I am Elric of Melnibone, last of a line of great sorcerer kings. This blade I wield will do more than kill you, friend demon. It will drink your soul and feed it to me. Perhaps you have heard of me by another name? By the name of the Soul Thief? Also known as the White Wolf, because he is an albino warrior. And as the Prince of Ruins, because in fulfilling a dark prophecy he has destroyed Imrryr, the Dreaming City, his own capital on the island of Melnibone. Also as Stormbringer, by the name of the magical sword he carries, forged in the fires of Chaos. Also as the Eternal Champion, one of the incarnations of the rebel soul who fights against Fate across overlapping worlds and warped timelines in the multiverse imagined by Michael Moorcock.The present volume, known initially as "The Sleeping Sorceress" is a collection of three novellas, most of them presenting Elric and his companion Moonglum on a personal vendetta, chasing after a powerful sorcerer named Theleb K'aarna. While the structure of the stories is clearly inspired from sword & sorcery classics from Robert E Howard, Jack Vance or Fritz Leiber, Moorcock is creating his own style, distinguished primarily by the nature of his hero, neither the bloodthirsty barbarian (Conan) nor the humorous scoundrels (Fafhrd & Gray Mouser). Elric is nobody's hero, least of all in his own eyes. He will fight against demons and cruel kings and dangerous magicians, even agaisnt gods, but he is never happy about it, and he is always questioning his motives and his future, he is always rebelling against being pushed like a pawn across the Younger Kingdoms by forces beyond his comprehension. "I am so weary of gods and their struggles" he murmured as he mounted his golden mare."But when will the gods themselves weary of it, I wonder?" Moonglum said. "If they did, it would be a happy day for Man. Perhaps all our struggling, our suffering, our conflicts are merely to relieve the boredom of the Lords of the Higher Worlds. Perhaps that is why when they created us they made us imperfect." There is a progression in the champion's journey, revelaed not only in the battles he fights and in the alliances he makes and dissolves. The changes come mostly from the unbreakable link between the man and the doom sword he carries. Without the sword, Elric is so weak he cannot even stand up on his own legs. With Stormbringer in his hand he is near unbeatable, but the price he pays is absorbing into himself the souls of all the dark creatures he kills. How long until Elric himself is turned into a hellspawn by all the horrors he imbibes? And a white-faced demon stood over the dead thing of Hell and its crimson eyes blazed and its pale mouth opened and it roared with wild laughter, flinging its arms upward, the runesword flaming with a black and horrid flame, and it was a wordless, exultant song to the Lords of Chaos.There was silence suddenly.And then it bowed its head and it wept. I have remarked before on the concise and colourful prose of Moorcock, and this collection is no exception. It packs in less than two hundred pages more action and more ideas that a modern fantasy doorstopper. It creates a special mood, mixing horror with myths of creation, fantasy with science-fiction, philosophy with swashbuckling adventure. Some passages work better than others, and initially I was disappointed with these three novellas, considering them repetitive of plot elements and with character motivations already used in every previous episode. By the end though, I got drawn back into the Moorcock multiverse, and I decided to give it an extra star, in the context of the larger Elric epic, rather than for the individual novellas included here.- - - The Torment of the Last Lord sends Elric and Moonglum to a northern kingdom, there to confront the armies of demons led by Theleb K'aarna. Succubi, a mechanical bird, a beautiful woman sleeping in an abandoned castle, a summoning of eagles, a touch of romance and a powerful magic artefact hidden on an island isolated by a ring of volcanoes - these are some of the ingredients that spice up the quest. To Snare a Pale Prince Elric and Moonglum recuperate in a quiet town, but get in trouble over a couple of ladies of the night, resulting in the powerful Ring of Actorios that Elric uses to summon supernatural help being stolen. The clues lead to a city of thieves: Framed against the scarlet sunset, Nadsokor looked from this distance more like a badly kept graveyard than a city. Towers tottered, houses were half-collapsed, the walls were broken. Once there, the companions discover another devious plot by Theleb K'aarna. More monsters from the Hell dimensions, more battles, more existential angst result in yet another Elric typical adventure. Three Heroes with a Single Aim. is my favorite in the collection. It takes the reader for the first time to Tanelorn, the fabled refuge for tormented souls, the secret garden of peace in a world ravaged by wars. Come, rest in Tanelorn - peaceful Tanelorn, where even the Great Lords of the Higher Worlds cannot come without permission. Even Tanelorn, sitting between the Young Kingdoms and the Sighing Desert, cannot offer Elric peace from memories of dark deeds, from his dreams and his existential questions. His restlessness is aggravated by the knowledge of the presence of Teleb K'aarna, still hatching his evil overlord schemes somewhere out in the world. My favorite passage describes the appeal of the emptiness to the troubled mind: For several hours Elric of Melnibone tramped through the Sighing Desert and gradually, as he had hoped, his sense of identity began to leave him so that it was almost as if he had become one with the wind and the sand and, in so doing, was united at last with the world which had rejected him and which he had rejected. In the wastelands, the former sleeping sorceress Myshella makes a comeback and gives Elric another quest, that of destroying a doom machine that Teleb somehow discovered and plans to use against Tanelorn. Valiant Elric jumps into the fray, and lands in a place between worlds, where he meets with two other incarnations of the Eternal Champion. Only together, the three warriors can enter the vanishing tower from the title and there defeat yet another powerful and slightly deranged sorcerer / godling. If it sounds familiar, it may be because the champions coming together into something much stronger that the parts appeared also in a novella from the second episode. It might be interesting to read later the stories of Corum, Hawkmoon and the other incarnations of the hero with a thousand faces in the multiverse of Moorcock. For now, the collection concludes with another meditation on the conflict between Law and Chaos, and of where exactly Elric loyalties lie. I guess I will find out when I reach the end of the cycle.Recommended as part of the larger Elric saga.
Chegamos ao quarto livro da saga que narra os feitos do personagem Elric de Melniboné. Esse livro tem como trama principal, de acordo com as sinopses oficiais, portanto, não é spoiler, pessoal (aliás, nenhuma das resenhas anteriores eu coloquei qualquer espécie de informação que fosse spoiler, apenas o que está nas sinopses oficiais), a busca por vingança do Elric contra o feiticeiro Theleb K'aarna.Para atingir o seu objetivo, porém, Elric terá que enfrentar uma série de dificuldades, até aí nenhuma novidade na vida do rapaz, além de finalmente chegar em uma lendária localidade, algo já falado nos livros anteriores.Bem, antes de eu deixar a minha opinião sobre o livro em si, preciso esclarecer que vocês podem encontrar o livro sob um título diferente: The Sleeping Sorceress. Ambos títulos têm a ver com a trama, claro, mas The Sleeping Sorceress foi o primeiro título do livro e ainda é o título usado nas publicações britânicas da série. Agora sim, vamos à minha opinião sobre o livro.Como de praxe, eu gosto muito das narrações do Moorcock, em como ele consegue construir um bom cenário sem entrar muito em detalhes, além de mostrar mais seres e criaturas que fazem parte do universo da série, bem como colocar mais fatos sobre o próprio personagem. Moorcock realmente mostra que em poucas páginas é possível contar uma grande história, mesmo sem os detalhamentos tão usuais nos livros de fantasia. Além disso, as ótimas cenas nas quais temos os usos das habilidades mágicas misturadas com habilidades de lutar rendem excelentes momentos de leitura.Este quarto livro, porém, apesar de todas as grandes cenas e a trama envolvente, não me agradou tanto quanto os livros anteriores. Não que seja um livro ruim, acho que deixei bem claro nos dois parágrafos acima o quanto o Moorcock é um ótimo contador de histórias, mas achei algumas cenas um pouco forçadas demais, porque é fato que o livro começa a fechar algumas pontas soltas dos livros anteriores, ao mesmo tempo que deixa outras, e assim, o autor começa a levar a trama da série para o seu fim, mas acabou atropelando algumas ações que mereciam uma melhor explicação ou um melhor cuidado na narração.Mesmo assim, o entretenimento é garantido. Descobrir novos povos, seres e criaturas, novos locais e mais lendas sobre o mundo onde se passa a série foi fantástico. Além de um desfecho que deixa o leitor ávido para saber o que estar por vir. Para quem é fã de fantasia e tem interesse em ler os clássicos do gênero, em especial aqueles elencados no subgênero Espada e Feitiçaria, ler a saga de Elric é mais do que obrigatório, por isso eu recomendo a série e espero que vocês gostem tanto quanto eu estou gostando.
Do You like book The Vanishing Tower (1987)?
Michael Moorcock, The Vanishing Tower (DAW, 1970)Some wag is bound to notice the odd release dates on the DAW definitive editions of the six "classic" Elric novels and ask "what's up?" It only starts making sense when you pair the books with the events therein; Moorcock makes mention of the events in The Vanishing Tower, for example, in The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (q.v.). Those events hadn't yet taken place in Elric's time, as Elric notes in The Sailor on the Seas of Fate; however, they had already taken place in Corum's time. And so yes, it does make some semblance of sense that the definitive Vanishing Tower was released four years before the definitive Sailor on the Seas of Fate. If that sounds confusing, well, it is. Trust me when I tell you that Moorock makes the whole thing as clear as possible. And it does make sense, in the greater scheme of the story.The Vanishing Tower is where the divergent pieces of Elric's saga are weaved into a single tale; the saga of Elric's dealings with Melnibonë, his homeland, related in books one and three, and the saga of his journeys through the Young Kingdoms (as Melnibonëans call the rest of the world), related in book two, come together in book four.Elric and his surviving countrymen are stateless wanderers, mercenaries hated and feared by those in the Young Kingdoms whom they dominated for ten thousand years. Elric is apart from the others (a rogue mercenary band led by Elric's childhood friend, Dyvim Tvar); he and his companion Moonglum are occupied by their own problems, most of the time. One of those problems is the desire if the rest of the surviving Melnibonëans to see Elric's head on a spear. But aside from that, Elric's patron deity, Arioch, is becoming more and more loath to help Elric, his actorios ring, his last link to the ancient dynasty of Melnibonë, has been stolen by the king of Nadsokor, city of beggars, and Elric, unused to life as a regular wanderer, has no concept of fiduciary responsibility. (That one tends to be a minor worry, as Moonglum is quite an accomplished thief, and there are no lack of people willing to employ the most powerful sorceror on the planet as a mercenary.) All of these factors weave in and out of the fourth book in the novel, coupled with all the usual strengths and weaknesses of Moorcock's writing in this series, culminating in Elric finally getting to the tower of the title and discovering yet another piece of his fate. It is here that Moorcock throws the series' most intriguing twist into play, but to mention the nature of that twist would be quite the spoiler; you'll just have to read the series for yourself. ****
—Robert Beveridge
Some very brief thoughts here. The episodic quality of these stories seems to put some people off, and that is a matter of taste. I enjoy the meandering quality of the books. So many fantasy works have a tightly focused quest that it's refreshing to have a break from that, more like the wanderings of Conan. I have never found the "transgressive" agenda of the books to be fully successful. Moorcock has discussed these works as an anti-Tolkien experience, but they still seem deeply enmeshed inn the tropes of that style. Still, in spite of my usual distaste for medieval fantasy, I find this series an intelligent and appealing exception.
—Mitchell
The saga of Elric the Emo continues. Seriously, I've not read any other 'hero' who whines so much about his own life and fate (except maybe Luke Skywalker), but nevertheless this is an entertaining tale. The more I read, the more it seems the Elric is actually his own worst enemy. He manages to inspire the people he meets into ever more insane levels of revenge and plotting evil deeds, and seems to get out of trouble only to put himself each time into even worse situations. It's almost comedic :)This book has the now standard structure of 3 linked tales. In the first he is chased by a revenge seeking petty sorceror, he escapes but finds a damsel in distress (what is it with coma induced women, mr moorcock?). She temporarily wakes up to set a quest for stuff which let's her do a spell to kill the sorceror's forces... But Elric being the self hating guy he is can't stay and be happy, but runs away again...Then we get a nice story where the Sorceror finds new allies who also have been done over by Elric in the past, and they setup a nice trap for Elric, involving stolen heirlooms, tricksy whores, and trapped demons. Once more he is saved by his alliance with Chaos...Which leads to the let down part with all the 'multi dimension' hopping stuff to find a weapon to use against the invulnerable creatures summoned by the increasingly pissed off Sorceror - which ends in the sorceror's escape, and the death of the woman from the first tale... And Elric descends into even more self loathing :)I'm being a bit flippant, but I actually am enjoying this tale of a 'chosen one' who really doesn't want to he chosen!
—Kenny
