Jirel of Joiry: "The Black God's Kiss"

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.

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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
with an iron fist and a roving eye...

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.

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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.

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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