Elric chronologically

[Anonymous]

I'm new to this site, and I just found out that there's a lot more Elric books than I first thought. I ran across the first in the Elric Saga in a used book store about four years ago and finding the rest of the series has been a real trial. My question is, including the Elric saga, what are the Elric books in chronological order?
Thanks

[devilchicken]

I think Mike answered that recently in another thread - check this out:

[link expired]

I've got the UK omnibus editions - the Orion versions with the white covers. They structure the sage in the following order (though you might notice some of the books have different titles depending on which editions you have - e.g. Bane of the Black Sword, Weird of the White Wolf, and The Vanishing Tower have been re-edited and renamed):

Part 1 - comprises

Elric of Melnibone
The Fortress of the Pearl
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate
The Dreaming City
While the Gods Laugh
The Singing Citadel

Part 2 - comprises

The Sleeping Sorceress
The Revenge of the Rose
The Stealer of Souls
Kings in Darkness
The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams
Stormbringer

[Anonymous]

Thanks a lot!

[Marca]

Was The Last Enchantment an Elric story? I used to have this in Ariel - The Book of Fantasy but sold piles of books a few years ago and have a feeling this went with them. Certainly I can't find it at the moment. Did it ever get reprinted elsewhere? And where did Caravan of Forgotten Dreams come from? It's copyrighted 1962 in the Millenium EC paperback - was that published anywhere else before then?

[Marca]

I turned up Ariel The Book of Fantasy and The Last Enchantment is indeed an Elric story, as I remembered. So I'm interested in knowing where this fits in the series. Was it incorporated into any of the books?[/b]

[Michael Moorcock]

The Last Enchantment was a 'lost' story which my old agent discovered amongst Ted Carnell's papers and sent back to me. I'd forgotten all about it and yes it did appear in Ariel. Actually I have a spare copy of that and think I'll offer it for auction in the New Worlds Authors Fund.
Beautiful magazine run by two idealistic guys from Harvard who had some decent backing. Of course, it didn't sell -- far too good -- but it
published some beautifully illustrated stories. As far as O recall it HAS
been reprinted. It's sort of out of sequence and hard to place in the regular Elric chronology. I wrote it after I'd done the stories which made up the original Stealer of Souls and before Stormbringer. I thought it was the last Elric story I would write at the time and it was intended for Cele Goldsmith's FANTASTIC, but Cele left the magazine, as I recall, before it could be submitted to her. Ariel was worth waiting for!

[Marca]

I only have the one Ariel book but I agree it was very beautifully done. It has some gorgeous illustrations and a great design.

[Marca]

Probably because of the 'new' Elric chronology I'd completely forgotten that The Last Enchantment was included in the Elric At The End Of Time anthology. It was your notes on the background that reminded me Mr. M since similar notes were included in the book's introduction. Was the story revised at all before publication in the 70s? The style seems a bit different to the work you were doing in the early 60s.

Also what about The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams? As mentioned before that has a 1962 copyright...?

[David Mosley]

Also what about The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams? As mentioned before that has a 1962 copyright...?

Did you ever get an answer to this, AV? In case not, I stumbled upon the answer the other month when I was trying to match the contents of the Granada editions with the Orion/Millennium omnibuses.

CoFD was originally called 'The Flamebringers', which was the title of the story when it was published in 'The Stealer of Souls' and later in 'The Bane of the Black Sword'.

The text of 'The Flamebringers' underwent some minor revisioning/rewriting when it appeared in BotBS, and this was retained when it was re-titled 'CoFD'.

Of course, for the answer to the unasked question - why Mike felt the story needed a new title - I'm afraid you'd have to ask him. ;)

[Marca]

I did find out demos, when I started re-reading the Elrics and noticed the two stories were the same. Thanks anyway. Do you know, when I first started posting here regularly, I was very out of touch with the contents of the Millenium/White Wolf EC volumes and how some of them had been retitled from the original stories. You'll notice I'd even forgotten The Last Enchantment/Jesting With Chaos had been collected in book form in the 80s :roll: The last few months has seen me on a Moorcock crash course and I finally feel like I'm up to speed. Apologies to Mike for my previous ignorance, he must have wondered what I was on about :?

[Ant]

This page might be of interest...

Cheers,
Ant

[Michael Moorcock]

Don't apologise, pard. I rely on John Davey to keep me abreast of my various publications and the forms they take. I never reread them and keep most of it in my head, but that's the main characters and story threads, not publication details. So we were both in the dark! :D

[tekkamanllama]

If i read the whole omnibus editions published by White Wolf of The Tale of the Eternal Champion volumes 1-15, will that include all the Elric stories? and all the stories that relate to the multiverse?

[David Mosley]

If i read the whole omnibus editions published by White Wolf of The Tale of the Eternal Champion volumes 1-15, will that include all the Elric stories? and all the stories that relate to the multiverse?

As Elwher says, it only includes the Elric stories written up to the time the omnibus series came out (1993-1999). As such it doesn't include the Dream Quest trilogy - The Dreamthief's Daughter, The Skrayling Tree and The White Wolf's Son - which were all written after 2000 and in which Elric features prominently, nor the recent story stories Mike's written about Elric and Rakhir.

The US omnibus series is different from the UK series, btw, and doesn't include The New Nature of the Catastrophe. Neither series includes the Jerry Cornelius novels, or the Jerry Cornell novels, or the Karl Glogauers, etc. etc.

See this thread for more details.

[Stephen_E_Andrews]

I'd say no as well. But if you read the Elric omnibuses from that series, even though you don't get the Dreamthief/White Wolf/Skrayling Tree trilogy in them (they are quite different to books like Elric of Melnibone and Stormbringer in style), you'll have an excellent grounding for exploring the Multiverse. IMHO (and I suspect many others here), virtually all of Moorcock's full-length novels are part of the Eternal Champion sequence, if only tangentially (even the Pyat novels have connections to them).

I'd get those Elric omnibuses under your belt first, then work on Corum, Erekose, Hawkmoon, Bastable and Cornelius. As the sequence has at least two 'endings', there is no real reading order that makes sense in terms of internal chronology, especially when series intersect (as Von Bek and Erekose do, both arguably culminating in The Dragon in the Sword. The Eternal Champion is just that - no beginning and no end).