The Eternal Champion

And this brings us to Micheal Moorcock. An iconoclast, a writer who has done more than his share of genre-bending, boundary-pushing, and pissing people off. Certainly one of the most cerebral of the pulp writers, like Leiber his career spans the era from the latter pulp days up to the modern age Unlike Leiber – or anyone else I have written about here so far – Moorcock is still living and still working. He has gone from a kind of counterculture figure in the 60s to one of the grand old men of the genre. He has written everything from straight SF to fantasy to alt-history and all kinds of things in between. But to talk about his contributions to Sword & Sorcery, we have to talk about Elric of Melnibone.

Moorcock’s best-known and most archetypical creation, Elric was invented when Moorcock was about 20, and often seems to be most popular with boys around the same age. He was created to be the kind of anti-Conan, as Moorcock was no great fan of Howard’s often anti-intellectual heroes. He is the opposite of the protoypical Howardian barbarian protagonist in every imaginable way: Conan is strong, Elric can’t even walk without special drugs and herbs. Conan detests magic, Elric is a sorcerer who commands inhuman forces. Conan is a barbarian of no lineage, Elric is from a decadent culture thousands of years old, the 428^th of his line. Conan usurped his throne, Elric was born to a line of kings stretching back into antiquity.

And yet many of the themes in the worlds they inhabit are similar, even if the character’s relationships with them are markedly different. Rather than the Hyborean Age – explicitly based on mythologized versions of real places - Moorcock’s world was far more alien. The demons and monsters that lurked in forgotten places in Howard’s work were much more present in the Young Kingdoms. The power of magic was more open and explicit. Moorcock’s imaginings much more resembled the kind of high-magic world envisioned by many modern tabletop and computer games, with easy travel to and from alternate dimensions, and the constant presence of demons and gods.

That, in a nutshell, is a big part of what differentiates Moorcock’s work from Howard’s, and is why the Elric stories kind of straddle the line between S&S and genuine Epic Fantasy. In Howard’s world, and in other pure S&S worlds, there is no built-in metaphysic: no giant battle between good and evil. That kind of scale, and that absolute moral aspect, is a hallmark of High Fantasy, and you see it in the work of Tolkien as well as Moorcock (though he would hate the comparison). Moorcock evaded neat morality by using “Law” and “Chaos” as his proxies for good and evil, but as revolting as the Lords of Chaos are depicted as being, the equivalency of Chaos with Evil is inescapable.

If Sword & Sorcery fiction is a kind of fantasy noir, with characters existing in shades of moral gray, then the presence of real, tangible gods or other powers handicaps that out of the gate and makes it impossible to stick with. Moorcock kind of dealt with this by having his character be torn between Law and Chaos, a servant of chaos who did not really hold with their ideals. If the Lords of Chaos had not been so blatantly demonic, it might have really held water as a moral question, as Law and Chaos can both be said to have valid arguments for and against.

Moorcock’s real contribution to the genre (aside from the fanzine argument that prompted Leiber to name it) is his wider and more inventive world, and his introduction of a tragic hero archetype that adds layers of operatic drama to the essential formula of adventure and action. Moorcock’s work was far more intellectually and philosophically complex than the old pulp tales, and he brought the whole genre out of the old days and helped bring it to a wider new audience as part of the new wave in the 60s – an audience that keeps growing and evolving today.