A Son of the Rock

Gollancz Golden Age Masterworks, 2019, 205 p. First published in Weird Tales between 1934 and 1939.

This is a book containing six novellas from one of the early pioneers of women’s writing in the field of SF and Fantasy, in this case from before the Second World War. Viewpoint character Jirel is a fierce red-haired warrior woman who rules the territory of Joiry, which seems to be a fiefdom somewhere in France in mediæval times. Post Roman times certainly, since she wears the leg armour of a long-dead Roman legionary.

Black God’s Kiss starts with Jirel’s forces having been overcome and herself captured by the soldiers of Guillaume the conqueror who subjects her to a savage kiss before imprisoning her in a dungeon. Jirel escapes and travels to an underworld where she eventually meets the stone image of the black god, kisses it and absorbs its energy. After an arduous journey back home she bestows that fatal kiss on Guillaume.
Black God’s Shadow sees Jirel suffering what seemed to me an unlikely remorse for her killing of Guillaume, but she is haunted by the sounds of him in torment in the afterlife. She again travels to the underworld in order to seek to release Guillaume from his purgatory.
Jirel Meets Magic in another passage through another fantasy world following Giraud, a man whose castle she has taken, through a window into where the sorceress Jarisme holds power.
In The Dark Land a wounded Jirel is abducted from her death-bed and quickly restored to health by Pav, King of Romne, who wants her for his wife. Jirel isn’t keen on this.
Queen of the Starstone was written along with Moore’s husband Henry Kuttner. It is an SF/fantasy crossover wherein two men from the Mars of the future are brought back to Jirel’s time by a wizard who wishes them to recover from her the Starstone of the title.
Hellsgarde is a place of foreboding. To redeem twenty of her men whom he had captured, Guy of Garlot has sent Jirel there to uncover the treasure someone called Andred had hidden in the castle. She meets dread and ugliness but also a redeeming power. Attitudes of the time this was written are perhaps indicated by the sentence, “God in his wisdom does not for nothing mark a whole and healthy man with a cripple’s face.” And sinful Guy has a dark beauty for a fleshly garment that is “no design of the good god.” The story’s resolution is satisfying though.

Overall Moore has an irritating tendency to repeat a word within a line or two of text and we do not see Jirel perform many feats of swordswomanship or military prowess, we have to take it on trust she is accomplished militarily.

These stories are of their time but are significant for who wrote them and the nature of their protagonist rather than any intrinsic merit.

Pedant’s corner:- sorceress’ (sorceress’s,) swarm (rest of passage in past tense; swarmed,) “Pav’s smiled face” (smiled? Smiling surely,) “before Pav could come near enough to prevent” (to prevent it,) “as through on a giant axis” (as though.)