Silken Swords: An Informal Guide to the Women in the Fiction of Robert E. Howard

Lethal Lovelies

Steel-thewed barbarians. Two-fisted adventurers. Cold-blooded sorcerers. These are the heroes and villains of Robert E. Howard. But it wasn't all testosterone and loincloths. In REH's worlds, the ladies were sometimes as deadly as the men.

REH scholar Fred Blosser provides an A-Z encyclopedia of every female character in Robert E. Howard's fiction, from Conan's Belit, Valeria, and Yasmela, to dozens of hags, harlots, and hussies, as well as the occasional demure damsel and distaff destroyer.

Blosser assigns each woman to an archetype: elder, maiden, servant, supernatural being, temptress, warrior, witch. Taken together, these archetypes encompass the feminine gamut not just of REH fiction but of sword-and-sorcery in general, and are a useful tool for further scholarship.

These ladies don't do the dishes.