Elric, the collected first stories of Michael Moorcock’s titular protagonist, is the powerful cycle of a dark hero confronting both unfathomable terrors and his own cruelty. Once you get familiarized with the deceptively simplistic writing, this challenge to Tolkein’s formula takes on mythic force and serves as a foundational text for contemporary fantasy.
Elric is composed of stories about the titular hero, an albino with a semi-sentient soul-drinking sword named Stormbringer and a mastery of black magic. He is the last king of the cruel race of Melnibone and from them inherited both the sentient sword and a malicious streak to go with it. While Elric has rejected his place as the king of the cruel and decaying Bright Empire, Elric is never “good” despite his sometimes noble aims. This dark edge makes the character refreshing to read even 40 years after its initial publication.
Elric combines the first two volumes of Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga, The Stealer of Souls and Stormbringer. The Stealer of Souls is a collection of short stories while Stormbringer is a novel that feels like a collection of short stories. Because of the format, a lot happens in a few pages: continents are traversed in a sentence, gods defeated in a paragraph, and years pass with the start of a new chapter. The short stories of The Stealer of Souls are very loosely connected, and while entertaining they do not quite strike the epic chord that they strive for. There is simply too much happening to give any particular event dramatic clout. Elric must face a variety of supernatural difficulties, but overcomes them and moves on to the next so quickly that there is little sense of tension to his conflict. However, Stormbringer does a fantastic job of transforming these stories into an epic cycle that feels like a dark myth reclaimed from humanity’s subconscious. What seemed relatively brainless adventuring when first encountered takes on new significance after the metaphysical dimensions explored in Stormbringer, and when read in sequence Elric’s adventures build into a heroic journey that Joseph Campbell would feel right at home analyzing. During The Stealer of Souls I tended to put the book down after finishing a story without feeling terribly compelled to pick it back up again; after reaching the second book of Stormbringer, I finished the story in one sitting.
While the setting of Elric does not reach the depth of Tolkein’s or Erikson’s, or the plausibility of Patrick Rothfuss’s in his recent novel The Name of the Wind, it does feature wildly creative monsters and civilizations. The highlight is Elric’s own doomed Melnibone, the Bright Empire and rulers of the Dreaming City of Imrryr. Melnibone is a mixture of cruel magic and brightly colored decadence, of nobility and evil, of power and decay. In a way it recalls the British Empire – flamboyance on top of subjugation.
Moorcock has a flair for writing the grotesquely beautiful. For example, the following scene, while unimportant to the plot, stuck with me:
At one time they saw in the distance a frightful sight, a wild and hellish mob destroying a village built around a castle. The castle itself was in flames and on the horizon a mountain gouted smoke and fire. Though the looters had human shape, they were degenerate creatures, spilling blood and drinking it with equal abandon. And directing them without joining their orgy Elric and Moonglum saw what seemed to be a corpse astride the living skeleton of a horse, bedecked in bright trappings, a flaming sword in its hand and a golden helm on its head. (pg 276)
The imagery recalls artwork from the Great Plague, but given color and vibrancy by the castle-turned-pyre, the volcanic eruption, and the dead king’s courtly regalia. Evil and death are not dour and dark things but wildly, insanely colourful and disturbingly picturesque. Likewise the supernatural entities in Moorcock’s world have a Lovecraftian sense of dread and madness, and the servants of Chaos which Elric frequently encounters are some of the most convincing denizens of Hell ever put into words
Part of what made Elric hard to get into is its language. The prose feels aged: there is a lot of telling rather than showing, and some grammatical choices have not aged well. Particularly, the exclamation points! These stories are not in the vein of the realist novel that most of today’s fantasy novels draw upon. While contemporary fantasy usually seeks to draw you into their worlds and let you escape from reality for a time, the stories in Elric are more concerned with storytelling rather than world building or character development.
While Elric’s character is nuanced, Moorcock’s characterization of him is not. Elric is tormented by his reliance on the sword Stormbringer, which gives him great vitality by consuming the souls of its victims but has a tendency to kill people Elric would rather leave alive. After an unsuccessful attempt to abandon Stormbringer and a subsequent battle in which Elric slays multitudes (not a rare occurrence in the book), Elric ruminates on his emotional state: “‘I am still a Melnibonean,’ he thought, ‘and cannot rid myself of what else I do. And, in my strength I am still weak, ready to use their cursed blade in any small emergency’” (pg 188). The problem is that we already know Elric turns to the blade’s evil power too quickly for a man seeking to reject it. We just saw him do it. The subsequent internal monologue just cheapens Elric’s emotional complexity by removing any subtlety.
However, over the course of the book I grew less concerned with the aged syntax because it seemed to fit with the stories’ foundational place in the modern fantasy cannon. It almost feels more in line with The Epic of Gilgamesh or The Odyssey, both of which feature language that sounds strange and somewhat simplistic to the modern ear (in translation, of course), but underneath of which teems a world of subconscious impulses and primal fears. In Elric we find a template for the amoral tales of Glen Cook’s Black Company, and Stephen Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon features a character so similar to Elric that he is almost certainly an homage. Perhaps it’s because I know Moorcock’s stories are so influential (the back cover told me so), but the simplistic writing seems to accentuate the place that these stories hold for the contemporary fantasy reader. They feel older than their 40 years – at their best moments, they feel timeless.
But the theme of this timeless story is different from Tolkein’s foundational myth, and it is here that Elric achieves surprisingly compelling complexity. While The Lord of the Rings can be boiled down to a battle of Good versus Evil in which Evil inevitably corrupts and so must be rejected absolutely, Moorcock does not portray things so simply. Elric’s use of Stormbringer is akin to Frodo discovering that he must, in fact, use the One Ring to kill Sauron even if it turns him into a miniature Ringwraith. Elric does not choose between Evil power and Good nobility, he chooses between survival and death. In Elric there is very little, if anything, that can be called absolutely “Good” in the Tolkeinian sense – rather, there is a balance of Chaos and Law that must be preserved, and either could be called “evil” or “good” depending upon where that balance fell. Ultimately this is an apocalyptic conflict of Evil against Evil that must destroy the world in order to save it. In Moorcock’s myth that destruction takes the form of a necessary cleansing of men, gods, and memories from the earth to allow for a better future. Considering the 20th century’s mass bloodshed and the Cold War threat of complete annihilation, perhaps Moorcock’s myth is more realistic than Tolkein’s. In a world in which all sides of have committed atrocities, from the Holocaust to Hiroshima to the countless wars of imperialism, it is certainly hard to image a force of pure Good.
Currently Reading:
