Before Sonja, There Was Dara

Aside from Wonder Woman and some jungle girls, there weren't many archetypes of the female warrior during the Golden Age. An exception to this was the one-shot character, Dara Of The Vikings who was featured in Avon Periodicals' Strange Worlds #2. She is one of the last of a tribe of modern day vikings secluded away from the rest of the world. Two pilots, Ford Robbins and Gene Dorn, have their aircraft go down in a storm somewhere off the coast of Greenland. Escaping in an inflatable raft, they wind up on dry land and are shocked to find a horned helmeted hottie who was part of two warring tribes that first settled there in 1361. Dara is captured along with the aviators by a rival clan cleverly called The Hairy Ones lead by the brutal Cyngar who demands the viking vixen give up her family's enchanted Golden Bow they use to keep invaders at bay. The vivacious valkyrie uses her fighting skills to free them all, and they zip to her village of Tine where the pilots amaze them with tales of this mysterious place called America. Cyngar sneaks in later on and steals the Golden Bow, leaving Ford and Gene to use some bombs they MacGyvered from a mix of flour and charcoal. The two bachelors decide to stay in Tine trying to form a love triangle with the bodacious blonde barbarian. Aside from using her prowess to escape their enemy, Dara doesn't get to do much in her own feature, leaning more into the chauvinist fantasy that women can only succeed if there is a rugged man there to save them.