Elric_ The Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock [200]
“The exact nature of the feud is a mystery” (“Theleb K’aarna,” line 6): Maybe I wasn’t clear enough here—but I have the idea that I explained somewhere how Theleb K’aarna had devised a means of sending Elric on a wild goose chase by loosing some supernatural force or other against him. This was why Elric wanted blood. That story by the way was the most popular of the first three. I guess a Freudian psychologist would know why….
“Kings in Darkness” I’d rather not deal with, since it was the worst of the series and, as I mentioned, written commercially. Therefore there is little of it which fits in with what I like to think of as the real content of the Elric series.
No comments, either, on “The Flame Bringers”—although I enjoyed writing the Meerclar bit and the last sequence with Elric on the back of the dragon. This, I think, is nothing much more than an adventure story, though it serves to show up Elric’s weakness in that the moment things get tough he’s seeking his sword again. Also the last bit where the sword returns is a hint of the sword’s “true” nature.
In the book version of the last quartet (of which “Black Sword’s Brothers” is the first part) I’ve revised the opening a bit. It was—and C. R. Kearns pointed this out and I agreed with him—what you might call a confused start. In the final revision of the short story version I changed it fairly considerably from the original and one or two inconsistencies crept through—I was working hard at the time and was very tired.
I would rather you had left this story out or waited until all four had been published before synopsizing it since this is the first part of a novel and many issues are not clarified until the end. I’m not happy with any of the magazine stories as they stand and have made, in places, quite heavy revisions. The last story to be written is, I feel, the best though. A final word—the Lords of Chaos hated Tanelorn not because it was a utopia, but because nearly all those in the city had once owed them, the Lords, allegiance and had forsworn it when they came to Tanelorn (or so the story goes). This is probably the most overtly philosophical or mystical of the Young Kingdom tales, as you say, and took much longer to write than the rest. It could be improved, I feel, by more play on the actual characters involved.
The writer feels that “Black Sword’s Brothers” was the dullest Elric story. It was certainly, as explained above, one of the most patchy from the point of view of construction. It’s true, in one sense, that I was losing interest in the Elric series—or rather that I had reached a point before it was written where I had run out of inspiration. But the interest picked up as I began to write and, by the time I’d got into the second part, I was enjoying the writing again. I think it’s possible to look at the Elric stories as a sort of presentation of the crude materials which I hope to fashion into better stories later. Being non-logical, I have to produce a great deal of stuff in order to find the bits of it I really want. My ideas about Law and Chaos and the rest became clearer as I wrote. Of the four, “Black Sword’s Brothers” and “Sad Giant’s Shield” (the most recently published) are the weakest in my opinion. Both were revised (something I do not usually do with the Elric stories) and both suffered from this revision, I think. My mind was at its clearest (not very clear by normal standards) when I wrote “Doomed Lord’s Passing.” I’ve found that I can only really learn from my