The appeal of Elric

Yay, my first request! Off in the comments, Zach asked me to expound a little on why I like the Elric cycle of stories. Never being one to pass up the opportunity to prattle on at length, here's my "What Elric means to me," post.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons at about nine years old, and consequently, before I had read a lot of the works that had influenced it, so I still tend to view things through the lens of my first experience. Elric was one of the bigger influences on the mythology of the game, in particular, the Law versus Chaos paradigm Moorcock created. (Or perhaps he just popularized it. I know that he's made the claim that he "created" the concept and the phrase, "multiverse", but that's always struck me as somewhat absurd, as the idea of parallel worlds has been around forever, and once you start thinking about those, multiverse is just about the first term to occur to anyone.)

Moorcock's writing is occasionally beautiful. The stories are seldom complex. When shopping for my plane trip back from the UK a few years back, I picked up a collection of every Conan short story. They are fun stories, but there's not always a lot of variety, and they are best enjoyed in small doses, otherwise you may find yourself doing what I did, which was putting the book down and exclaiming, "Didn't I just read that story?"

Despite the fact that Elric was designed to be as different from Conan as possible (a cultured, infirm albino who topples his birthright kingdom and slays the princess), the framework of individual Elric stories are very, very similar to one another. Taken alone, I think any given story is an entertaining read, but reading them as a part of a collection, they all kind of blur together.

There are some Elric stories that I haven't read, Fortress of the Pearl and Revenge of the Rose that a friend says are very good and show just what Moorcock is capable of writing when he's not churning out stories as fast as he can write them for pulp magazines. I haven't read those, but I did enjoy his Corum cycle of stories. The first I got through the sci-fi book club in the pre-internet days. If I didn't send my response back quickly enough, they would send me that month's selection. I wound up with the shitty Dune prequels that way, as well as a collection of the first Corum trilogy. 

One thing I thought was really interesting was how we had a crossover in one the Elric stories where Elric meets up with two other aspects of the Eternal Champion, Corum and Erekose. Later on in the Corum cycle, we see the same encounter from Corum's point of view. I thought that was really nifty.

Also, I like how he subverted a lot of the fantasy tropes. Corum was a Vadhagh, and much longer lived than a human. He settles down with a human woman at the end of the first trilogy and then the second one picks up seventy years or so later, after she's died of old age. Later on in the second trilogy, the heroes are under seige and Corum goes on a desperate quest within a faerie mound for the Macguffin that will stave off defeat. He returns after an ordeal with the object in hand...only to find that three months have passed in the real world and all of his allies fell shortly after he left. 

It's not great, it's not art, but it's generally a very fun read, best enjoyed a little at a time.