Elric_ The Sleeping Sorceress - Michael Moorcock [141]
Noble self-sacrifice still brings me to tears to this day, irrespective of the loyalties of the man or woman who performs the deed. Their loyalty is to a higher ideal, to a noble ethic. To this day epic films, like Ridley Scott’s recent Kingdom of Heaven, have shown the noblest hero to be the one who rises above simplistic loyalties to serve what is best in mankind and what is universal in mankind’s religious or political systems. When, long after I first read of his exploits, I saw Charlton Heston as El Cid have the arrow pulled from his body and strap himself to his horse in order to rally his troops against the invader (even though I knew that in real life Díaz had died in his bed) I enjoyed the same sensations. All this went to inspire my own troubled characters who wonder, in the words of E. M. Forster, whether it is best to betray one’s country or one’s friend—or, indeed, oneself.
To me, no attempt to mirror the great epics of our ancestors can succeed, even marginally, without an understanding of death. My quarrel with many of the fantasy romances written in the past fifty years or so is precisely that they do not understand the issue of mortality. All they do is keep us wondering whether the protagonist will live or die. This is scarcely important to us or Malory would not have called his work “Morte d’Arthur.” “All death is certain,” says the Hospitaler over his shoulder as he goes to certain doom against Saladin in Scott’s film. 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.
ORIGINS
Early artwork associated with Elric’s first
appearances in magazines and books.
A page from an aborted graphic adaptation of Stormbringer, by James Cawthorn, 1965, previously unpublished.
Front- and back-cover artwork by James Cawthorn, for The Sleeping Sorceress, first edition, New English Library, 1971.
“The Age of the Young Kingdoms” map by James Cawthorn, 1971; first published in Elric of Melniboné, first edition.
Cover artwork designed by Laurence Cutting, for Elric of Melniboné, first edition, Hutchinson, 1972.
Cover artwork by Michael Whelan, for The Vanishing Tower, first retitled edition of The Sleeping Sorceress, DAW Books, 1977.
Cover artwork by Robert Gould, for The Weird of the White Wolf, book three of the Elric Saga as reconfigured in the mid-1970s, Berkley Books, 1983, comprising “Master of Chaos” (as “The Dream of Earl Aubec”) and three stories from The Stealer of Souls.
Front- and back-cover artwork by Dalmazio Frau, for Elric of Melniboné, first audiobook edition, AudioRealms, 2003.
Cover artwork by Chris Achilleos, for Elric de Melniboné/La Fortaleza de la Perla (Elric of Melniboné/The Fortress of the Pearl), Spanish edition, Edhasa, 2007.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Recently voted by the London Times one of the fifty greatest English writers since 1945, MICHAEL JOHN MOORCOCK is an SFWA Grand Master and the author of a number of science fiction, fantasy, and literary novels, including the Elric novels, the Cornelius Quartet, Gloriana, King of the City, and many more. As editor of the controversial British science