Fantastic Fiction: Elric of Melniboné: Tortured Elf Emperor with a Cursed Sword

What is the longest running SFF series written by a single author?

If you answered “Elric of Melniboné” by Michael Moorcock, congratulations, you’re right. Spanning a whopping 62 years from the first Elric story, The Dreaming City, in 1961 to the last story to date, The Folk of the Forest (2023), no other series written by a single author has run longer.

But who is Elric of Melniboné, and what makes him so special? He is the 428th (and—as it turns out—final) emperor of the island nation of Melniboné, though it’s not a job he particularly wants. The Melnibonèans are inhumanly beautiful and have pointed ears but are also cruel and callous beings without empathy. In short, they’re elves by another name. Their civilization is ancient and decadent, and most of Melniboné has reverted to wilderness except for the capital city of Imryr.

Elric is different from the rest of his people, both physically and mentally. Moorcock describes him as an albino with “milk-white hair, flesh the colour of bleached bones, and slanted eyes, crimson and moody.” Elric is sickly and weak, dependent on both drugs and dark sorcery to stay alive and strong. But unlike the other Melnibonéans, Elric has a conscience and empathy, though he is also introspective and given to brooding. Elric is clear-eyed enough to recognise the sorry state of his fading empire and dislikes Melniboné and its traditions almost as much as his subjects dislike him.

As with any reluctant ruler, there is a rival waiting in the wings: Elric’s villainous cousin Yrkoon, who wants both the throne of Melniboné as well as Elric’s first love, Cymoril (who also happens to be Yrkoon’s sister), for himself. Yrkoon repeatedly tries to kill Elric and eventually drives him into exile. He also kidnaps Cymoril and puts her into a magically induced sleep. Elric’s attempt to free her and regain his throne drives Elric to make a pact with the demon Arioch, Lord of Chaos. This pact leads Elric to a cave where he finds the magical blade Stormbringer, which can cut through almost everything and also grants Elric strength and vitality. However, Stormbringer exacts a steep price from its wielder because the blade feeds on the souls of those it slays and has the uncanny tendency to kill the people Elric cares for—including his beloved Cymoril, his friend Moonglum, and eventually even Elric himself.

Elric was born out of a conversation between John Carnell, editor of the British magazine Science Fantasy, and the young writer Michael Moorcock, wherein both proclaimed their love for the sort of fantasy adventure stories—soon to be called “sword and sorcery”—that had been published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales some thirty years earlier but were considered hopelessly passé by the early 1960s. Carnell remarked that he would be open to publishing “that Conan stuff,” so Moorcock wrote The Dreaming City, the first Elric story, which appeared in the June 1961 issue of Science Fantasy.

The influences that created Elric are manifold. Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian is obviously one, though Elric is very much the antithesis of Conan and much closer to another Robert E. Howard character, the introspective and brooding King Kull, who also has to deal with multiple attempts to usurp his throne. Elric’s appearance was inspired by Monsieur Zenith, the albino antagonist of the long-running British detective franchise Sexton Blake, one of whose adventures Moorcock penned in 1959. Other influences are Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Poul Anderson’s fantasy novels The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions, the Finnish national epic Kalevala, and the works of Bertholt Brecht, particularly The Threepenny Opera. In spite of his myriad influences, Elric is very much a hero for the 1960s counterculture, an angry young man, a born rebel who is disgusted by the satiated establishment of a fading empire, and a drug-user who is fascinated by mysticism and sorcery. Elric would not have been out of place at a beatnik or hippie gathering in the 1960s.

Elric’s adventures were popular from the get-go, and the character appeared in nine novellas and novelettes in Science Fantasy between 1961 and 1964. When Science Fantasy was about to fold in 1964, Michael Moorcock decided to end Elric’s story by having him succumb to his cursed, soul-eating blade Stormbringer.

This might have been the end of the doomed elf lord, but it wasn’t. Since the publication of The Dreaming City in 1961, the sword-and-sorcery genre had undergone a revival that was about to go into overdrive when the US paperback publisher Lancer reprinted Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories to enormous success beginning in 1966. Suddenly “that Conan stuff,” which had been hopelessly passé only five years before, was the hottest trend on the market. And so Michael Moorcock returned to Elric to feed a readership hungry for more sword-and-sorcery tales, writing prequels and filling in gaps between the earlier adventures of Elric chronicled in the pages of Science Fantasy.

The sword-and-sorcery boom eventually faded by the early 1980s, but Michael Moorcock kept returning to Elric again and again, and he also integrated the adventures of the doomed albino elf into his overall multiverse, with Elric becoming one of the incarnations of the Eternal Champion.

At the height of his popularity, Elric also appeared in other media such as comics, music albums, and role-playing games. However, unlike other fantasy heroes, Elric never made the jump onto the big or small screen. Film and TV adaptations were planned, but never came to anything. As a result, Elric is probably less well-known these days than such a long-running character should be.

That said, the influence of Elric can also be seen all over modern fantasy, from Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher (Geralt of Rivia) to the pale-skinned, white-haired, and incestuous Targaryens of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Indeed, Matt Smith’s portrayal of Daemon Targaryen in House of the Dragon looks as if he stepped out of the Michael Whelan’s Elric covers.

Have you read Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné tales? Have you played a roleplaying game inspired by the character or maybe cosplayed as Elric? Let’s continue the conversation in Seattle.