Elric of Melniboné

I’ve been aware of the Elric books for many years, but it has taken me a long time to get around to reading about the eternal champion. It was worth the wait.

It is fascinating to see how these stories have had such far-reaching influence, from roleplaying games to video games to fantasy authors. Elric is a great anti-hero, and though you always root for him, you often feel like you shouldn’t!

This was the first fantasy series I read, and it changed my life. Elric of Melniboné is a glorious blend of Grimdark and Sword and Sorcery, that starts a satisfying series, which, in and of itself, is the cornerstone of a larger collection of fantasy works.

So many works have borrowed from Elric, you really owe it to yourself to read the original. The books are short, and read quite quickly. There is incredible pathos within the story arc, and a deep, dark creativity to the worldbuilding.

It’s hard to think of a more iconic character than the albino last Emperor of Melniboné, a melancholy sorcerer/warrior symbiotically linked to his rune-sword, Stormbringer. Moorcock has a way of making myth feel real, as if he immerses the reader in a pre-historic world of chaos gods and demons that existed before the current crop of homo sapiens crawled their way out of the primordial soup. 

The writing is succinct, poetic, mythic. Less concerned with the psychological realism that characterizes much modern fantasy, in true Sword and Sorcery style, the Elric stories confront the reader with haunting motifs and mythic… show more.