Christopher Rowe Reviews The Citadel of Forgotten Myths by Michael Moorcock

The Citadel of Forgotten Myths, Michael Moorcock (Saga 978-1-98219-980-7, 336pp, $28.99, hc) December 2022.

For over 60 years, Michael Moorcock has written the adventures of the doomed albino swordsman Elric of Melniboné. And rewritten them. And expanded, condensed, revised, revisited and at times even retitled the stories and books that began with a novelette, “The Dreaming City”, first published in the British magazine Science Fantasy in 1961 and continuing on down the decades to this latest entry, The Citadel of Forgotten Myths.

The road from the city to the citadel is far from a straight one. Writing in the fanzine Niekas in 1964, the year that saw the “saga” supposedly completed, Moorcock said, “I’ve found that I can only really learn from my mistakes after they’ve been published, which is hard on the reader.” But from the energetic and fanciful prose of those early magazine appearances (Robert E. Howard, the writer Moorcock was famously writing in reaction to, might have described the first Elric pieces as “zestful”), to the deeply considered and cultivated language of this new novel, the many, many works that have featured the char­acter have never failed to engage and entertain Moorcock’s many fans. In fact, Moorcock has a version of what I call the “the Song of Ice and Fire problem,” in that Elric fans are not the same thing as Michael Moorcock fans. The creation, in this case, has outstripped his creator.

Whether he is aware of this situation or not, whether he cares or not, Moorcock has reacted to it in his fiction by undertaking a decades-long project of interweaving and creating dozens of works of fantasy into a vast “multiverse” that, while it cannot be said to be rationalized, can certainly be said to be intentional. To be an Elric enthusiast, should Moorcock’s apparent design work out, is to be a Corum enthusiast, is to be a Dorian Hawkmoon enthusiast, is to be (above perhaps all others) a von Bek enthusiast.

But it is Elric we are concerned with here. The Citadel of Forgotten Myths is an entertaining and substantive addition to a series that has not always kept those two watchwords foregrounded. There is, perhaps inevitably, a bit of trickery to be acknowledged. The first third of this novel is made up of two pieces published previously (as “Red Pearls” in 2010 and as “Black Petals” in 2008 – and no, I did not list them out of order). The placement of these two stories – the publisher says they are “substantially revised” but that seems a generous assessment – at the beginning of the novel serve as a kind of rampway, leading, one might say, to the walls of the titular citadel. They feature Elric and his near-constant companion Moonglum adventuring in “the world below,” which its inhabitants call “the world above,” a deftly worked out bit of double worldbuilding that’s signalled with a wonderful naval set piece. It is only after these two adventures are out of the way that two years pass in the space of a paragraph and the novel proper gets under way.

If this sounds a bit confusing, well, yes. The Elric Saga is hard on the reader, or at least some readers. Some of those readers are people who have dipped in and out through the years, or per­haps (and this has sometimes been a practical im­possibility) they have read the stories in the order in which they were published. These readers will be confronted with the latest in dozens of stories and novels that take place between and among the first eight Science Fantasy stories that many aficionados consider, along with the 1972 novel Elric of Meliniboné, the meat of the series. There are so many questions raised by this skipping stone approach! Where is Elric’s wife? Wasn’t the world destroyed back in the mid-’60s? Etc.

The second set of readers, the readers Moor­cock and his various publishers have long sought to satisfy, are those who wish to experience the Elric stories in what fans and editors call “internal chronological order.” This is a tradition in sword & sorcery, and blandishments or brickbats may be offered for its prevalence to the editors of the infamous Lancer editions of Howard’s Conan sto­ries, published roughly contemporaneously with the first Elric works. In this publishing scheme, order of publication is of no concern whatsoever, and a supposed sequential career is worked out for the hero (or heroes, in the case of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, and with that I have satisfied my holy duty to mention “the Big Three” of sword & sorcery authors) and the work is presented as if it had been planned that way all along.

Howard would certainly have been aghast to know what became of his greatest creation after his death. It is only relatively recently that the Conan stories have been restored to their original form and order, as was Howard’s clearly stated intention. Thereafter, things get murky. Fritz Leiber participated in the imposition of chronol­ogy on his characters. Michael Moorcock has not merely participated, he has orchestrated, he has dedicated one part of multi-pronged career to this practice.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. In essence, the practice is unfair to the writer. The stylistic whiplashing from a story written in the context of Cold War Britain by a 20-year-old to something like the book under consideration, written by an 80-year-old under Late Capital­ism, can be extremely disorienting. In addition to not being fair to the writer, it’s not fair to the material.

The Citadel of Forgotten Myths is described in its marketing as being welcoming to old fans – and it certainly is that – and to newcomers. That last is a big ask. From the very first page, readers are offered up a veritable smorgasbord of proper nouns, allusions to old stories, references to absent characters, and a general environment that invites or even demands bone deep under­standing of six decades worth of material. That understanding is, in fact, essential to fully engag­ing with this novel.

Here, again, we find Elric and Moonglum desperate for funds, surrounded by enemies, falling in love (Elric’s conveniently absent wife has let him off the leash for a few years, we’re told), encountering fierce magics, and, as ever in Elric’s case, fending of a death by a sickness that seems to be a combination of anemia and ennui. He never stops looking for a cure, but he never really starts needing one because there is always the option of wielding the fickle mournblade Stormbringer, probably the most famous fictional sword of the 20th century, with its devilish attri­bute of reviving its wielder by devouring the souls of his victims. Note that word, victims. The souls Stormbringer converts into vital life essence for Elric are, famously, not always those of his en­emies. He has slain relatives, friends, and lovers over the course of his long (or short, depending on the hows and whos of counting) career.

There is, in the final judgement, nothing new here. But new is hardly the point in revisiting a character such as Elric. What’s wanted is the wind of story, which blows here. What’s wanted is a depth of experience, which is on offer here. What do readers want from Michael Moorock? For over half a century, they’ve wanted more Elric. Here is some.

This review and more like it in the January 2023 issue of Locus.

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