“Elric: Song of the Black Sword” by Michael Moorcock

 

 

504 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041801

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. Elric: Song of the Black Sword was the fifth in this series featuring the character Elric of Melniboné, and includes the tales Elric of Melniboné, The Fortress of the Pearl, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, The Dreaming City, While the Gods Laugh and The Singing Citadel. Elric of Melniboné is without question Moorcock’s most famous character. One of the original anti-heroes, his proper name is Elric VIII, 428^th Emperor of Melniboné, a stagnating civilization that at one time ruled the entire world but that, by the time of Elric, finds itself confined to its original island home, while the rest of the world, called collectively “The Young Kingdoms”, has arisen in the wake of this retreat. In addition to being an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, Elric is an albino: his flesh “is the color of a bleached skull…and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the color of bone”. Elric is physically frail and reliant on drugs and sorcery to keep up his strength – and, unlike his predecessors, he has a conscience, which causes him to look upon the Melnibonéan culture and history with a loathing that causes his subjects to loath him in return.

 

Elric of Melniboné is not the first Elric story that Moorcock wrote, but it is the first in the series’ internal chronology; for this reason, perhaps, Moorcock clearly makes an effort to craft this tale as an introductory one for anyone just learning who this albino antihero is. While it may be too much to call these books Pulp Fiction, Moorcock’s prose tends to be…bombastic, perhaps in an attempt to be Dramatic (Over-the-Top). But that’s okay in my book, as the language is lush and the imagery resonant, for the World of Elric really comes alive on the page. Elric of Melniboné is consciously epic in every way, larger than life and proud of it, which shouldn’t came as a surprise when one considers Moorcock’s influences on his most famous antihero: Bertolt Brecht and his Threepenny Novel and The Threepenny Opera (indeed, Elric of Melniboné is dedicated to Brecht; in the same dedication we find that Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions and Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn influenced Moorcock, as well, along with Mervyn Peake’s Steerpike in the Titus Groan trilogy, Poul Anderson’s Scafloc in The Broken Sword, T. H. White’s Lancelot in The Once and Future King, J. R. R. Tolkien’s cursed hero Túrin Turambar and Jane Gaskell’s Zerd in The Serpent (perhaps one day I’ll read all those works to see how Moorcock’s Elric measures up).

 

The Fortress of the Pearl is a novel length tale set between Elric of Melniboné and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate and introduces the concept of the dreamthief to Elric’s world, which he would later revisit in a trilogy beginning with The Dreamthief’s Daughter, which is also set up in the current novel. Fortress is quite different in tone from the earlier Elric novels, as it has a more philosophical bent and shows that Moorcock was capable of moving beyond a straight-forward hack-and-slash epic. While Oone (a dreamthief) and Elric pass through multiple dream realms which Oone explains are differentiated from each other, their adventures in any one realm do not last long enough to be fully explored, although their differences can be seen in Elric’s outlook as they seek the Pearl. These realms and adventures don’t have a dream-like quality for the reader, appearing to be just as real as any of Elric’s other adventures, just as dreams feel real while they are being dreamt. Between writing the main sequence of Elric novels and The Fortress of the Pearl, Moorcock not only underwent a change in writing style, but also a change in outlook, as Oone is Elric’s equal and the Melnibonéan emperor is almost a sidekick to her when she appears in the books.

 

The Sailor on the Seas of Fate is actually made up of three shorter stories; in each, Elric sails to some sort of alternate world and faces a supernatural threat. Others have said that this collection reads like an advertisement for Moorcock’s lesser-known characters, a kind of Elric and his Superfriends collection. I think this was more on par with Moorcock exploring his Eternal Champion concept and showing how interconnected his many characters were in his universe. As should be expected by now, Moorcock’s prose is great and Elric never fails to be interesting a protagonist. The tone is, perhaps, not what many fantasy readers will be used to, what with its dream-like cast, and if one reads it right after Elric of Melniboné they’ll becomes ever-more accustomed to Moorcock’s sometimes (ofttimes) overwrought style. On the other hand, it’s hard to deny that for casual readers who really couldn’t be bothered about the multiverse or what-have-you and expect instead to see some sort of motion in the world Moorcock constructed in the first novel, this sequel may be a baffling disappointment. None of the other Melnibonéans we were introduced to in Elric of Melniboné have anything to do with The Sailor on the Seas of Fate and, indeed, Elric’s meeting with Count Smiorgan is about the only impact Sailor has on the overarching plot of the series.

 

The Dreaming City features Elric’s quest to sack the last standing Melnibonéan city and rescue his lost love from the clutches of his evil cousin Yyrkoon, who has usurped the throne. Moorcock, it would appear, does not believe in Good vs. Evil, as the “heroes” are often as cruel and ruthless as the “villains”, and in City we have no Tolkienesque vision of light vs. dark (M. John Harrison, the English author and literary critic, once described Tolkien’s work as “stability and comfort and safe catharsis” – ouch!). While antiheroes are all the rage anymore, when Elric was introduced in 1961 he must have seemed like a freak; not only is he morally ambiguous, be didn’t follow the prototypes of fantasy heroes – no bulging muscles, brilliant swordplay, taciturn acceptance or virtuous actions. Elric is slight, his swordsmanship comes courtesy of his demon-sword, Stormbringer, he agonizes over everything and always does what’s best for himself. This is dystopian fantasy at its best: dark, bloody and devoid of simplistic moralizing, and I can’t imagine George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones existing without Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné.

 

While the Gods Laugh is set a further year into the future whence Elric has continued to travel the Young Kingdoms, although now as a wandering hermit rather than as an Emperor in search of wisdom. Throughout this rather slight tale (the second written by Moorcock), we find Elric, agent of the Gods of Chaos, seeking a kind of “uberGod” that controlled the warring factions of Law and Chaos (a concept which Moorcock would flesh out more in future stories as the “Cosmic Balance”). Despite our moody albino’s self-declared desire of solitude, his cynicism towards and distrust of Everyone and Everything, he has a tendency to become boon companions with several characters in the course of his adventures – whether Rackhir the Red in Elric of Melniboné, Smiorgan Baldhead in The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, or Moonglum of Elwher in While the Gods Laugh (won’t mention what happens to Shaarilla, though). More adventures, more violence and more morally ambiguous actions on the part of our protagonist awaits the reader within, as the character of Elric can’t help but fascinate and repel in equal measure.

 

The Singing Citadel allows Elric to come face-to-face with some of the consequences of the raid on Imrryr in The Dreaming City; two years have now passed, and Elric and Moonglum are trying to sneak into Dhakos, the capital city of Jharkor whose king, Dharmit, died in the initial attack on Immryr. Although the primary story is about a partnership between Elric and Queen Yishana of Jharkor (sister to Dharmit), in their quest to discover what is behind a strange fortress that has appeared in the hinterlands and is causing damage to cities and Jharkor soldiers to disappear, the real import of the story is that it introduces Yishana’s lover, the Pan Tangian sorcerer Theleb K’aarna, and makes him Elric’s rival, which will have lasting consequences. While it is questionable that the nation’s queen would ride on an expedition as dangerous as the one Yishana, Elric and Theleb K’aarna undertake, at least when Elric leaves Yishana, his reasons are understandable aside from his total disregard for women.