By: C. L. Moore
Appeared in: Weird Tales (October, 1934)
Character/series: Jirel of Joiry
In what seems to be an alternate medieval France, Jirel, ruler of Joiry, is dragged before her conqueror, Guillaume, who has just taken her castle and is lolling on its dais, surrounded by the corpses of its defenders. Red-haired and yellow-eyed, Jirel is a fearsome warrior woman who radiates defiance. Guillaume forces himself upon her and she responds by attempting to tear out his throat. He knocks her out and has her imprisoned in her own dungeon.
That’s not going to hold our heroine of course, so, after braining her guard with a stool, Jirel sets off on her mission of revenge. With the help of her confessor, Father Gervase, she goes down “into hell tonight to pray the devil for a weapon, and it may be I shall not return.” There is a stairway, you see, beneath the castle that leads to a nightmarish alternate dimension. Jirel and Father Gervase discovered this previously but we are given little detail of this first visit or any idea as to who built it and why. As Jirel descends into a world where time and space do not follow the regular laws, she encounters Lovecraftian beings and her own doppelganger before finally encountering the titular deity and its terrible curse.
Without giving too much away, the weapon Jirel seeks is no ordinary weapon and there is a price to be paid for its use resulting in an ending that some readers have found distasteful. Personally, I found it an interesting (if tragic) idea that ditches the predictability of a happy ending for something deeper making Black God’s Kiss a cut above the average hack-and-slash adventure story. Jirel isn’t just Conan with a sex change. Her battles tend to be more emotional rather than physical. The obstacles she overcomes are psychological in nature rather than actual monsters and her greatest strength lies not in her sword arm but in her ferocious willpower.
It was a while before the readers and contributors of Weird Tales pegged that ‘C. L. Moore’ stood for Catherine Lucille Moore. Women writing for the pulps were rare and most assumed Moore was a man. She had already made a name for herself with her tales of intergalactic smuggler and Han Solo prototype, Northwest Smith, and enjoyed regular praise from H. P. Lovecraft with whom she corresponded as part of his literary circle of ‘weird’ authors. Four more Jirel stories would appear in Weird Tales as well as a cross-over with Northwest Smith in the tale Quest of the Starstone. This was a collaboration with fellow Lovecraft Circle member Henry Kuttner. In 1940, Moore and Kuttner married and the couple would collaborate on many stories and novels until Kuttner’s death in 1958.
Jirel is one of the first examples of the ‘warrior woman’ character that has become a mainstay in sword and sorcery fiction. Conan creator, Robert E. Howard, had penned similar characters like Belit the pirate queen in Queen of the Black Coast as well as The Shadow of the Vulture‘s Red Sonya of Rogatino (who would lend her name to one of the genre’s most famous warrior women; Marvel Comics’ Red Sonja). Moore certainly picked up the sword and sorcery torch after Howard’s suicide in 1936, but even Howard had taken a few pointers from Moore. The two were in correspondence in 1935 and Howard sent her the typescript for his story Sword Woman; a tale of a strikingly similar character called Dark Agnes de Chastillon set in 16th century France. He had apparently written this after the publication of Black God’s Kiss and it is notable that, like Jirel of Joiry, Dark Agnes has flame-red hair. But then, so too did Red Sonya of Rogatino (who appeared several months before Black God’s Kiss), suggesting an interesting cycle of influence between the two authors.
The legacy of the warrior woman owes a great deal to C. L. Moore’s Jirel tales and it’s a shame she doesn’t receive more recognition for her influence on the genre. Howard would pen two more Dark Agnes tales but they were never published in his lifetime. His other warrior woman was Valeria in the Conan tale Red Nails who (unlike most of Howard’s material) actually made it into the movie Conan the Barbarian (1982) in which she was played by Sandahl Bergman. A Red Sonja movie followed in 1985 as well as various imitators like the Barbarian Queen movies starring Lana Clarkson whom producer Roger Corman called “the original Xena Warrior Princess”. Sure, Xena is more famous and Red Sonja was inspired by a tale written before Black God’s Kiss but there is no denying the effect Moore and Jirel had on the evolution of the sword woman. Not only that, Moore was by far one of the better writers to continue sword and sorcery and the spirit of Howard’s writing in the immediate aftermath of his tragic departure from the world.
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