The Multiverse and the Eternal Champion
Worlds without number, sorrow without end

Elric was by no means Moorcock’s first foray into sword and sorcery. Moorcock was long fascinated with many of the precepts of the genre, particularly the fundamental conflict between order and chaos.

His earliest work, published in Tarzan Adventures while he was editor, introduced his own violent and amoral character Sojan.

Soon after, Moorcock created the Eternal Champion in The Eternal Champion (Science Fantasy 1962 ^†), and he began to evolve the complex relationship between world and hero, between Multiverse and Eternal Champion, that became the over-arching structure of all his purely genre work – and he is still evolving that structure today.

The Multiverse

Moorcock’s Multiverse is quasi-infinite array of alternative realities, parallel fantasy worlds that echo our own world and those of other fantasy writers (including Tolkien). Moorcock coined the term “Multiverse” in his first sf novel, The Sundered Worlds (SF Adventures 1962-3, Compact 1965 US). The short story “The Song of the White Wolf” (Elric:Tales of the White Wolf ed. Edward E. Kramer 1994) gives the most explicit description of the Multiverse – and the “moonbeam roads” between the worlds.

The idea of the multiverse (small “m”!) emerged in quantum theory and has again more recently in cosmology.

Hugh Everett was the first to understand clearly (in 1957, some thirty years after the theory became the basis of subatomic physics) that quantum theory describes a multiverse, a continuum of universes that differ at the quantum level and whose interactions give rise to quantum effects. Over time, quantum differences lead to worlds with completely different histories, although all are governed by the same laws of physics. (See Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality, right.)

Moorcock was developing The Eternal Champion at this time; on the influence of Everett’s work, he says: “It was an idea in the air, as most of these are, and I would have come across a reference to it in New Scientist (one of my best friends was then editor)… [or] physicist friends would have been talking about it. … Sometimes what happens is that you are imagining these things in the context of fiction while the physicists and mathematicians are imagining them in terms of science. I suspect it is the romantic imagination working, as it often does, perfectly efficiently in both the arts and the sciences.”

A multiverse of a somewhat different kind has been envisaged within the 11-dimensional extension of string theory known as M-theory. In M-theory our universe and others are created by collisions between membranes in an 11-dimensional space. (See Greene’s The Elegant Universe, right.) Unlike the universes in the “quantum multiverse”, these universes can have completely different laws of physics – anything may be possible, even magic… While this theory hasn’t directly influenced Moorcock’s work, he has woven a few references into his latest books.

The Eternal Champion

What binds the worlds of Moorcock’s Multiverse together – in practical, storytelling terms – is the Eternal Champion, a pawn of Fate, hurled from one existence to another in an endless parade of grief and sorrow. Each incarnation of the Eternal Champion – Erekosë, Elric, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum Jhaelen Irsei, Kane of Old Mars, and (less completely) each of the von Beks – is a warrior doomed never to know peace. He may fight the entire human race (Erekosë), he may be the henchman of Lucifer (von Bek), or he may just destroy the world to let a new æon come (Elric). All of these heroes must fight something or someone: none like what he does.

The Eternal Champion fights sometimes on the side of Law, sometimes on the side of Chaos. Neither Law nor Chaos is wholly good or wholly evil. Law represents civilization, order, and justice, but also stagnation, rigidity, and sterility. Chaos represents disorder, entropy, and turmoil, but also creativity, change, and progress. Politically Law is authoritarian; Chaos libertarian.

The Eternal Champion tales make up only part of Moorcock’s oeuvre, but since the 1970s he has quite ruthlessly interwoven them with his fully fledged Commedia sequences featuring various versions of Jerry Cornelius, his science fiction, his romances, and his late non-genre works. The Eternal Champion tales can be viewed as ironical Commedia dell’Arte skits devoted not to love but to the joke of heroism.

Just as Elric is a parody of Conan, Jerry Cornelius is a direct parody of Elric: the first Jerry Cornelius novel, The Final Programme (cut 1968 US, Allison & Busby 1969), was a re-write of sorts of “The Dreaming City” and “While Gods Laugh” (Science Fantasy 1961).

In his early appearances, Jerry Cornelius is Moorcock’s first version of Harlequin: a mercurial trickster, a Carnaby Street dandy, and would-be James Bond (but Austin Powers he is not!). Later, in The Condition of Muzak (Allison & Busby 1977), Jerry turns out to be Pierrot, a gullable dupe. Jerry Cornelius appears as a companion of Corum’s under the name of Jhary-a-Conel – and Corum Jhaelen Irsei is of course an anagram (if not an avatar) of Jerry Cornelius.

Another extended character is Una Persson, a “temporal adventuress” who traverses the venues of the Multiverse in Moorcock’s Commedia sequence, like the protagonist of Victoria Woolf’s Orlando. She also appears as the queen’s companion Una, Countess of Scaith, in Gloriana, or the Unfulfill’d Queen: Being a Romance (1978; rev 1993) and as Oone the Dreamthief in The Fortress of the Pearl (1991), an Elric novel.

Tanelorn

Tanelorn exists in very world of the Multiverse in one form or another, and its appearance depends on the preconceptions of those who wish to find it. In Elric’s world, Tanelorn wears a guise of beauty, surrounded by the yellow sands of the desert.

Tanelorn is a city of refugees who have fled the ills of the world and the demands of gods to find peace. It changes in appearance and is not easily found, very much like the Graal Castle of Arthurian romance.

Although few recognize this, Tanelorn exists everywhere people gather together to serve the common good.

Most must quest to find the physical city before they discover the bloom of Tanelorn within themselves.