Elric_ The Sleeping Sorceress - Michael Moorcock [140]
My thanks, as ever, to Mike Friedrich, to Roy Thomas, to Messrs. Russell, Gilbert and Freeman and, of course, to Rick Oliver and all at First Comics (who nobly took up Pacific’s fallen banner) for these wonderful pages. They have succeeded in making a fairly old man pretty damned happy . . .
EL CID AND ELRIC:
UNDER THE INFLUENCE!
EL CID AND ELRIC:
Under the Influence!
(2007)
ELRIC AND EL Cid! The similarity between the two names is not entirely coincidental, since the legends and romances of El Cid were a huge influence on my juvenile imagination.
I was brought up, like most British boys—I suspect like most boys of my generation everywhere—on stories of idealism, heroism and self-sacrifice. Macaulay’s How Horatius Held the Bridge, Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, Newbolt’s Vitai Lampada, Chesterton’s Lepanto and many, many more were the stirring narrative poems we recited not to please teachers but for our own delight. Much of our history was already mythologized—the cool courage of Francis Drake and the brave death of Nelson were mixed in our minds with the fictional death of Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities and a whole army of heroes who, in true Christian tradition, gave their lives for the benefit of others. Usually these heroes were depicted, like Robin Hood, as underdogs, fighting against the rich, the powerful and the thoroughly unjust!
The movies were the same. The stories were often of brave “ordinary” men who sacrificed themselves for the good of the many. High Noon represented this theme in Westerns while Quo Vadis and Ben Hur offered it in what were known as “toga and sandal epics,” Humphrey Bogart sacrificed his own desire in Casablanca and in the urban thrillers which eventually were given the generic name of “noir” by French critics. These were the popular entertainment of my day, but I had another enthusiasm, not shared by any of my peers. This was for all the books on myth and legend I could find, as well as for the few adult stories which in those days were still to be given the name of “Fantasy,” including Lord Dunsany, Edgar Rice Burroughs and, when I came across them, the American pulp magazines with names like Planet Stories or Startling Stories, specializing in a Burroughs-influenced “sword-and-planet” fiction. Early on I came across a series which told the stories of Greece and Rome, Scandinavia and Britain, most familiar to English children, but also included a volume on Peninsula Romance and it was in that book I first came across the story of Rodrigo Díaz, El Cid Campeador, whose story especially thrilled me.
Perhaps I was impressed by the fact that Díaz was an historical figure living at one of the most colourful and romantic times in Spanish history, when Christians and Moslems were enjoying perhaps the highest level of civilization either had ever known, when chivalric knights on both sides exemplified the highest ideals, irrespective of religion, while on the other hand there were villains amongst both communities, and El Cid fought with Moslem allies against corrupt Christians or with mixed armies of both religions to secure Valencia for himself. I was thrilled when Díaz was named El Campeador—“The Champion”—bearing his sword Tizona in man-to-man combat and I am sure all this went to inspire my own character Elric and the background of his world.