The Eternal Champion

This is a central, and yet not widely-read work in the Moorcock canon. Released in 1970, it was the work which began to explicitly tie the different heroes of his mythos together and to assemble the genuine cosmology of the titular champion. Despite this, the book itself received a muted reception, and this is in part because of the ways that its themes depart from what readers expected.

By the time he wrote this, Moorcock was already known for his hero-cycles about Elric and Dorian Hawkmoon, and here he added the central character of Erekosë – a character who, unusually, is presented with a framing device. We get the information that the hero is John Daker – a denizen of 20^th century London – who has dreams in which he remembers other lives as various heroes, many of which will be recognized by fans of Moorcock’s other works. Interestingly, some of the heroes had not yet appeared in print at the time The Eternal Champion was published, establishing that Moorcock was planning his cosmology out ahead of time with considerable care.

Daker is summoned to another world by a king calling for the long-dead hero Erekosë to rise and save them from evil. While he is not sure if he is really Erekosë – a question that interestingly haunts him through the novel – he feels kinship with the king and his beautiful daughter, and agrees to take up their battle against the inhuman Eldren.

The Eternal Champion is far more thematically and philosophically complex than most other Sword & Sorcery books of the time – or any time, for that matter. It deals with questions of identity and purpose, as well as existential questions about the nature of man. Erekosë doesn’t know for certain who he is, or even if he is on Earth. He wonders if he is in the past or the future, or on some alternate world. He wonders if he is dreaming or insane, and struggles with the morality of the war he finds himself in.

Because while the reader might expect a straightforward narrative about a great hero defending humanity from insensate evil, we soon see it is not that simple. Despite the Eldren being painted as utterly evil by the other humans in the book, we begin to suspect that only blind bigotry drives their crusade, and the behavior of the humans in the war – slaughtering children and raping and murdering women – is meant to turn our stomachs just as it does the hero.

The Eldren themselves are elflike, delicate beings of strange beauty, and Erekosë feels drawn to them, especially after their princess becomes his prisoner and he finds himself questioning what he is doing. We are led along with Erekosë as he becomes disillusioned step by step, as the war progresses. When the Eldren have been driven back to their last stronghold comes the turn which makes this book so unusual, and so hard to like.

Because Erekosë turns. After first simply trying to broker peace between human and Eldren, he then joins them and helps them to fight off the human onslaught. But then the book goes further, and Erekosë decides that there can never be peace while two races exist on the same world. So he organizes a war of extermination against the human race, and wipes them all out, even hunting down survivors who hide in caves to try to escape him.

It is a really bold turn, and I can’t think of another book where the protagonist ends the story by committing genocide, much less genocide against the human race. The reader has followed Erekosë through the story, sympathizing with his doubts and fears, feeling his disillusionment and eventual disgust with the senseless violence of the humans he is in contact with. When he turns on them and helps the Eldren survive, you are totally on board with his decision.

But then the book does not stop, and really drives home the point that while we were willing to allow the genocide of an alien race – however appealing – as sad but regrettable necessity, now we have our faces rubbed in the essential ugliness of it, and the indefensible morality of the decision on either side. Even the Eldren do not agree with his actions, but he will not be stopped, as though he is driven to destroy one race or the other. This remains a fascinating, uncomfortable book, and Erekosë perhaps the most ambiguous incarnation of the Eternal Champion character.

Spear Queen

The wind from the north was hard, and it pushed her back as she struggled through the gale. Tiny needles of ice, carried in the air, scourged at her face as she made her way across the bitter snow to the edge of the sea, and she looked northward across the black waters armored in ice. The sky was low, and seemed to clutch at the earth, as if seeking to crush it.

She looked back the way she had come, over the snowbound hills and the frozen rocks. She knew they were still behind her, and she did not think the coming night would stop them. Here she stood, at the far northern edge of Vathran, far from the reaches of any hold or lord, and yet still they would not give up their pursuit. The men set upon her path by Hror the usurper knew they could not return, save with her head.

Beneath her furs she wore a coat of mail that was too large for her, and at her side hung the sword that had slain Oeric, king of Vathran. She had cut off his head and stolen it away so Hror would not have it. Now it was her only companion in this forsaken land, far north of where any living men made their home. Here the sword was her lover as the king had never been. She had been Ruana, the Queen of this land, and now she had run out of places to flee.

Warrior Witch

This is the first book in a trilogy that actually gets a good bit of positive press, and I can’t really see why that is. The Bloodsong trilogy first appeared in the 80’s, written by C. Dean Anderson under the name Asa Drake, as he already had a bit of momentum going under that name. The whole thing was later reprinted under his own name, getting a nice trade edition from Hawk Publishing in 2000. In the notes, Anderson makes much of being a student of Norse myth and history, which might lead you to expect a gritty, realistic adventure. You would be wrong.

The series follows the adventures of Bloodsong, a warrior-woman originally named Freyadis, but who has died and been brought back to life by the death-goddess Hel as a “Hel-Warrior” to ride against the sorcerer Nidhug. Nidhug was once Hel’s priest, but he has turned against her and he has the power of one of her artifacts – the War-Skull, which is depicted as just a huge skull partly embedded in the earth – which is admittedly kind of bitchin’.

I say “adventures” but really this book has an extremely linear and uninteresting plot. We start with Bloodsong some indeterminate distance from the castle of Nidhug, she rides toward it, and he uses various magical bullshit to try and stop her from getting there. That is literally all there is to it. He sends some demons or whatever to kill her, she fights them off, then he tries something else, and she defeats that. And so on. It is extremely tedious when you realize that nothing interesting is going to happen, and the same things will essentially repeat until the book is done. It’s like the plot of an arcade game.

Bloodsong is equipped with a ring that gives her various magical powers taught to her by Hel, and these are all referred to as “Hel-something” in a manner reminiscent of the old Batman show: Hel-horse, Hel-ring, Hel-fire, until you half-expect her to whip out the Hel-mobile.

The plot seems to begin in the middle of a larger story that I am just as glad I missed. Bloodsong has a past with a dead husband and dead child that are supposed to motivate her, but we never see them, so it fails to make for any kind of emotional connection. We just follow along with the “action” as she fights magical MacGuffins, and slices up human minions in scenes that are bloody, yet unexciting.

In between Bloodsong’s uninteresting plotline, we switch back to the POV of either Nidhug or one of his captives for some magical hugger-mugger and general unpleasantness, as we see the wizard forced to use the giant skull to keep himself young and vital by draining the life out of naked slaves. We have one slave who he tortures repeatedly through the book, paralyzing her, stabbing her, and then later locking her in a room to be raped to death by zombies. (The fact that said zombie raping does not actually happen is a great relief.) None of this serves any purpose, adds to drama or excitement, or reveals any interesting layers to the villain, who remains steadfastly two-dimensional. It all seems to just exist so we can have naked females brutalized every other chapter.

By the time the end comes you are far past caring. None of the magic seems to have any rules, the action remains flat, and Bloodsong seems to win kind of by accident. There are no interesting characters, no character moments that are not wholly cliche, no tension and no drama. No book that’s only 70,000 words should feel this long, or be this much of a slog. I have seen people hold this up as an overlooked classic, but a sweet Boris Vallejo cover does not make for a good, or even a tolerable book.