THE READING RHEUM: STORMBRINGER (1965)

 

Months ago, I finished my reread of my 1965 copy of STORMBRINGER-- the one whose cover, to Moorcock's later chagrin, established the idea that Elric went around wearing a "tall, pointy hat" all the time. But it took me months to figure out how to evaluate the way Moorcock had ended his saga-- albeit leaving things open to many, many prequel tales.

As I mentioned before, I really, really liked the Elric character as he appeared in his comic-book crossover with Conan five years after this paperback's publication. But I'm not sure I was nearly as enthused with the actual prose adventures in my original readings. All I can say for certain, given that I'm speaking of readings from fifty-plus years ago, is that I don't believe I tended to reread most of Moorcock's books, whether sword-and-sorcery or science fiction, as I would reread Burroughs, Tolkien and various others. None of that is necessarily a failing of Moorcock as an author; it's just a taste thing.

However, now I found a section of STORMBRINGER that explains, to my *own* satisfaction, why I tended to pull back somewhat from the Moorcock universe somewhat, even if I liked individual works a lot. My conclusion: Moorcock doesn't like magic.

Moorcock endlessly faulted JRR Tolkien for his political leanings. Yet I find it interesting that Tolkien presented his readers with a world in which his creations, his elves and dwarves and Valar, had an intrinsic love of the world with which they interacted. and they did so by understanding its essence through magical arts.

Elric, the last son of the Melnibonean Empire (a stand-in for the declining British Empire Moorcock experienced in youth), takes no evident joy in being able to commune with wind-spirits or lizard-gods or whatever. We don't generally know what actions he took that made these astral entities his allies; they're just there at convenient moments to save the hero's butt. 

This insight more or less will dominate the review, for I didn't find the final plotlines of STORMBRINGER very interesting. Moorcock spent all of his previous Elric stories building up to this pyrrhic victory for the doomed hero, and thus the climax becomes pretty tiresome as Moorcock systematically knocks off all of Elric's support-cast prior to the hero getting killed by his own sword. The two females in his orbit suffer particularly gruesome fates, though I'd stop short of crying "women in refrigerators!" The previous cycle of Elric stories pitted the albino against a pathetically jealous sorcerer, who disappeared at the end of the cycle and I guess got finished off in some separate story. Here, the main villain doesn't have that much characterization and is nothing but a routine warlord-type. Moorcock even has Elric's companion Moonglum kill off an innocent and unoffending giant simply because an additional death makes the book even gloomier.

All that said, STORMBRINGER still possesses a high level of mythic content due to how Moorcock contextualizes the doom of Elric's realm. Early in the book, Sepiriz, one of the many pocket know-it-alls found in magical-era fantasies, tells Elric, "Chaos formed this earth and for eons, Chaos ruled. Men were created to put an end to that rule." Sepiriz tells the hero that he is, in essence, a puppet who's been manipulated by the forces of Law to end the reign of Chaos. The cost of establishing the reign of Law is that eventually the entire world will be remade so that every trace of Elric's realm is expunged.

I theorize that because Moorcock always meant to subject his fantasy-cosmos to such a Gotterdammerung, this meant that Moorcock the author might not have invested much emotional tonality into that domain and its characters. Naturally that too is a subjective judgment. Still, it explains why I thought ELRIC OF MELNIBONE was the best of the sixties novels, because it allows the sympathetic characters some illusion of hope. After that, though, it's pretty much doom and gloom all the way, and I'm not sure Moorcock captured the fatalistic resignation of Old Norse mythology as much as he may have thought he did.

I consider the beginning of the 1960s as a new era for magical-era stories in England and the US. The old era, loosely initiated by Robert E Howard's 1930s works, continued through the 1950s in spotty fashion with fantasy-stories from writers like Leiber, Vance and of course Tolkien. But only in the 1960s did fantasy become a "hot commodity" rather than an occasional curiosity. The relatively new venue of paperback publishing both introduced baby boomers to Tolkien and Howard and offered new prospects to Leiber, Vance and Moorcock. The embrace of the magical-fantasy genre in the 1960s shares some parallels with the revival of neopaganism and "wicca" in both the US and England, if not in other countries as well. And whatever one may think of such "New Age" movements from a philosophical standpoint, they embraced the language of magical fantasy in terms of venerating the natural world, whether the adherents regarded "magic" as a literal force or a symbolic construct.  

Tolkien's love of magical wonders probably contributed to his popularity with Baby Boomer readers of the sixties and seventies. But as I said, I'm not sure how deeply Moorcock's love of magic ran (even as a literary construct), or if it even existed independently of professional considerations. All that I can say is that I don't see much of it in the sixties Elric books. I'm tempted to explore the six-part "Prince Corum" saga from the same decade, but I don't know when I might find the time. Anyway, the verdict on STORMBRINGER-- good mythicity for its cosmic schema, bad mythicity for its humdrum characters.