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fiction and other, harder-going stuff, like Southey’s Palmerin of England and the few available translations of Peninsula Romances a kid like me would be likely to find. I’d shuddered at The Monk, skipped a bit through the longueurs of The Mysteries of Udolpho, loved the imagery of Vathek. As many of us do, who develop an enthusiasm, I had gone back as far as it was possible to go and met another early influence on the way—John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, together, of course, with Milton’s Paradise Lost. Cornerstones of Puritan literature? But they worked for me. Bunyan taught me that you could tell more than one story in a single narrative. Milton taught me that Satan can be excessive attractive. To this day I advise people who want to write fantastic fiction for a living to stop reading generic fantasy and to go back to the roots of the genre as deeply as possible, the way anyone might who takes his craft seriously. One avoids becoming a Tolkien clone precisely by returning to the same roots that inspired The Lord of the Rings.

And so Elric himself figuratively went back to those wellsprings increasingly as I told his story. But it is here, in what became the first two books, I think you’ll find the psychological roots, the essence, if you like, of Elric, before I understood that we were as locked together as firmly as Conan Doyle and Holmes and that my creations would engulf me in a tidal wave of imitations or inspirations. Poor Bob Howard, distraught over the death of his mother, took a shotgun to himself and at least avoided the Conan clones, just as Tolkien never had to see Gandalf bobbleheads or gaming companies lifting and vulgarizing aspects of his work wholesale. I’m sure Howard would have learned how to deal with anything, had he survived, and I still enjoy a fantasy of him as an old guy in a rocking chair, sitting on his front porch and swapping technical tips with his visitors while sometimes privately confiding that the fire’s gone out of the stuff since he first started doing it. Except, of course—and then he’d reel off a list of names crossing a spectrum as wide as the state. Howard could not predict the success of his character any more than I could guess Elric’s future. Unaware of the coming influence of Dungeons & Dragons and others, I cheerfully permitted free use of my ideas and cosmology until I had the peculiar experience of watching different companies going to law over characters and cosmologies I had created, which is why the Elric gods and demons appeared in the original D&D book but were later dropped.

We’ve come a long way since 1957, when it was still possible to order the set of The Lord of the Rings and wait a week before receiving the first editions at, as I recall, a guinea apiece. Tolkien’s phenomenal story was still considered as much an expensive rarity as Arkham House Lovecrafts, luxuriously illustrated limited editions of Dunsany or the Gnome Press editions of the Conan books. Ironically, none was as widely published as Anderson’s second novel (his first was a mystery) The Broken Sword, which was done in an ordinary commercial edition by Abelard-Schuman. This was long before Lin Carter’s rediscovery series of fantasy classics, which provided a rich education for those interested in what was still a pretty disparate bunch of books! Before Carter’s series, the fantasy canon was an expensive prospect, even if you could find the book in print. Weird Tales of the magazine’s golden age were, however, still relatively cheap in the second-hand bookstores, especially those that specialized in giving you half price on any title you brought back in good condition. This meant that all my copies had big purple rubber stamps on the inside pages. I think I’d miss that purple if I saw the magazines in any other state! That’s where I was introduced to the likes of Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith and other exotically named individuals, good writers who could find no commercial publication save in the marginal pulps, which, like Black Mask, had their own specific readerships. Some, like Frank