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Welcome to Sword and Sorcery Reviews . My name is Christopher Rowe. This blog is mainly dedicated to reviewing contemporary short fiction in...

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

20th Century Sword & Sorcery Characters: Jaisel, created by Tanith Lee


Tanith Lee (1945-2017) hardly needs any introduction. She was a winner of multiple World Fantasy Awards and was named a Grand Master by the World Horror Convention in 2009. Among her 100+ novels and short stories, she wrote a number of sword & sorcery tales, including a pair that tell the story of the swordswoman Jaisel. They first appeared in the two volumes of Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s essential Amazons anthologies.

Jaisel’s ancestry can be productively traced to Mary Shelley (Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus), Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Rappaccini's Daughter”) and J.R.R. Tolkien (The Return of the King), all focused through the prism of Lee’s own extraordinary imagination.


“Northern Chess”  | Amazons!, ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, 1979 | short story


“Southern Lights”  | Amazons II, ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, 1982 | short story


Internet Speculative Data Base entry


Encyclopedia of Fantasy entry

Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry


Wikipedia entry


Both of these stories, along with fourteen other of Lee's sword & sorcery stories, are collected in The Empress of Dreams, published by DMR Books


Entry by Christopher Rowe

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