Reading from Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures, Del Ray, 2011, pages 331-63

Dark Agnes, one of the literary creations that inspired the marketing creation that is Red Sonja, is Howard’s darkest character—even more bleak than Bran Mak Morn, so dark that she does not have time for Kull’s melancholy or Conan’s sour mirth. Sword Woman is, of all Howard’s tales, the one most dedicated to blood memory, of ancestral music coming to life and ringing out a murderous paen in a person’s soul, of a deep belief Howard held that certain of our ancestors and their certain combative natures are prone to well up within certain of us so that we might write our names in time with the deserved deaths of those unworthy of such upwellings.

Granted, there is a Red Sonja in a Robert E. Howard historical story set at the Siege of Vienna, but the dominant, shapely sword woman that was brought to comics and cinema has more of Dark Agnes in her then Howard's Red Sonja.

The father of Agnes was a low, brutal man sprung from a submerged race of fighting men ground down to the level of serfs, who himself fought in wars, and forever took out his malice at being less than his ancestors with jaw cracking abuse of his daughter, a piece of leverage-bearing ass to be sold off to a useful son-in-law.

But Agnes, as she is regaled by her older sister, already wasted and ruined from the burdens of a peasant’s betrothal, is given the key to unlocking her hidden heritage, her ancestral warrior soul, when her dreary mirror of a sister hands her a dagger before her marriage, urging her to kill herself rather than suffer life’s dictates. Agnes takes up the weapon, but not to plunge into her own heart, and begins to realize the savage potential from freedom that courses through her blood.

In Sword Woman, Howard, who often mused of suicide in the dialogue of female characters faced with slavery—and who ultimately took that course to freedom himself—permitted only one character to remain truly free and uncompromising, to walk like Death across a battlefield, and it is Agnes, who, unusually among Howard’s characters, speaks for herself in a first person narrative:

“At that a red mist waved across my sight. It was ever thus at such talk of taming.”

“Now as I looked at this war-scarred veteran, and heard his talk, my heart beat quick with a strange longing, and I seemed to hear, as I had heard so often in my dreams, the distant beating of drums.”

Agnes, who is the death of all men who ride with her, and is known to the others as “a she-devil in breeches,” is the celibate, slaughtering dyke from Hell, a misogynist’s feminist if there ever was one.

On those dark days when you believe the world is owed nothing from you but your worst—read of Dark Agnes.