"It came to me one night as I was surfing the net. Sonja and Joan have very similar backgounds and it could very well be that Joan of Arc was the inspiration for the Red tressed she devil.
Joan fronted the armies of France during the hundred years war back in the 1400's...she was inspired to pick up a sword because she heard words of a Holy nature speaking to her.
The King who commisioned her betrayed her as a heretic and had her burned alive. She was 19 at the time of her death. Many many years later in the 1920's she was canonized as a Saint. Not too long after that. Robert E Howard created the prototype for the heroine we adore today. Basically recreated and reinvented. Red Sonja the she devil with a sword!! "
We can thank the great Roy Thomas for the vision of fury and beauty we have today.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, the arguably second most popular character to come out of the Marvel Sword & Sorcery boom wasn’t, strictly speaking, a pure Robert E. Howard creation. Red Sonja, the She-Devil with a Sword, was based on Red Sonya (with a ‘Y’) of Rogatine, a character who appeared in the REH historical adventure story "The Shadow of the Vulture." Roy Thomas adapted the tale for Conan issue 23, changing the story’s original hero, a German Knight from the 16th century, into Conan, and transferring Sonja/Sonya to the Hyborian Age. Sonja would really come into her own in issue 24, "The Song of Red Sonja."
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