Jirel of Joiry: "The Dark Land"

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.

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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. 

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