“There is no glory in pitting oneself against any but a worthy foe.” – Gwydion, from Evangeline Walton’s The Virgin and the Swine, aka The Island of the Mighty, 4th Branch of the Mabinogion.

This one is all about feminism, story structure, and how utterly %¥?€.^ing weird actually mythology can be. Join us.

“The analytic study of fairy-stories is as bad a preparation for the enjoying or the writing of them as would be the historical study of the drama of all lands and time for the enjoyment or writing of stage-plays.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, quoted from On Fairy Stories

Wherein John Ronald kinda craps on the whole idea of the podcast. I feel personally attacked. I happen to have enjoyed many of the works I’ve read for this project while also over-analyzing them for the dubious pleasure of my tens of listeners. I also feel it would be uncharitable to point out that we are about to discuss a 40+ page essay Mr. Tolkien himself wrote on exactly this topic, but I digress.

Welcome back, everyone, to Something About Dragons. Today, we’ll be discussing two towering titans of prewar pulp. Righteous raconteurs. Pulp provocateurs. Short story samurai. 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 an obscure character named Conan the Cimmerian.

Content note: discussions of sexism and racism present within the texts and in the general milieu of 1930’s America.