Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [179]
I have always loved America, first as a fantasy inspired by Fenimore Cooper, Longfellow, Joel Chandler Harris, Louisa May Alcott, Bret Harte and Clarence E. Mulford, and later as a reality, when I wandered the woods of the Delaware Valley or explored abandoned mining towns in the Rockies. I have crossed the US back and forth three times and delighted in her infinite variety, the complexity of her people and cultures. These cultures, blended in the great cities of America, have entertained and inspired the world.
I began writing heroic fantasy before anyone had a name for it, when my Elric books were as marginalized as Professor Tolkien’s. I drew inspiration not only from T.H. White (The Once and Future King) and Mervyn Peake (the Titus Groan trilogy), both of whom I was privileged to know, but from American writers like Fritz Leiber and Leigh Brackett, whose wonderful prose and extraordinary imaginations were without equal and with whom I also later became friends. Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword and James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen were other enormous influences. Indeed, I found Tolkien, when his trilogy began to appear in my mid-teens, a little tame in comparison! The Americans were always my own literary heroes.
Therefore it is probably not surprising that the time came to acknowledge these boyhood enthusiasms and to recall the inspiration of American landscape and literature. Many American writers of fantasy have retold the tales of Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere—the Matter of Britain. Very few have looked to the Matter of America, their native myth cycles. Hardly any have written about Hiawatha, the great civilizer, the American King Arthur, or used the images which fired the dreams of their ancestors and brought them to these lands as explorers, traders, settlers, sometimes conquerors, seeking a thousand different fantasies of idealism, security and wealth.
In The Skrayling Tree, I wanted to write an homage to America and the great Americans. Not an uncritical, sentimental celebration, because that would be disrespectful, but a tale of blood and beauty, touching on this country’s early history before she became a nation.
With that in mind, I have written of the desert dwellers of the Southwest. I’ve described the plains, lakes and mountains of America before she was settled. I’ve told the stories of north-eastern forest dwellers. I have written of the savage yellow-haired Teutonic invaders who first came to these shores from Europe, of the legends and tales which inspired Longfellow and the American transcendentalists. Indeed, I’ve even written about Longfellow himself in one chapter! Images, like the tree of life, common to most peoples, are blended with more typically American images, like the legendary City of Gold, which brought so many to their deaths as they sought to discover it.
How Elric, the albino quasi-human Sorcerer Prince from another age, fits into this, how he meets savage Vikings, a man and a woman from our own time, as well as the great Hiawatha himself, and how they come together to save the heart of America, perhaps the entire multiverse, I’ll leave for you to discover—and, I hope enjoy—in the pages of The Skrayling Tree!
If, in telling this adventure, I’ve touched a little on the Matter of America and described my own love for this vast, rich, complicated country, then I will have paid back my debt, at least in some small measure.
INTRODUCTION TO THE FRENCH EDITION OF ELRIC
Introduction to the French Omnibus Edition of
ELRIC
(2006)
IT IS NO secret that the inspiration for Elric came from a character in the long-running pulp adventure series (of which I was later an editor) The Sexton Blake Library. Sexton Blake began his career in 1897, but it was not