In the first story, “Black God’s Kiss,” searching for an instrument of vengeance and victory over an invader who’s conquered her domain, Jirel dares to explore a dark tunnel underneath Joiry Castle, that leads to what proves to be a dimensional portal. Some critics have found fault with Jirel’s having romantic feelings toward her enemy in the first story, Guillaume, considering this a betrayal of feminist orthodoxy but I think her complex feelings are quite plausible psychologically, and lend the story a depth and tension that it wouldn’t have otherwise. Moore’s prose style here was influenced by Poe and Lovecraft (and she’s fully their equal) her plotting and her creation of vivid fantasy worlds, all significantly different from the others, are highly original, and she excels at evoking a mood of strangeness and menace –Jirel’s approach to Hellsgarde castle is a masterpiece of this sort. Like most people in her time, she’s a loyal daughter of the Church –but she’s not especially religious and wouldn’t make any claims to sainthood! Though she’s a veteran fighter of conventional battles, these stories involve her mostly in adventures of another sort, confrontations with dark sorcery, usually in otherworldly, extra-dimensional realms.

Jirel is a strong and complex character, the first in prose fantasy’s long and honorable list of butt-kicking heroines tough but not brutal, proud and hot-tempered, but possessing a gentle side, too. Jirel's journeys through unnatural landscapes and her battles with supernatural opponents are still wonderful to read, and though newcomers Red Sonja and Xena are more famous now, Jirel rules as the archetypal, indomitable redheaded swordswoman in chain mail and greaves, swinging her 'great two-edged sword.Originally published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in the late 1930s, Moore’s five stories featuring beautiful swordswoman Jirel, lady ruler of a feudal fiefdom in medieval France, were as germinal in the development of sword-and-sorcery fantasy as the work of her contemporary, Robert E. Were these stories written today, inevitably Jirel would have a lot of hot sex, but as they were first published in Weird Tales between 1934-1939, sexual attraction is mostly only vividly implied. Indeed, in Jirel's world, beauty = decadence = corruption. She's a good Catholic girl, stubbornly purposeful, relentless in pursuit of enemies or vengeance, hard-boiled and a little stupid, and cannot be distracted by mere physical attractiveness.

Moore created Jirel, ruler of Joiry, in reaction to the beefy total-testosterone blood-and-thunder tales of '30s pulp magazines, but Jirel is no anti-Conan. Chip in front of paperback cover!īlurb: “ C.