C.L. Moore was still working as a bank secretary in Indianapolis when she started publishing stories in Weird Tales, and by October 1934 she had introduced a character who would go on to influence the genre in ways most casual fantasy readers still do not fully appreciate. That character was Jirel, ruler of the fictional French province of Joiry, and across five solo stories plus one crossover written through the 1930s, Moore built something that stood apart from just about everything else running in the pulps at the time.
The premise of “Black God’s Kiss,” the story that introduces her, sets the tone for the whole cycle. Jirel’s castle has just been taken from her by the conqueror Guillaume, and rather than being positioned as someone waiting to be rescued, she descends through a hidden passage beneath Joiry into a genuinely alien underworld in search of a weapon dark enough to destroy him. It should be noted that Moore was writing within the constraints of 1934, and there are moments where that shows. That said, what she does inside those constraints is the more interesting part of the story, and the fact that Jirel’s revenge curdles into something far more complicated than triumph by the story’s end is exactly why the story has stuck around this long.
What holds the Jirel stories together across the whole run, “Black God’s Kiss,” “Black God’s Shadow,” “Jirel Meets Magic,” “The Dark Land,” and “Hellsgarde,” is less the plotting than the atmosphere. Moore was writing horror as much as she was writing fantasy, and the otherworldly realms Jirel travels through are rendered in an overloaded, almost hallucinatory sensory register that owes as much to that horror lineage as it does to anything resembling a Conan story. This being said, that repetition of structure, Jirel descends into somewhere she should not be, confronts something ancient and entirely indifferent to her, and comes back changed, does start to show across five stories read together. Even the slighter entries, though, are carried by prose that was doing something genuinely singular for the period.
The character herself is really the point. Jirel is proud, hot-tempered, and often makes the wrong call, and Moore lets her be wrong without punishing her for it or reshaping her into someone more palatable. She is allowed to be furious and reckless in a way genre protagonists, especially female ones, were rarely allowed to be in 1934, and it is worth remembering that Moore created her as a direct answer to the “beefy total-testosterone blood-and-thunder tales” that made up most of what Weird Tales was publishing at the time.
Jirel’s influence on the genre is easy to undersell because so much of it happened quietly. Robert E. Howard, a contemporary and admirer of Moore’s, built his own Dark Agnes stories partly in response to what she had done with Jirel, and Moore herself later collaborated with Howard’s fellow Weird Tales writer Henry Kuttner on “Quest of the Starstone,” pairing Jirel with Moore’s other signature creation, the spacefarer Northwest Smith. Moore and Kuttner married a few years later and went on to become one of the most prolific writing partnerships in genre fiction, but that 1937 crossover is worth seeking out on its own, if only as a piece of history showing how seriously Jirel was already being taken as a character worth building further stories around.
None of this is to say Jirel of Joiry is some lost masterpiece nobody has heard of. Genre scholars and pulp historians know exactly what Moore accomplished here. What tends to get missed is how much of the wider conversation about the roots of sword-and-sorcery still skips past her in favour of her male contemporaries, when Jirel was doing something just as formative, and in some ways more psychologically interesting, at almost the exact same moment Conan was taking shape a few pages over in the same magazine. Anyone actually curious where the genre came from, rather than just where it ended up, should go back and read these stories for themselves.