The Bane of the Black Sword

A nice addition to the Elric Saga. Elric has found an uneasy peace, love and it seems a chance to put his past behind him. Things go south very quickly as he is drawn into a world that has other plans for him and Stormbringer.

Book Five. Every time I finish one of the books in this series I think, I'll read something else before the next one...but end up slavering for another one of these cookies instead. Though the writing in these books lacks polish—a red pen in the hands of an editor these days might leave it looking like one of the gory slaughterfests the author so graphically describes—I'm not that concerned.

Elric is the ultimate tortured soul. Not a good man, he is steeped in ten thousand years of sorcerous ancestry and willing to do just about anything to achieve his ends; but he pulls it off in such a graceful way I end up rooting for him. So do his friends and lovers; they fear him, but they stick around. His bottomless suffering softens and show more hardens him at the same time, making him unpredictable, scary and fascinating.

I thought Book 5 was a bit more focused than some previous installments. Here Elric finds peace at last, but of course I don't trust that. He has too many demons. What keeps me reading these books is the classic heroic tension between love and hate, beauty and desolation. Despite formidable hardpan weaknesses, Elric wreaks mayhem on his terms, sometimes just because he can. He is very creative about it. A proper hero if ever there was one. show less

So close to contentment, and then it is ripped away.

I think this typifies the Elric experience. Pure melancholy undiluted by even a shard of true happiness...

Elric adventures again with Moonglum, gets vengeance on an old foe, finds love, and is responsible for fewer friends than usual dying. Also an interesting epilogue that contains absolutely no Elric other than a mention in passing, although it features an old ally of his, last seen several books ago. Happy to have read it again after so many years, and glad to now be passing it on to a friend.

I almost wondered if Moorcock originally planned this as the end of the Elric saga, just the way he left Elric toward the end.

Regardless, still a hell of a lot of fun, and interesting to see the author taking Elric in different directions.

Two more books to go!

Definitely the pinnacle of Sword and Sworcery. Elric, the mage of legend, is a transformed warrior descending from lofty ideals into the realm of chaos and back again, casting off his allegiance to the goddess of chaos itself to battle... um... just about everything. :)

I can say this is less strange and less idealistic and mysterious and archetypal than the previous volumes, focusing more on the quest and the battle and retaining a core of his idealism, as corrupted as that has become.

Mister anti-hero Elric. :)

It isn't so challenging anymore. It IS pretty wonderful, however. Epic, even, for being so short. :)

I wonder whether one can consider Elric's sword Stormbringer to actually be a character in itself. Okay, the sword doesn't speak, but it does seem to have a will of its own, which is probably why I had the sword turn on Elric in the short story that I wrote for year 12 English. Well, I think to suggest that the sword is a character is a little misleading since it is not actually the sword that is the character but rather the demon that has been imprisoned within.
As I have said before I think Stormbringer is one of the coolest swords ever to come from the imagination of a fantasy writer. Okay, I probably would not like to actually own it since it is a demonic sword that hungers for the souls of its victims. Stormbringer doesn't simply show more kill people like a normal sword does but it rather drinks their souls – in a sense annihilating them from existence. Okay, that probably means little to us in this world where we have little understanding of what lies beyond death, but then for those of us (and I am not one of them) that believe that when we die then we cease to exist, the idea of having our souls drunk doesn't really put a shiver down our spine.
I guess the idea of the soul goes back to the Ancient Greeks (though I doubt the Greeks were the only ones who had this idea) who believed that our souls live on after death. Okay, some of us still believe that today, though once again I am not one of them. I probably have a more biblical view of death and the afterlife, and while you may suggest that that does involve souls, I would disagree. My understanding (or belief if you want to call it that) is that we don't actually have souls, but any soul that we have is intrinsically connected to our body. My belief with regards to the afterlife is that it begins at a future point in time that is the same for everybody and our body undergoes a physical resurrection. It is sort of like, using computer jargon, a concept called firmware. Firmware is a cross between hardware and software. Hardware is the computer (namely the body) and software is the soul. However firmware is software that is intrinsically tied to the hardware, so while you can move software, you cannot necessarily move firmware. However, the more I think about it the more I realise that software cannot exist without hardware. Anyway, this has gotten way off topic, but at least I started the commentary talking about Elric. show less