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| DAW 1977, Art: Michael Whelan (detail) |
Moorcock had intended “The Last Enchantment” to be his final Elric story. That short episode seems to readdress the concept of the Struggle between Law and Chaos (first brought up in “While the Gods Laugh”) and tie it off as an abstract affair with no real sign of resolution. However, Science Fantasy editor Ted Carnell convinced Moorcock to continue on with more Elric stories (at least until he left the magazine himself the following year), giving Moorcock the opportunity to kill off Elric and end the whole affair in an over-the-top Ragnarok-ian curtain fall.
Conceived as four novellas, Stormbringer was serialized in Science Fantasy over a period of months, and then published together as a single novel (but edited for the library market). This technique of breaking down his first published novel into four arcs would come in handy when he later magnified the process to write trilogies and quadrilogies in the 1970s (particularly those of the Hawkmoon and Corum cycles). Perhaps because this was his first commissioned novel, Moorcock pulled out of the holding pattern seen in the more workmanlike efforts of “Kings in Darkness” and “The Flame Bringers” and proceeded to gleefully destroy the world.
"What gives Stormbringer its momentum, its specific sense of tension, is, I believe, the fact that I hardly knew where I was going with it. I was making up rules for myself as I went along. Those rules became formalized in later books, but in that one I was winging it a lot of the time. In rock and roll you sometimes let the instrument take over. As with Stormbringer, it sometimes feels as if the instrument has taken on a life of its own, is inventing progressions for you. You also sound better if your voice isn’t quite up to the song, musically speaking."Part of Moorcock’s target audience was his friends, including JG Ballard, Barrington J. Bayley and James Cawthorn (whose illustrations had in the past inspired certain Elric scenes):
- "Elric is Me", The Dreamthief's Daughter, 2001
“In some senses I wrote the stories for them, in my own rough way trying to create the same kind of atmosphere and excitement I had enjoyed in the apocalyptic aspects of Blake, Byron and the Shelleys, in the visions of Mad John Martin and others whose work I could see at the Tate. I also loved the music of Mahler and Richard Strauss. I liked my romanticism in the biggest and most intense doses possible.”
- Elric: Stormbringer (Omnibus introduction 1993)
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| Herbert Jenkins 1965, Art: James Cawthorn |
Part 1. "Dead God’s Homecoming"
IN BRIEF: Jagreen Lern, a Chaos wizard of Pan Tang has Elric’s wife kidnapped. After a terrible defeat on the battlefield, Elric meets the enigmatic Nihrain ancient Sepiriz, who tells him that he must use Stormbringer and its sibling runeblade Mournblade to defeat Darnizhaan, one of the ancient Dead Gods (now returned to this sphere through Jagreen Lern's help). During the final confrontation, Elric uses an ancient Melnibonéan spell to turn Stormbringer and Mournblade against the Dead God.
"We do not exist, any of us!"
Darnizhaan is the titular Dead God in this story, and I assume he's one of the Dead Gods referred to in "While the Gods Laugh" (I still hold out hope that Rhynn and Kwll from Corum's Swords Trilogy are Dead Gods as well). In an interesting twist, the "evil" Darnizhaan only wants to "save" Elric's world from its fated destruction and rebirth, and even offers to make Elric a Higher Lord in order to dissuade him. It's easy to forget that the objective of Elric's entire mission is to destroy all traces of his world (and that he is fully aware of that).
This story features the first appearance of Sepiriz and his nine brothers of the Nihrain, an ancient race older even than the Melnibonéans. Sepiriz will return and gain additional background in several future Eternal Champion books (The Quest for Tanelorn (1975), The Dragon in the Sword (1987), The Skrayling Tree (2003) and Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer (2004)). He (or one of his brothers) will also appear as a frequent character in Hawkmoon's sequence as the "Warrior in Jet and Gold".
"Dead God's Homecoming" also smoothly calls back to an earlier Elric story by featuring the return (and final fate) of Queen Yishana of Jharkor (last seen in "The Stealer of Souls"). Later on, Org (from "Kings In Darkness") is also mentioned as being consumed by the Chaos wave. The damsel in distress here, Elric's wife Zarozinia, was first encountered in "The Flame Bringers". The winged men of Myrrhyn were first described in "While the Gods Laugh". Monstrous owls were also featured in the Rackhir story "To Rescue Tanelorn...", published earlier but which takes place concurrently with this story.
Part 2. "Black Sword’s Brothers"
IN BRIEF: Sepiriz gifts Elric with a spell to call upon Stormbringer’s runeblade brothers for aid when needed. At Jagreen Lern’s palace, Elric uses the Black Sword’s Brothers to banish his patron Arioch and two other Dukes of Chaos from Earth. When a weakened Elric is captured by Jagreen Lern, he eventually frees himself by summoning Stormbringer back from his brothers to rescue him. Nonetheless, the Southern Kingdoms' fleet is destroyed by Jagreen Lern’s superior forces.
“Stormbringer,” said Elric, “it is time to summon your brothers.”
In this installment Jagreen Lern's Chaos forces continue their seemingly-unstoppable encroachment over the Young Kingdoms, and gain quite alot of real estate. Sepiriz tells Elric that in previous occasions when he had been aided by an unknown force, it was not Arioch who had helped him (as would have been assumed), but Stormbringer's brothers. This may be the first instance - of many - where Moorcock ret-cons an earlier story (or who knows, maybe it was planned...). Speaking of ret-cons, several stories in recent decades have ret-conned a 10,000-year-long dreamquest into the first paragraph of Chapter 6. Once one gets over the sheer outlandishness of the idea, it actually works nicely - or at least is kind of fun (see The Skrayling Tree, The White Wolf’s Son, “Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse”, “The Flaneur des Arcades de l'Opera”, etc).
Arioch finally makes a reappearance, the first since "The Dreaming City" if Sepiriz is to be believed. However, his dialogue is here still fairly undeveloped compared to the seductive, teasing charmer he would later become. Rackhir the Red Archer appears here, as he was just introduced in the non-Elric story “To Rescue Tanelorn…” (published just a couple months before this story came out). The prequel novel Elric of Melniboné will later describe Elric and Rackhir's first encounter, but here Rackhir's appearance follows closely after the events of “To Rescue Tanelorn…”.
Part 3. "Sad Giant’s Shield"
IN BRIEF: Elric tries to oppose Jagreen Lern and his newly-summoned Hell Ships with a new fleet of allies, but is soundly defeated. On Sepiriz’ advice Elric goes on a quest to obtain the Sad Giant’s Shield, which will protect him from the reality-disrupting effects of the Hell Ships' disruption wave. Elric eventually uses the Chaos Shield to help him get close enough to destroy Pyaray, leader of the Hell Ships. After a mutated Zarozinia sacrifices her life to Stormbringer, Elric and his remaining friends retreat to Melniboné.
"...He has been—altered, Elric.”
Sepiriz travels in a floating golden globe which strangely reminds me of Dark Empire technology (ie - Huon's globe, Kalan's time-pyramid). Lord Pyaray's Hell Ships are a great invention and very visually evocative. A similar "Flying Dutchman"-esque vessel will be later seen in Corum’s Swords Trilogy. The water elemental King Straasha's inability to defy the power of the Hell Ships is an effective way to increase the sense of inevitable doom (Straasha's first meeting with Elric will be portrayed in 1972's Elric of Melniboné). Just before Rackhir's death there's a nice sequence of interior dialogues between the four adventurers. The climactic battle is exciting, although a bit on the pulpy side (tentacles, worm-women) - still, fun. Overall, "Sad Giant's Shield" has alot of fun action, but not much new in terms of subtext (I think).
Part 4. "Doomed Lord’s Passing"
IN BRIEF: Sepiriz takes Elric on a dreamquest to confer with the Lords of Law. He is then advised to obtain the Horn of Destiny from another realm, that of the undead warrior Roland. After Elric defeats Roland and obtains the Horn of Destiny, he uses it to awaken the dragons of Melniboné. Elric then uses the dragons to launch an attack on Jagreen Lern’s Camp of Chaos. A second blast from the Horn of Destiny allows the Lords of Law to arrive and battle the Chaos Lords. Finally, Elric is forced to slay his only true friend Moonglum in order to gain the strength to blow the Horn a final time, ushering a new age of rebirth. Stormbringer subsequently slays Elric.
“Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!”
Moorcock has stated that this is his favorite of these four novellas and it's pretty much great in every way. It opens with such a sense of bleak hopelessness, it might as well be a post-nuclear scenario (which, in a way, it is - at least for the Young Kingdoms). It opens with only three mortal characters against an entire realm ruled by Chaos.
Near the beginning, Elric visits a "multiversal" version of Melniboné through time, and then the realm of the Law Lords. He does this by going into a hypnagogic state - the same state John Daker is in when he is drawn from 20th Century Earth to timeless Necranal in "The Eternal Champion". This idea of a semi-dreamstate as a portal to the roads between the worlds had also just been seen in the short story "Not By Mind Alone" ("Islands").
When Elric is taken to Roland's world he meets another important recurring character, Jermays the Crooked. Jermays reappears in Phoenix In Obsidian/The Silver Warriors (1970), The Dragon in the Sword (1987) and The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001). I like to think that Jermays is an incarnation of Jephraim Tallow from The Golden Barge. When read as a continuation of Jephraim's story, several clues seem to comfortably fit (Jermays' tale is "unfinished" for example). They both seem to have a similar height at least... In one passage Jermays also seems to hint at an army of Eternal Champions, which will later be referred to as the Warriors at the End (or Edge) of Time. The Warriors appear in The Dragon in the Sword (1987) and in a Hawkwind song or two...
Jermays: “…there are a dozen or more who lie sleeping somewhere in this land alone. They are supposed to awaken only when a desperate need arises, yet I’ve known unpleasant things to happen and still they have slept. It could be they await the end of their world, which the gods may destroy if it proves unsuitable, in which case they will fight to prevent such a happening. It is merely a poorly conceived theory of my own and of little weight. Perhaps the legends arise from some dim knowledge of the fate of the Champion Eternal.”Roland and Vivian
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| Roland at Roncesvalles by Alphonse Marie de Neuville |
Roland's protector/admirer Lady Vivian is probably an incarnation of the "Lady of the Lake" from the legend of King Arthur and others (sometimes named Lady Viviane). Additionally, Vivian states that Roland had once resisted her charms, which is exactly what another Eternal Champion (Earl Aubec) will do when faced with the mysterious Myshella in "Master of Chaos", published just one month after "Doomed Lord's Passing".
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| (from Howard Pyle's 1905 "The Story of the Champions of the Round Table") |
A more detailed synopsis of Stormbringer can be found HERE.
The Death of Elric
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| Ace 1987, Art: Robert Gould |
“I got that from Melmoth the Wanderer; and Faust, and Don Juan - there’s a whole lot of Gothics where the hero comes to a spectacular end. Again, it was simply modification of a nineteenth-century formula: make your choices and pay your penalty. A good nineteenth-century romantic story has everything risked, and frequently everything lost. You rarely have everything risked and everything gained!”Moorcock also proposes that since death is an inevitable fate, the fact of Elric’s death is not as important as why he dies. Elric began his story in “The Dreaming City” with the destruction of his people for essentially reasons of personal vengeance. In Stormbringer, he again destroys the world, but this time it is to help usher in a period of rebirth, one where Chaos has a lesser presence (hopefully).
- Death Is No Obstacle (1992)
“It is the meaning that we give our deaths (and, of course, our lives) that is important. This idea is at the root of all our great chivalric epics. How the hero dies is as resonant as how he lives. This is the point I have tried to make in my own stories. El Cid’s legendary end at the battle of Valencia reminds us that courage without sacrifice is an empty quality. Elric’s death, to herald in a new and better era, must be equally meaningful if I am to do even modest justice to those great epics which meant so much to me when I was a child.”Additionally, as Chaos encroaches over Elric’s world, the imagery Moorcock brings to bear is a perfect complement to Elric’s own ambiguous loyalties.
- "El Cid And Elric: Under The Influence!" (2007)
"I was influenced by mythology and the great Romantics, Wordsworth, de Quincey, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley, the Brontes and so on, using techniques where for instance the landscape and the weather is carefully employed to describe and illustrate internal conflicts within a character. I don’t build worlds because the worlds I describe reflect the character. Landscapes are there to reveal what’s going on in the characters’ minds...Characters and their moral conflicts interest me."
- PM Press interview 2014
The Cosmic Balance
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| Lancer 1967 Art: Jack Gaughan |
"...in the Elric stories...I was developing the notion of the Cosmic Balance, which ideally was always equally balanced between Law and Chaos. Chaos for me could be pretty terrible, with everything in a state of constant change, unstable, while Law represented stability and consistent justice. However, I had soon begun to understand that the world requires equal doses of Law and Chaos to survive."
- Siren's Call, Interview 2009
"When the scales tip too far towards Law we move toward rigid orthodoxy and social sterility, a form of decadence. When Chaos is uppermost we move too far towards undisciplined and destructive creativity."
- Introduction to The Eternal Champion, White Wolf 1994
"Basically it's a good metaphor for the human being; the two forces warring inside the individual. Half of us is attracted to the wild side - the romance of Chaos, while the other half is saying that if you spend all your money, you won't have any left for your bus fare. I also used the ideas behind Zoroastrianism. Again, that sort of dichotomy, the sort of ambiguity of light and dark and the different aspects of it seem to me to reflect the human condition. A lot also comes from the thoughts of Jung."The Eternal Champion
- Imagine Magazine #22, January 1985
The connection between the Eternal Champion with the struggle for Balance between Law and Chaos is more important to Corum's Swords Trilogy, but is worth mentioning here since Stormbringer was eventually revised to name Elric as an Eternal Champion as well (although not conceived as such in the beginning). The Balance (or the Cosmic Hand that holds it) “enlists” the Eternal Champion to manifest in various realities ("spheres of the multiverse") in order to correct a state of imbalance between Law and Chaos in that sphere. Oftentimes the Champion does not even know which side he is supposed to be fighting for, and his (or her) struggle ends up further illustrating the fluid definition of good and evil. The theme of betrayal attached to the Eternal Champion often arises when the subjective nature of “good” and “evil” is shown to be inferior to the more objective, non-moralistic struggle for Balance between Law and Chaos.
"The Eternal Champion is always turning up to represent one group of apparently ‘good’ people only to discover that he’s fighting on the wrong side. That’s why Law and Chaos are much more useful opposites. One can’t exist without the other. Neither are evil, both are capable of altruism. It really is a much better way of looking at the world."The Multiverse
- Tripwire Interview 2008
The concept of the multiverse is mentioned at the beginning of “Sad Giant’s Shield”, and in “Doomed Lord’s Passing” Elric actually visits the world of Charlemagne’s tragic warrior Roland. Here, Roland is identified as another incarnation of the Eternal Champion, so it could be said that this episode is the earliest multiverse crossover (at least between mutually exclusive legends). As Moorcock's roster of Eternal Champions grows in the future, he will no longer need to call upon "legendary" figures, since he would have Corum and John Daker waiting in the wings (of course this didn't stop him from bringing Sexton Blake in a few decades later...).
"If we are the toys of the gods—are not perhaps the gods themselves mere children?”
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| Mayflower 1976, Bob Haberfield |
“When, in the last Elric story of all, the sword, his crutch, Stormbringer turns and slays Elric, it is meant to represent, on one level, how mankind’s wish-fantasies can often bring about the destruction of (till now at least) part of mankind…. how much of what we believe is true and how much is what we wish were true? …this is what nearly all my published work points out. …this reliance on pseudo-knowledge (wish-fantasy or editorialized facts), which seems to prove something we wish were true, is a dangerous thing to do. This is one of the main messages of the Elric series, though there are several others on different levels.”"I was glad I’d had a chance to finish the series with a bit of a bang."
- "The Secret Life Of Elric Of Melniboné" (1964)
Moorcock’s attempt to weld together the multiverse, the Eternal Champion and the Struggle for Balance between Law and Chaos into this final novella is incredibly ambitious, yet it all plays out beautifully, like a well-composed classical symphony. So many elements of Stormbringer resonate further down the line in the "Tale of the Eternal Champion" (some ret-conned, admittedly), that a much larger article could be written. In any case, it hard to understate the importance of this one book to the Elric and Eternal Champion saga.
Wikiverse Entries
Stormbringer
Dead God's Homecoming
Black Sword’s Brothers
Sad Giant’s Shield
Doomed Lord’s Passing
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