The Gor Series: Marauders of Gor

Marauders of Gor is a powerful story in the Gor series. In it John Norman tells the tale of a much matured, crueler Tarl Cabot - who knows what he wants and has no reservations about taking it. He is more Gorean, but more important than that he has grown and has certainty of purpose now. Gor won’t be changing him anymore; now he will be changing Gor. This becomes part of the tone of the Gor series.

In Marauders of Gor Tarl goes to the icy wastes of Torvaldsland where he finds a transplanted Viking culture that very much echoes his own changes. In contrast with the decadent, delicate, cultured world of Ar in Assassin of Gor with its slave dances and colored silks, Torvaldsland is a monstrous, barbaric land of monstrous barbaric men (and indeed, monsters as well). It is a place where death may come at any time to even an armed free person - and is far more deadly for a slave girl.

Spoiler Warning!

The Barbaric Sex Slavery of Torvaldsland

The Threat of Death

In Ar, there is a professionalism among slavers that protects sex slaves to some degree. Emotions are secondary to logic; a girl may live as long as she has value. In violent Torvaldsland a slave girl has no such guarantee. Surrounded by violent men who enjoy killing - and drunkenness - there is a mortal menace hanging over their Gorean slavery at all times. Consider the fate of the male slave Tarsk who had attempted to strike a slave girl (an overstepping of Torvaldsland bounds).

His punishment would be heavy indeed. The snake is a single-bladed whip, weighted, of braided leather, eight feet long and about a half an inch to an inch thick. It is capable of lifting the flesh from a man’s back. Sometimes it is set with tiny particles of metal. It was not impossible that he would die under its blows.

This was a commuted sentence: he was to have been killed but Tarl intervened and suggested a whipping instead.

Female slaves are just as likely to be killed. Norman describes how the raiders will use them as bait if need be:

When food is low it is not unknown … to use a bond-maid … for bait in such a manner. The least pleasing girl is always used. This practice, of course, encourages bondmaids to vie vigorously to please their masters.

And true disobedience really only has one solution.

“Drink,” said the Forkbeard.

She lifted it to her lips, and tasted it. She closed her eyes, and twisted her face.

“It is too bitter,” she wept.

She felt the knife of the Forkbeard at her belly. “Drink,” said he.

Marauders of Gor is a primal, violent book with berserkers blinding themselves in rage and eating the flesh of their enemies. Yet, Norman holds back from showing us slave girls executed and turned into scarecrows in the fields, stuffed and mounted inside slave pens as daily reminders, or fed to the other girls. I suspect he was simply uncomfortable writing such content and preferred to have Tarl simply relate that such cruelty existed there. You will find nothing as disturbing as those three examples in Marauder of Gor.

Degradation and Sadism

Aside from the ever present threat of sudden and violent death, the conditions Gorean slave girls are submitted to in Torvaldsland are a magnitude more base than what’s endured by their kajira sisters in the ‘civilized’ south. During a chase at sea, one slave girl is hung from the stern of the ship as a trophy:

Her hands were jerked over her head. Then, by her fettered wrists, she moaning, her naked body twisting against the mast, foot by foot, she was drawn to five feet below the spar. She dangled there, in pain, her body that of a stripped bond-maid, exquisite, tempting, squirming, a taunt to the blood of the men of Thorgard of Scagnar.

Later when the danger is passed, she is again hung as a trophy but from the prow of the ship:

Gorm put a rope on her neck and pulled her to the prow, She was held by another crewman, he fastened her at the prow. Her back was bent over it. Her wrists and ankles drawn back, were tied at its sides. She was roped to it, too, at the belly and throat.

New slave girls are renamed by their masters, which is not unusual, but these are particularly degrading and emphasize that their value is entirely in how their masters see them. One girl, Aelgifu, is renamed ‘Pudding.’ Another, a Peggy Stevens from Earth, becomes ‘Honey Cake.’

Casual cruelty is very much a feature in this book of the Gor series. Torvaldslanders are as ready to indulge their sadism as they are their taste for alcohol:

One, who had irritated an oarsman, her hands held,was beaten, crying out, with his belt. Released, she began to kiss him, weeping, trying to please him. Men laughed.

The best example is where the slave girl Thyri, for a mean-spirited attempt to deny her enemy the male slave Tarsk the sights of a slave market, is punished by being given to Tarsk to be raped.

“She is yours until morning,” the Forkbeard told the young thrall. “Use her behind

the tent.”

“My thanks, my Jarl!” he cried.

“My Jarl!” wept Thyri.

He turned about, dragging her by the right wrist … The Forkbeard, and I, and his men, laughed.

“I hope,” said the Forkbeard, “he will not make her scream all night behind the tent. I wish

to obtain a good night’s rest.”

“It would be a shame,” said I, “to interfere with his pleasure.”

“If necessary,” said the Forkbeard, “I will simply have him gag her with her own kirtle.”

“Excellent,” I said.

Tarl’s Attitudes to Sex Slavery

Marauders is book 9 of the Gor series and Tarl, who at this point is a prosperous Gorean slaver, has grown in his outlook to be very much a full-fledged Gorean. He sees slave girls as lovely possessions to be enjoyed, kept in chains, and firmly thrashed whenever uppity.

We see how his attitudes have changed most in how he describes them. Tarl is delighted by their beauty and revels in his license to look upon them in a way he cannot a free woman:

This left nineteen girls at the wall. I admired the taste of Forkbeard. They were beauties. My choices would have been the same.

I handed the horn to Thyri, who, in her collar, naked, between two of the benches,knelt at my feet.

“Yes, Jarl,” said she, and ran to fill it, from the great vat.

How marvelously beautiful is a naked, collared woman.

Honey Cake, too, I thought, would make him a delicious little slave.

We would all enjoy her.

The best example of all is in his assessment of a newly captured girl:

Hilda the Haughty was a superb piece of female flesh. In almost any market she would surely have drawn a high price ... She had a fair throat, good shoulders; she was marvelously breasted … if the Forkbeard wished to breed her she would bear healthy, strong young to his thralls … her thighs, too, were lovely, and her calves; her ankles, while not thick, as Pretty Ankles had asserted, were heavier than those of Thyri, or Pretty Ankles. I had no objection to Hilda’s ankles; I found them quite lovely; they would take a common girl fetter nicely, with about a quarter inch tolerance.

There is not one woman in Marauders of Gor that he sees as a person (to be fair, all the girls in it are slaves or shortly go on to be enslaved). This is a bit surprising; his character would be stronger if we could contrast his attitudes towards free women.

This may say more about John Norman at this point rather than Tarl Cabot.

Tarl’s sadism has also developed; he enjoys the tormenting his slaves (a bit) and exercising his complete power over them; he’s not a john with a hooker -- he’s a master with a slave girl:

“Go now to the kitchen of the hall,” said he. “In the fire there, burn your clothing, completely.”

Weeping, clutching her clothing, she ran to the hall. The men and bond-maids laughed muchly. I, too, roared with laughter.

I looked away from her, paying her no more attention. I heard her moan, and rub her body on the post.

“I need you Tarl Red Hair,” she whimpered.

I would let her smolder for another Ahn or two.

The slave girl knows that she must please her master, and that she will be punished, and perhaps

harshly if she does not; this makes her not only desperate to please the brute who fondles her, but also produces in her a genuine fear of him; this fear on her part enhances her receptivity and responsiveness … if she should not be afraid, it is no great matter; any woman, if the master wishes, can be taught fear.

Between seeing beautiful slave girls as delightful meat to be enjoyed, and from crossing beyond sexual pleasure to sadistic pleasure in the punishment and torment of slave girls, Tarl has achieved peak Gorean. Gor, and all its taboo wonders, have become his.

Go Read It!

I give Marauders of Gor 5/5. It is a particularly primal and barbaric book in the Gor series, and I think that is when Sword and Sex Slave fiction is at its best.

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