortunately, I don't find Jarisme to be quite as engaging of an antagonist either, nor Giraud, probably because their emotional stakes with Jirel aren't ratcheted super fucking high like they are in previous stories. Also, what's with this title? Jirel has met magic before, at least twice. Why is this the one that's called "Jirel Meets Magic?" I know it's not that C.L. Moore had forgotten- page 36 of the story says, "Jirel shrugged after a moment's bewilderment. She had met magic before." Don't count me a total naysayer, though. This story still has a bit of fun to be had. Specifically, it continues to show off Moore's skills as a fantastic character artist. Jirel's early exchange with Jarisme in which Jirel "smiled her sweetest, most poisonous smile" is filled with great character moments. The two of them spar verbally for a moment, and Jirel shows that she would make a decent battle rapper, responding to a question essentially asking "You think I can be bought?" with "You will forgive me. At the first glance at you I did not think your price could be high..."
I've always wondered if Jirel was less of a favorite character to Moore than Northwest Smith, and so perhaps she was a little less invested in the yellow-eyed maiden of Joiry than other characters. Either way, even C. L. Moore's most mediocre is pretty much anyone else's best.  I'm going to get sentimental today. So if that's not for you, I understand. I knew this guy in college named Matt Stevenson. My wife actually knew him a lot better than I did. Matt was Jewish and everyone knew that about him, partially because he wore a kippah daily. There were a lot of Matts at her college, so people would refer to him as "You know, Matt" and cup their hand on the back of the crown of their head. This is relevant because it became clear during their college years that one of their acquaintances, a guy they'd had classes with and hung with occasionally, was a Nazi. I'm not using that just as a pejorative; his name was Derek Black and he was the son of Don Black, the founder of Stormfront, which was (and maybe still is) the largest white supremacist website in the world. His godfather was David Duke, Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.  When the news on their college forum broke, Derek got ostracized pretty much immediately. This was a very liberal south Florida college, so his social circle shrank to effectively nothing overnight. A car the same make and model as Derek's (but not actually Derek's) was vandalized, my wife remembers flipping him off from across the quad. Matt was a unique thinker, though. He found it odd how Derek had made friends at their school, even without disclosing his beliefs, which he had gone from tacitly not-bringing-up to completely concealing during his time at school. He'd noticed that Derek had become close with international students, queer students, and, you know, a Jewish guy like him. He had an idea. Matt hosted Shabbat dinners in his dorm frequently. He'd invite friends over, they would eat, play some board games, and have the kind of heady philosophy discussions you only want to have when you're in college. So one week, he invited Derek over. He wasn't sure he'd come, but Matt explicitly instructed everyone to not bring it up if he did, and just see how things went. Much to his surprise, Derek came, bearing a bottle of wine to share. To everyone's surprise, Derek came back the next week, and then the next. They weren't so sure what to think at first: was Derek cultivating a group of multicultural friends to use as a shield when people called him a racist? Was he trying to get dirt on them to use later? Surprisingly, no. After a while, Matt started bringing up Derek's beliefs to him and discussing. Over time, Derek not only softened his beliefs, but began to outright reject his upbringing. He told his dad he didn't want to call into his propaganda radio show anymore. He deleted his accounts on the white nationalist boards he was on. Matt became one of his closest friends and Derek has gone on to become an anti-racist speaker and activist. He changed his name and a whole lot else, too.  I teach a quarter-long Holocaust literature unit every school year to 8th graders, and one time we interviewed Matt as a part of it. Why did he take the time to show kindness and patience to Derek, who deserved it least of all? Matt told me that as part of his faith, he believes that everyone has a spark of pure goodness at their core, put there by there creator. This has stuck with me ever since, and I find a lot of truth in it even as an atheist who was raised Lutheran. I try to remember what Matt told me, and to keep that spark of pure goodness in mind when I talk to people. I think C.L. Moore understood this concept and baked it into Jirel of Joiry, most specifically in her second story "Black God's Shadow," published in the December 1934 Weird Tales, just a few months after "The Black God's Kiss." "Black God's Shadow" is a straight sequel to "The Black God's Kiss" and picks up in the immediate aftermath of the first story. Something within Jirel rumbles with something like regret for how she quite literally damned Guilluame's soul with the magic of the black god's kiss (I mean, Guilluame damned himself plenty, but it was Jirel who kind of cut the brakes on his one-way ride into to Hell). Jirel returns to the underground dreamworld, which has morphed to maintain its creepy, off-putting nature. Even though we've been there once before, it doesn't feel like we can ever anticipate the next thing Jirel will encounter. That brings me to where I started this blog post. When Jirel finds Guilluame, we get this passage: "And what subtle torment the black god's kiss had wrought upon him! To dwell in the full, frightful realization of his own sins, chained to the actual manifestation, suffering eternally in the obscene shape that was so undeniably himself—worst and lowest self. It was just, in a way. He had been a harsh and cruel man in life. But the very fact that such punishment was agony to him proved a higher self within his complex soul—something noble and fine which writhed away from the unspeakable thing—himself. So the very fineness of him was weapon to torture his soul, turned against him even as his sins were turned."  Guilluame deserves his punishment: the text says that what he's writing in is nothing but his own sins. But Jirel fights this ugliness with all of her positive emotions and is clearly at times protected in the story by her very human dignity. She looks into evil periodically and knows intuitively that it cannot touch her because of her goodness. Now, Jirel's not perfect (that's what makes her interesting!) but she has lots of goodness within her. I was talking to current Jirel author Molly Tanzer recently and she brought up that some people dismiss Jirel as being just a "girl who fell in love with her rapist." I think that's far too simplistic of a reading. In this story, Jirel is seeing the humanity of someone who didn't deserve it. She does this not because Guilluame isn't bad, but because she is good. I have a hard time imagining any other pulp hero doing that. I also find it hard to believe that with morally-moving stories like this (Is it just me? Could be.) that people can dismiss all of pulp as a format or S&S as a genre out of hand. Philosophically, this reminds me of David Foster Wallace, Superman, or certain scripture. "Black God's Shadow" reads as a story about finding peace within yourself by moving on and forgiving those who've hurt you in the past, completely disconnected from whether or not that person deserves it, since it's not about them at all. If you're just referring to the plot events of the story, "Black God's Shadow" is has the least going on out of any Jirel story, but the character work within it and many of the lines (the black god was "coldly inimical to all things human") more than make up for any sort of lack of sword & sorcery romping. Please don't get me wrong or take me too literally here; I'm not saying that the way to defeat the Nazis is to befriend them. I'm not saying that if someone traumatizes you that you need to forgive them. Far from it, in fact. But I am pointing out that there is a higher ideal towards which we can strive. It's probably unrealistic in most situations in life, but it does cause me to get a little worked up and feel connected to a 92 year-old pulp story, which speaks to C.L. Moore's skill as a writer. She puts a lot of heart into Jirel, which still beats nearly a century later. Cora Buhlert, the writer whose work introduced me to C.L. Moore, has a tremendous piece about this story that is far more eloquent than mine. Read it here.   Jirel of Joiry, one of the most stunningly original sword & sorcery characters I've ever read, seems to have come about by a series of accidents. Accident the first: author Catherine Lucille Moore, eventually known under her pen name C.L. Moore, was sick a lot as a kid. Without really knowing how she came into contact with them, the magazine Weird Tales became her hospital reading companion. Moore remembers that, like most literate people of her day, her family thought Weird Tales was trash, the absolute bottom of the barrel when it came to literary quality. But she loved them. And as she got older, she continued to read in that vein, if not WT itself, as her father would sneak her Barsoom and Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, away from her mother's disapproving eye. Accident the second: Moore was working on her typing speed at work one day when a proto-Jirel came dashing out of her imagination to her. After having to quit college after three semesters and find a job, most likely due to the Great Depression, Moore was lucky to find work at a bank, for jobs were hard to come by. One afternoon, when she had nothing to do but desperately wanted to look busy, she began practicing some typing exercises. She quickly grew bored with quick brown foxes jumping over lazy dogs, so she started to type up fragments of poetry she remembered from class. And then, she typed a few sentences about a "red, running woman," imagining a figure from 13th century France. It amused her. Why's she running?, she asked herself. Accident the third is more of just an unintentional product. Moore began typing up a couple of stories, stating with one about Northwest Smith, a Han Solo-type (or wouldn't it be more appropriate to say that Han Solo is a Northwest Smith-type?) of space ranger she began like this: Northwest Smith was a hard-boiled guy  That's the dorkiest shit ever and I'm so here for it. But, back to the accident. Moore shopped around her first Northwest Smith story, "Shambleau," and a story called "Were-Woman." "Were-Woman" was flatly rejected by Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales, but "Shambleau" was accepted. In her kitchen in Indiana, she opened a letter from Wright, complete with the information that the story had been accepted and she would be paid $100 for it. Moore screamed her head off, causing her dad to rush into the kitchen, thinking that his daughter might be the victim of some attack. But no, just $100 dollars richer, which Moore says felt like ten thousand dollars to her. The accident here is that "Shambleau" was accepted because it was so different than the rest of what Weird Tales was printing. It pulses with sexual tension between Smith and then gorgon he comes into contact with. A lot of pulp stories are sexual or salacious, but "Shambleau" approaches the erotic, which Moore wasn't trying to do. She always maintained that she wasn't really trying to imbue theme or specific philosophy into her stories, nor did she seem them as pure escapism, but that she just wrote what she wanted to read. That unique fingerprint of hers, found in "Shambleau" first, would be present for the rest of her career. That brings us to the lady of Joiry. In the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, "The Black God's Kiss" appeared as the lead and cover story. It's the same issue featuring the second part of Robert E. Howard's "The People of the Black Circle" and Clark Ashton Smith's story "The Seven Geases." In this story, we meet Jirel, lady of Joiry, which is a fictional hegemon in France, some time in the 13th to 15th century. Jirel is a capable leader and fighter, opening the story having been captured at the end of a battle, her helmet ripped off by the enemy to reveal her curly mop of red hair and her blazing yellow eyes. Joiry has been invaded, and it looks like they've lost.  Guilluame, the leader of the conquering force, has taken control of her throne room. After ripping off her helmet ("Unshell me this lobster" should be used more often), he kisses her right there in her own hall. As has been reported many times over the years, this was essentially as far as Weird Tales was willing to go with the salacious content, but that the kiss should essentially be read as a sexual assault. That's what it would be in real life, too. Interestingly, the text of the story is somewhat infatuated with Guilluame and Jirel clearly thinks he's hot, but because of this violation, Jirel burns with a hatred for Guilluame and vows revenge. She goes to a priest friend of hers named Father Gervase to be blessed before essentially venturing down into Hell through the depths of her castle so that she can find an appropriate weapon with which to kill Guilluame. This is one of my favorite "weird" elements of this story: the passage through which Jirel goes is a round tunnel that she and Father Gervase discovered some time ago. It winds deep into the earth, and whatever created it seems to have not done so for human feet. After an indeterminable amount of time in which gravity itself seems to flip-flop on her, Jirel appears in a dark land of horror and mystery shrouded in eternal night.  After a few jaunts this way and that, she finds a strange temple-like structure containing a black god statue. As Jirel kisses the statue, an upsetting evil seems to worm its way into her body. Both physically and spiritually uncomfortable, she hauls ass back up to the world of the living in order to get the toxin out of her. As she clamors into her throne room, the story characterizes Guilluame as "magnificent" in his armor, on her throne. It repeats his name several times, unclear if it's done in an astounded or hateful way. Jirel then collapses into his arms in a way that isn't not intimate, while kissing him for a second time. This kiss passes the evil from her into Guilluame, who writhes and wretches for a moment before dying horrifyingly. The very thing that Guilluame sought from her- her sexuality- is the very weapon that she uses to turn on Guilluame to end his life. And after all of that, Jirel bows her head to hide her own tears. The Jirel that Moore creates is such a human character that she stands head and shoulders above most other S&S protagonists. She's remarkably remorseful of some things, like Guilluame's death. There's this old Jack Stauber YouTube video where a kid asks his mom, "Why do I miss people who hurt me?" Jirel was blazing with hatred and revenge, but in the end doesn't find any satisfaction and even seems to think that she might've gone too far (when you read the sequel, "Black God's Shadow," Moore doubles down on this idea). It doesn't give you any easy themes like telling you Jirel absolutely was wrong for venturing into Hell to acquire a vile weapon and get revenge on her rapist. Instead, it lets you sit in her uncertainty with Jirel. I think this is what makes Jirel so compelling to me. She's powerful, brave, a sick fighter, but she's also frequently afraid, uncertain, confused, and very realistic. Jirel cries four different times in this story, each time having been moved to tears by something horrifically sad in Hell. And maybe Guilluame wasn't such a bad guy if we'd gotten to know him; maybe he was exactly the piece of shit he starts this story as. I'm not sure. Characters like Conan and Kane sometimes experience overwhelming, tough emotions (like Conan's loss of his lover Bêlit and Kane's overwhelming loneliness) but they're never nearly as realistic as Jirel. She's incredibly true-to-life and it makes her one of the best sword & sorcery characters I've ever read.  Fantastic Jirel art by Clade Mirya |
AuthorHey, I'm Dan. This is my project reading through the career of everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character, Conan the Cimmerian, in chronological order. 
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