Episode 6: The Black God's Barbarian

I just want to crush my enemies See them driven before me And hear the lamentations of their partners Who are probably also my enemies because I assume that, like my family, they share such burdens equitably.

Ben “Modern Barbarian” Heath, Esquire, Personal Communication

Welcome back, everyone, to Something About Dragons. Today, we’ll be discussing two towering titans of prewar pulp. Pulp provocateurs. Righteous raconteurs. Short story samurai. Wicked wielders of weaponized writing! Puissant purveyors of the purplest of prose!

If it wasn't already clear, today we're continuing our wandering through the fetid jungles of the pulps! We’ll be discussing the works of Catherine Lucille Moore, the First Lady of Pulp Fantasy, creator of the inestimable Jirel of Joiry, aka C.L. Moore because sexism. And also, we shall be covering the inescapable Robert E. Howard, creator of Kull the Conqueror, Solomon Kane, and some obscure character named Conan the Cimmerian that I'm sure will never get multiple 80's movies.

It'll never catch on.

This episode is, in some ways, a continuation of our last episode. Last time, we discussed (mostly) pulp fiction and the place of one Clark Ashton Smith, a prolific author who melded Lovecraftian imagery and the Cthulu Mythos with the emerging sword and sorcery strain of fantasy fiction and really pioneered a template for later writers, everyone from Howard to Fritz and Lieber to Robert Jordan. We also briefly discussed Hope Mirralees’s masterwork, Lud-in-the-Mist. I STILL feel bad about short-changing Mirralees, so here’s another pitch for you to go read Lud-in-the-Mist. I’ll be here when you get back.

Anyway, both authors in this week’s episode are pulp writers, first and foremost. There’s an argument to be made that Clark Ashton Smith was a literary writer selling to the pulps, since he initially garnered attention writing poetry. However, Moore and Howard are no-doubt-about-it, emphatically pulp authors and did a lot to set pulp fantasy on its path for the next couple of decades, through the 1950’s.

In a very important sense, our look at CL Moore and Howard today is going to show a progression of the pulp stream of the emerging fantasy genre. We’re moving on from folks like Gertrude Barrows Bennett (aka, Francis Stevens), Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Abraham Merritt and into an era where a market for fantasy fiction, particularly short fantasy fiction, is becoming more established. The market becomes more codified and specialized after a period of pretty wild experimentation to see what would sell.

Also, as the market becomes more established, so, to a certain extent, do the stories. The time of Merritt, Stevens, Lovecraft, and Smith was a time of experimentation and overall “weird” fiction. Stories were often published in all-story pulps, fighting for space and attention with romances, detective stories, general fiction, etc. After folks like CL Moore, Howard, and others, the medium evolved into a more-or-less stable and comfortable stasis where fans would get what they expected. And, as we discussed last week, a significant part of that evolution can be credited to the pulp magazine, Weird Tales.

To a certain extent, pulp fantasy can be divided into before Weird Tales began publishing in 1923 and after. If you want to be really pedantic about it, Weird Tales really becomes itself when Farnsworth Wright took over as editor in late 1924. Farnsworth really embraced the Weird Tales mission statement of “the Unique Magazine” and the content was better for it, though let’s not delve too deeply into other aspects of the business like the finances, labor practices, production schedule, profitability, etc. So, prior to Weird Tales, you had certain authors publishing fantasy (or fantasy-adjacent) stories in all-story pulps like Argosy, or maybe horror pulps, etc. but surrounded by non-genre stories. Lovecraft, for example, published a lot of his early fiction – “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”, “The Cats of Ulthar”, or “Nyarlathotep” – in literary or amateur fiction magazines.

Even “Dagon” – the first of the Cthulu mythos stories – was only re-published by Weird Tales after first appearing in a periodical called The Vagrant. So, there are “weird tales”, lowercase, flying around, but no capital-W, capital-T Weird Tales magazine wherein the early 20th century fantasy fan can go to get their weird fantastical fiction fix.

Truly a dark time with little literary culture.

After the establishment of Weird Tales, you have a go-to publication for all your weird fiction and proto-sword and sorcery. Which goes on to inspire imitators and other later pulps as well. Though it should be said that later imitator pulps like Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, Fantastic, or Unknown were often more expansive, often offering both sci-fi and fantasy, though the genre divisions weren’t as stark at the time. Pulp sci-fi, to the extent that pulp sci-fi and pulp fantasy could really be separated at this time, was a genre, if anything, more dependent on pulp magazines in its long-term development, but it didn’t really boom until later in the 1920’s and into the 1930’s, largely through the efforts of Hugo Gernsback at Amazing Stories, then later pulps like Astounding (eventually Analog). But that’s another podcast. Here at Something About Dragons, we are definitively moving into the post-Weird Tales world of fantasy literature.

As I have said in previous posts, I am a sucker for pulp fiction, even more so as I get older. Revisiting a lot of these stories is immensely entertaining and I’m discovering some depth I missed as a younger reader. While I feel like I’m covering the main high points of the early fantasy pulp era – Smith, Moore, Howard, etc. – and we’ll be coming back to later short story writers in the 40’s and 50’s like Fritz Lieber, L. Sprague de Camp, and Fletcher Pratt, I still feel like I’m doing a disservice to the depth of the pulps. I’m skipping, for example, Robert Bloch, who offers an alternative to Howard’s Weird Tales contributions, though I find his early writing more derivative of Lovecraft than someone like Clark Ashton Smith, though still thoroughly entertaining. Also, I’ve skipped over Seabury Quinn and his supernatural detective, Jules de Grandin, an obvious precursor to modern day urban fantasy like the Dresden Files or Kim Harrison, though Quinn’s stories haven’t aged all that well, in my opinion. I’ve barely mentioned August Derleth, except in passing, though he’ll come up a bit later.

I’ve even skipped Gertrude Barrows Bennett (aka, Francis Stevens) a major Lovecraft influence and author of dystopian and dark fantasy from the 19-teens. She is probably the one who deserves the most attention and I might do a supplemental. Suffice to say, that we’re going to brush past a lot of important authors and interesting stories as we go through this history. Otherwise, we’d never finish. But, if you’re interested in reading more about the pulps, and Weird Tales specifically, I can’t recommend https://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/ enough. Also, www.pulpfest.com. Both excellent sources.

To continue, so far in this project, we have talked a lot about the development of the genre, how class, race, and tone have developed in the genre. How certain books remained obscure classics, but could, potentially, have provided an alternate foundational text for the modern fantasy genre. History is an n of 1, but everyone loves a good 'what if?' story. More recently, we’ve started discussing how the genre began to solidify and coalesce during the Roaring Twenties, as books like The Worm Ouroboros or The King of Elfland's Daughter are unambiguously fantasy books, even if no one is describing the genre that way yet.

So, while we’re moving into the post-Weird Tales world of pulp fantasy, we are, not coincidentally, also moving into the period where we get characters who start dominating the pulp fantasy, not just authors. As I said above, after the early pulp writers and the publication of Weird Tales, you get a gradual consolidation of fantasy pulp fiction. Instead of CAS’s tales set in familiar settings with different characters, you start to get familiar characters in different settings or different aspects of the same secondary world. Jirel of Joiry and Conan really exemplify this pulp trend toward the ongoing stories of familiar characters, along with others like Dunsany’s Jorkins or Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin.

In other words, we are starting to bring some of the iconic characters into the genre. Specific, fully-realized characters who carry their story over multiple sequels and throughout a broader secondary world. Excepting obviously Tarzan, and maybe Dorothy, we really haven’t touched on specific or iconic characters. The Recluse was a great protagonist in House on the Borderlands, but he isn’t carrying a series. The characters in The Wind in the Willows are great, but they’re archetypes. Even Dorothy is kind of a blank slate to project on to, which is a common enough thing in children’s literature now. This is especially true in recent young adult fantasy – looking at you, Katniss.

The other early pulps – Smith, Francis Stevens, Lovecraft, A. Merrit – had great individual characters within stories – the Sorcerer Nimeria in The Dark Eidolon, for one. A few characters might even get passing mentions in later stories or maybe a sequel or two, but we’re entering into the time period where the writers begin to realize how strongly readers would connect with specific characters.

And publishers realized how quickly a Conan story would make copies of Weird Tales fly off the newsstand.

So let's dive into the nature of protagonists and iconic characters within the genre through the lens of two excellent characters: CL Moore’s Jirel of Joiry and R.E. Howard’s Conan.

A quick aside before we begin: yes, Howard also wrote Solomon Kane and Kull the Conqueror, two characters that are almost as iconic, at least within the genre. Honestly, I love Kull. Even that godawful late 90’s movie with current fascist apologist Kevin Sorbo. But, seriously, come on. It’s Conan. Also, yes, C.L. Moore is responsible for Northwest Smith – a precursor to Han Solo, Mal Reynolds, and Roland Deschain. Seriously, if I were a little more broadminded on my definition of fantasy, we might be doing Northwest Smith stories.

If Han Solo were played by Errol Flynn.

However, Mercedes Lackey never wrote a filk about Northwest Smith.

More folk songs about obscure fantasy characters please.

So we’re going to talk about Conan and Jirel because they set the template for many characters that come after them, including approximately 99% of everyone’s first D&D character. Or, at least, mine. RIP Condar, you magnificent expy.

Another quick aside, we’re going to be talking about sexism throughout the rest of this episode – you can’t really address the Jirel stories without it – and we’re going to talk about the racism of Conan towards the end of the episode. Both the sexism and racism are there, and Howard’s racial shorthand is arguably more damaging and influential than Burroughs’ racist eugenics. If Burroughs marked the trailhead of how race was depicted in the genre, Howard blazed the trail and paved it with lazy racial coding. And the way he discusses black cultures will (or at least should) be disconcerting to a modern reader. Though, to be clear, there’s far more to recommend Howard’s work in my opinion to the median genre fan than Burroughs’ Tarzan or John Carter or even Pellucidar. Also, Howard’s racism is less all-encompassing. Howard regularly uses race as a shorthand for groups – particularly Conan’s antagonists – and a 20th century racial hierarchy is there. The racism is persistent and unavoidable, but, in my opinion, more manageable than Burroughs. Your mileage may vary. Just a head’s up.

Anyway, let’s start with Jirel. Swordswoman extraordinaire and ruler of Joiry. Gets five stories between 1935 and 1938. Six, if you count the “Quest of the Starstone” cross-over with Moore and Henry Kuttner’s (Kuttner is Moore’s husband and a sci-fi author in his own right) character Northwest Smith, but I think of that story as more of a NW Smith story. Jirel basically gets an extensive cameo.

The overwhelming themes in the Jirel stories are rage and will. We often come into a Jirel story – “Jirel Meets Magic” for example – after Jirel has just been fighting or leading her soldiers into combat. Despite being a foundational work of the emerging "sword and sorcery" genre, we honestly get very little of Jirel swinging her sword on-stage in her stories. Jirel's will is her weapon. And she fuels that will with her anger. Lots, and lots, of anger. CL Moore makes her a redhead, of course.

But it says something that the angry, strident character is a woman, written by a woman. Conan, Kull, even NW Smith (a collaboration with her husband) are more confident, a little cocky. Attractive competence is the key feature. There is something of the beginnings of the "Heinlein hero" in those characters. Heinlein borrowed a LOT from NW Smith, something I didn’t fully grasp until these recent re-reads.

By contrast, Jirel is angry, frustrated, literally chasing sorcerers across dimensions to get revenge for them for killing her vassals. Not for money or obligation, like Conan in, say, “Rogues in the House”, but because she is personally, emotionally motivated. From a sense of honor or obligation, something Conan rarely feels. Apart from a few scenes – most notably the finale of “The Black God’s Kiss” which we’ll talk about more in a minute – we mostly see Jirel in full-on determinator-mode.

Which, I want to be absolutely clear, is awesome. There’s plenty to be angry about regarding the place of women in society, particularly in the 1930’s when you’re writing using your initials from a concern that readers don’t want to hear fantasy stories from authors like you. It’s also interesting – and important – that Moore choose to have Jirel’s anger not just fuel her martial prowess – at least not “on-screen” much – but to be a source of fuel for her willpower, her willingness to chase opponents literally across dimensions to punish them, save herself or her realm, or just to win. She’s not a rage-filled warrior. Jirel isn’t a disciple of Ares or Achilles post-Patroclus. Jirel is determined to protect and defend what’s hers – be it her vassals or her free will – against anyone. Or, quite literally, die trying.

First edition, published by Paperback Library, 1969. From the good ole days of boob armor and chainmail skirts for some reason? How do you ride a horse in that?

No box marked “other.”

Interestingly, if you think about the stories, Jirel is doing her best to maintain the status quo, to realign the world after something has gone wrong – her land has been conquered, she condemned an enemy to eternal torture and pain, her men were captured by an enemy, etc. In the Jirel stories, something in the world is out of sync, and she needs to restore the natural order. On the other hand, Conan operates as an agent of disruption. His stories often resemble nothing so much as westerns. The lone cowboy rides into town, takes a side, and hits that old dusty trail afterwards.

I also find it interesting that in Conan, the overwhelming theme is this: even if it’s supernatural, if you hit it with a sword enough, you can kill it. This isn’t to fall into the trap of reading or understanding Conan as an unthinking brute. He isn’t. He’s clever, fast, strategic. He’s really good at determining how and when and what to hit with his weapon.

But Conan is about leveling the playing field, being willing to confront things that seem beyond your strength, because they really aren’t that far above you after all. I’m thinking specifically of the sorcerer’s fire demon at the end of “Beyond the Black River”. Conan thinks, “huh, it has a body and that probably means I can stab it.” Turns out he’s right and the fight is almost anti-climactic, honestly. Conan’s bravery is confronting things that seem to be beyond human capabilities – and then killing, robbing, or imprisoning them anyway, because he’s confident enough to confront something that scares others.

Jirel’s overarching trait is persistence, an unwillingness to acknowledge defeat. A subtle difference but an important one. To win, you’ll have to kill her. Which is a win for her, because she remains unbroken (see: The Dark Land). It’s a different approach to the fantastic than Howard and Conan. Jirel doesn’t just behead the demon and move on to the next story. She accomplishes her goals, which – while they are built on the survival of herself, her vassal, and her realm – are more than just moving from one escapade to the next. She has psychological motivations that are deeper, and dare I say, more interesting, than Conan’s more mercenary approach.

This is exemplified by where we find our heroes to start, at least in terms of publication. When we meet Conan, in “The Phoenix on the Sword”, he’s toward the end of his life and story. He’s the middle-aged King of freaking Acquilonia, most powerful nation of Hyperboria. He has triumphed. He did a lot to get there, and, if you read all the Conan stories, you’ll hop around quite a bit in space and time. But we work backwards in the Conan stories, from the king with wealth, power, and authority to the wandering mercenary, swashbuckling adventurer, pirate king, thief, etc. We more or less know how the story ends, at least until we get to The Hour of the Dragon, one of my all-time favorite Conan stories (and more or less the basis for that Kevin Sorbo late-90’s Kull movie).

Conan operates as almost a classical hero. The tension in any particular tale comes not from whether Conan will survive, but from whether or not he’ll get the money or get the lady. Whether or not he’ll kill the monster or just escape it. Whether or not any of his companions will survive.

Spoiler alert: being around Conan is really hazardous to the health of non-protagonists and is basically the sword and sorcery equivalent of putting on a red shirt. 

This “preordained”, for lack of a better term, nature of the Conan stories is why, I think, we frequently get non-Conan POVs in his stories. For example, in “Beyond the Black River”, Balthus gives us our introduction to Conan on the frontier. Conan stories need that outside POV to provide some tension. Conan essentially has plot-armor. Poor Balthus doesn’t.

R.I.P. Balthus.

With Jirel, she starts out as someone already in authority, a feudal leader and warrior. However, we meet her at her lowest point at the beginning of “The Black God’s Kiss.” She’s just been defeated in battle by Guilleme. Instead of being introduced as eventually triumphant, a la Conan, we meet Jirel beaten but not humbled and not ready to quit. She’s determined, even at the expense of her soul, to regain control of Joiry. Joiry, by the way, is a fictional location in fantastical feudal France, from around 1500, according to “The Search for the Starstone.” I think some historians might argue that the extensive warlord feuding seems a little anachronistic for that late in the Medieval or that early in the Early Modern Period, but we work with what we have. Interestingly, Jirel does seek absolution from her castle’s priest before she crosses over into another dimension, to seek a “weapon” to defeat Guilleme, suggesting a much more pious individual than the believing but non-worshiping Conan, adding a touch of period-appropriate piety to the character.

Similarly, in the stories, “The Dark Land” and “Hellsgarde”, we see Jirel basically kidnapped in the first story and forced to enter a haunted castle in the second, where she encounters...vampires that feed on the undead? “Hellsgarde” is weird and it’s great and in the climax Jirel rides away to give her Trojan Horse gift to her enemy and “have a better vengeance”. Hardcore.

“The Dark Land” has her talking her way out of getting murdered by a creepy skull lady after some cosmic incel kidnaps her to be his wife because she’s just so awesome, but who also thinks Jirel needs to shape up and not talk back. “The Dark Land” is a really engrossing tale about possession, identity, domination, and longing. Fantastic writing. Potentially really relevant to current conversations about, and please notice the air quotes, “male loneliness.”

It’s not hard to see the early 20th century feminist themes in Moore’s writing, or at least a female social perspective. Conan is introduced triumphant; the story is how he got there and how he stays there. Jirel is introduced already possessing authority but defeated. Her stories are about how she uses everything at her disposal just to survive, to persist, to regain, and to maintain her rightful authority. That idea of persistence in the face of overwhelming odds or using persuasion and guile against forces martially stronger than you must have resonated with an early 20th century woman author. I imagine. I’m a hetero cis white guy sitting atop a decent pinnacle of privilege here, so take my interpretation of CL Moore’s work with an appropriately sized grain of salt.

But by my reading, Moore is sitting somewhere between first-wave, legalistic feminism and prefigures mid-20th century second-wave feminism of the New Left. The Jirel stories were written and published in the mid-late 1930’s. Long enough after the victories of the 19th Amendment, etc. to sink in, as well as the lengths women’s equality still needed to go. Jirel has the legal authority of being the official leader of Joiry. But, when dealing with antagonists like Guilleme in “The Black God’s Kiss” or Pav – king of Romne – in “The Dark Land”, she is overmatched, at least on the surface. One has conquered her castle; the other is a living god of an alternate dimension. She has to use guile, determination, defiance, persuasion, bargaining, audacity, and cleverness to extract herself from these situations. And she does, using the “weapon” provided her by the Black God – a venomous kiss – to defeat Guilleme and strikes a bargain with Pav to give herself a chance to escape.

In contrast, while Conan is resourceful and intelligent, that is a complement to his physical and martial prowess. Howard spends a lot more time describing Conan’s muscles and skill with a sword, while Moore spends more time with Jirel’s psychology, describing her internal feelings and attitudes. While we frequently get an outside POV on Conan, where the characters spend lots of time rhapsodizing about his physical strength, Jirel is always an internal perspective, the Northwest Smith crossover notwithstanding. As a reader, our perspective is always fused to Jirel’s.

Also, everything Jirel does comes with a cost. There is sacrifice, mostly because Jirel has something to preserve and save, other than just herself. The use of the Black God’s kiss causes her torment over the death of Guilleme. Personally, I’m of the opinion that the love she feels posthumously for Guilleme is a curse of the Black God, rather than her genuine affection, mostly because of the utter lack of romantic interest she has in the rest of the stories, but it’s open to interpretation. In “The Dark Land”, escaping Pav means bargaining with the creepy, and ultimately unreliable, skull lady. Saving her men in “Hellsgarde” requires not opening pandora’s box and defeating an ancient ghost. There are consequences and nuances to Jirel’s actions that aren’t really present in Conan. Conan is an aspirational symbol; Jirel is a developed character.

In some ways, Jirel’s ambiguity, psychological motivations, and tendency to address problems without beating them with a sword (though she’s shown fighting a number of times), actually make her a better template for modern fantasy than the much re-imagined Conan, despite Conan’s greater fame as a character. Her arcs within her stories are much more similar to a modern character like Rand al’Thor. The final battle with the Dark One in The Wheel of Time takes place as much within Rand’s mind, as with any weapon or the One Power. Similarly, al’Thor’s main conflict throughout the later books is with the figment of Lews Therin within his own mind. It’s a psychological conflict, much more akin to Jirel than Conan.

Similarly, you can see echoes of Jirel’s arc within “The Black God’s Shadow” in Jaime Lannister and Game of Thrones.  In “Black God’s Shadow”, Jirel returns to the weird underworld within Joiry Castle, to free the soul of Guilleme, after she murdered him in “Black God’s Kiss.” The need for redemption, the conflict between loyalties. These are themes that get a lot of attention from later 20th century and more recent genre authors.

Redemption arcs, deeply psychological motivations, moral and resolution ambiguity, there’s more to Jirel than a predecessor to Red Sonya or other strong female characters™. We will continue to see some of these underlying feminist themes as we go along in this project, especially during the 60’s and ‘70’s with authors like Ursala le Guin and later with books like Mists of Avalon and authors like Mercedes Lackey. Even Moore herself makes her feminist themes even more explicit in her later science fiction writing, which we’re not covering here (just google “CL Moore, feminism” and you’ll get plenty of material). But I think there’s a reason that Jirel, specifically, has resonated with genre fans and inspired fantasy authors for over 90 years.

That's not all I want to cover in this installment of the series, obviously. We've barely touched Conan directly, after all. However, let's end it here for now with Jirel riding high, and we'll come back in a few days with more about Conan, escapism, the frontier, and barbarism.