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| 1987 Edition, Art: Robert Gould |
By age 16 Moorcock had been exposed to Robert E. Howard’s casually-moral Conan, and probably Poul Anderson’s fantasies as well (including the 1953 man-out-of-time story "Three Hearts and Three Lions" and the grim The Broken Sword from 1954). He had also spent some time in Paris discovering random sci-fi paperbacks (such as Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination) and absorbing the writings of Existentialist writers Sartre and Camus (which could be summed up as a kind of “God doesn’t exist, you're on your own and nothing matters” outlook, I suppose). Around this time embryonic ideas for his signature character "the Eternal Champion" began to arrive.
"I started work on it when I was sixteen, and originally the influences came from H. Rider Haggard and A. Merritt. The idea being reborn and that of the Champion figure stemmed from those writers, and just grew and grew."“The Eternal Champion” first surfaced as a 1957 serial for one of Moorcock’s fanzines, 'Avilion'. Due to a sudden lack of resources and increased work demands from paying employers like Fleetway, it was then abandoned. In 1962, after the success of the Elric stories, Moorcock completed and published “The Eternal Champion” as a novella in 'Science Fantasy' #53. It describes a 20th Century man named John Daker who finds himself psychically transported into the body of a legendary hero on an unrecognizable Earth. Asked to lead mankind against an alien race of invaders, he soon realizes that the nature of the conflict is more complicated than it first appears. In 1970, with the Eternal Champion concept more clearly established in his published oeuvre, Moorcock further expanded the novella into a full-length novel, just in time to partner it with a sequel, Phoenix in Obsidian.
- Imagine Magazine #22, January 1985
Aside from the earlier-mentioned exposure to Howard, Anderson, Merritt, Haggard, Bester, Sartre and Camus, Moorcock has cited other influences including ideas absorbed at Michael Hall (his anthroposophically-leaning alma mater), scenes from the sword and sandal historical epics of 1950’s Hollywood and London, and “an intense reading of 19th century Romantic poetry, especially Shelley and Swinburne, (as well as) Gothic fiction by Maturin, Lewis or Radcliffe.” It seems almost logical that the neurotic, impressionable and genocidal hero Erekosë should arise.
The Eternal Champion
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| 1970, Art: Bob Haberfield |
A deeper breakdown of both the 1962 novella and the expanded 1970 novel can be found HERE.
alle...gory
As hinted at in the “Introduction” to recent Sojan collections, the Eternal Champion is a being who lives and fights through an infinite number of incarnations, mostly unaware of his past lives, and generally fighting for “the good”. However, in the "The Eternal Champion", the simple, seemingly-self-evident distinction between good and evil begins to blur. The Champion soon realizes that what is good for one person can very easily be bad for another (exemplified for example by the differing viewpoints between a liberator and an invader, or those of a freedom fighter and a terrorist ).
“…(it) describes, if you like, the dawning revelation of a teenager who realises that his country isn’t always right, according to its own statements, and sometimes you have to oppose what you don’t agree with. Of course, I’m putting this all a bit simplistically, but I think a lot of my fiction, generic and non-generic, addresses this question, at various levels of sophistication. Essentially, it’s describing the confusion one feels when one is expected to support something which goes against everything you’ve been taught by your culture about what’s good and what’s bad. I had done a lot of questioning as a kid…”
https://www.tor.com/2010/03/24/the-genesis-of-hawkmoon/
“We are not betrayed by others — we betray ourselves by too readily accepting orthodoxy, whether it comes from politicians or CNN...
- Moorcock, Introduction to The Eternal Champion, White Wolf 1994Later in the Elric saga, Moorcock eventually redefines his characters' struggle to be for a more objective ideal: balance between "law" and "chaos". In this way his protagonists may be "good" or "evil", but still fight for a comprehensible cause.
Moorcock's Multiverse
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| 1962, Science Fantasy 53, Art: Gerard Quinn |
Perhaps inspired by Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, Erekosë is paired with his legendary sword "Kanajana", which is imbued with some form of lethal radiation that only Erekosë himself can withstand. The role of a uniquely-powered sword had appeared in Moorcock's early 'Tarzan Adventures' story “Dek of Noothar - The Sword of Life”, but here it merely seems to be a very good blade for killing people. "Stormbringer", a later incarnation of the “Black Sword” (merely lead-colored here), would have a much more developed personality.
Erekosë eventually learns that the Eldren are the true natives of this Earth, and that humanity are the extra-terrestrial invaders. This twist had also earlier been employed in a 'Tarzan Adventures' Sojan sequence (“Prisoners in Stone”), but in all fairness, almost every nation is really made up of immigrants/colonists/conquerors (it's just not acknowledged it very often).
The Dreams of John Daker
Moorcock has never been hesitant to revise an older work to make it sit more naturally into the most current editions of his multiverse bibliography. This typically involves changing names, adding surnames, and/or adding new characters to older lists of name-dropped multiverse "celebrities". Nowhere is this more fun to track than in the various versions of "The Eternal Champion".
In the original novella published in 1962, this passage occurs:
"Was I John Daker or Erekosë? Was I either of these? Many other names, Shaleen, Artos, Brian, Umpata, Roland, Ilanth, Ulysses, Alric, fled away down the ghostly rivers of my memory."In the most current edition (2013), the same passage has been updated as follows:
"Was I John Daker or Erekosë? Was I either of these? Many other names—Corum Jhaelen Irsei, Aubec, Seaton Begg, Elric, Rackhir, Ilian, Oona, Simon, Bastable, Cornelius, the Rose, von Bek, Asquiol, Hawkmoon—fled away down the ghostly rivers of my memory."The latest text also includes a dream during Erekosë's first overnight stay at Loos Ptokai where even more familiar and semi-familiar names from the Moorcock bookshelves appear such as Byzantium, Colvin, Bradbury, London, Melniboné, Lanjis Liho, Powys, Marca, Muldoon, Dietrich, Arflane, Kane, Persson, Ryan, Pepin, Seward, Mennell, Tallow (The Golden Barge), Hallner, Köln, and Carnelian.
At one point I thought Dietrich referred to the German singer-actress Marlene Dietrich, but it's more likely this is a reference to Dietrich von Bern, the historical figure on which Dorian Hawkmoon is based (to a certain extent). However, where's Sojan? Maybe the next edition....
Epilogue
Although not published until after Elric had first made his debut in "The Dreaming City", it's rewarding to read The Eternal Champion first (or at the very least the novella version). At this point, the full scope of Erekosë's unique form of damnation would not yet be revealed (his remembrance of his previous incarnations), but it adds alot of resonance to later stories in which the protagonist often ends up in tragic circumstances - possibly as some kind of "karmic payback" for Erekosë's unimaginably bloodthirsty crimes in this first true episode.
"The Eternal Champion was the first book I ever planned to write. It is the cornerstone of my heroic fantasy sequence and in some ways a key to my other, more ambitious, novels."
- Moorcock, Introduction to The Eternal Champion, White Wolf 1994It's hard to really piece together a true chronology of Moorcock’s development of his “mythos”, considering that he seems to have been working in several different arenas at the same time in the late 1950s. However, I like to imagine that the conventional hero archetype embodied by Sojan had been deepened by its incarnation as the amoral and conflicted Jephraim Tallow of The Golden Barge, resulting in Erekosë, who willingly betrays his entire race in order to bring about a brief interlude of world peace. Moorcock’s next creation, Elric, would carry out a similar form of rebellion against his own people, although for reasons somewhat less immediately altruistic than Erekosë’s.
Wikipedia Entry
The Eternal Champion Omnibus 2013, Gollancz
Multiverse.org archive copy
Next Chapter: Elric: "The Dreaming City"
(Previous Chapter: The Golden Barge)
