Duke Dorian Hawkmoon von Koln is a nobleman of Germania, a land recently invaded and taken over by the masked armies of Granbretan. In exchange for his life, he must perform a task for Baron Meliadus of Kroiden: kidnap Yisselda, the daughter of Count Brass, who shamed Meliadus on a recent visit. Meliadus has sworn vengeance in the name of the Runestaff, a mythical object that can mould or break destinies…
Michael Moorcock is a bona fide phenomenon. I don’t think anyone knows just how many books he has written. Most of them, though, are about a character – or a series of characters – known as the Eternal Champion, an avatar of the forces of Law and Chaos that control – or fight for control – of the Multiverse.
The Champion is known by many names, among them Elric of Melnibone, Prince Corum Jhaelen Irsai, John Daker, and Jerry Cornelius. The character serves as a way of uniting most of Moorcock’s prodigious output, but you can read most of the books without any knowledge of the others.
Moorcock is also famous for editing the magazine New Worlds. This was a venerable UK SF magazine that helped to build and promote the careers of many writers from the UK and beyond. Several writers I’ve posted about here on the blog got their starts in New Worlds and its sister magazine, Science Fantasy.
But let’s get back to Hawkmoon, probably the most human of all aspects of the Champion….
He lives on a future Earth. Blasted by nuclear war in a past conflict known to the characters as the Tragic Millenium, the world has reverted to a quasi-mediaeval state. However, there are echoes of technology scattered across the world, with magic and science both being worked into monstrous devices that can alter reality or time or people.
The Granbretanians have mastered many forms of technology and magic and, as a result, control much of this future Europe. Their plan at the start of the series is to win over control of the parts of Europe that still resist them, beginning with the Kamarg, the domain of the renowned warrior and statesman, Count Brass.
These are a ridiculously adventurous set of books. Each of the four novels that make up the series tell a smaller part of the greater story but are capable of being read on their own with little knowledge of the others.
Let’s take a quick look at them all.
The first novel, The Jewel In The Skull (1967), begins with Meliadus’s foiled foray into the Kamarg to woo Count Brass as an ally and – later – his daughter as a lover. When his efforts on both fronts are thwarted, Meliadus sends a thoroughly defeated and subservient Hawkmoon as a sort of Trojan Horse to learn about the defences of the Kamarg and (equally importantly to Meliadus) kidnap Yisselda. To monitor Hawkmoon on his mission, a black jewel is implanted in his forehead. It acts as a surveillance device as well as a counter to any thoughts of rebellion by Hawkmoon. Count Brass and his advisor Bowgentle manage to defuse the jewel temporarily but Hawkmoon must travel to far off Hamadan to get the sorcerer Malagigi to destroy it completely.
In his travels to Hamadan, Hawkmoon meets and befriends Oladahn, a short, red-furred man who claims to be part-giant. They travel to Hamadan and battle Meliadus and his forces who are attempting to take over the Middle-Eastern kingdom. Hawkmoon is temporarily aided by a mysterious figure known as The Warrior In Jet And Gold who claims to be a servant of the Runestaff, and that Hawkmoon is, too, despite his own ignorance of this fact. Malagigi is successful at removing the threat of the black jewel and Hawkmoon and Oladahn prepare to return to the Kamarg.
In the second book, The Mad God’s Amulet (1968) Hawkmoon and Oladahn have travelled part of the way home and are resting in the old city of Soryandum. They are attacked by a troop of Granbretanian soldiers led by the French nobleman, Huillam D’Averc. After several adventures, D’Averc joins forces with our two heroes and they cut a swath across the Mediterranean as they strive to get home, armed with a weapon that the wizard/scientists of Soryandum gave them after receiving aid against D’Averc and his men. After a fairly gripping sea battle, Hawkmoon discovers a ring that belongs to Yisselda, so the trio divert to the base of the Mad God, a human being who has used the powers of a magical pendant to enslave men and women to his will to act as mindless soldiers. After Hawkmoon, Oladahn, D’Averc and The Warrior In Jet And Gold defeat the Mad God and rescue Yisselda they begin to make their way home, but the Warrior decamps with the Soryandum device just before Hawkmoon and the others are captured by the Granbretanians, inclu8ding Meliadus who gleefully informs them that the Kamarg is beingbesieged as they speak. D’Averc appears to have also deserted them until he aids them in their escape. When they finally return to the Kamarg, they discover that the Warrior has made it back there as well. After a climactic battler that repels the Granbretanian forces, our heroes manage to activate the Soryandum device which moves Count Brass’s castle and a portion of the countryside around it to another dimension, safe from the Granbretanian threat.
The third book, The Sword Of The Dawn (1968) opens with Granbretan victorious across all of Europe, save for the troublesome rebels who escaped from the Kamarg. We get hints of further plots and storylines from that foe then we cut back to Hawkmoon who meets a mysterious swordsman in the marshes near Castle Brass. This man is revealed to be Elvereza Tozer, a disgraced poet and playwright who has escaped from the court of Granbretan’s King Huon using magical rings obtained from a wizard in the wastelands of Yel, a wasted land in the west of Granbretan. Hawkmoon and D’Averc take his rings (because of course he has two of them) and travel to Londra, capital of Granbretan, posing as warlords from Asiacommunista a near-mythical land to the very far east of the known world. From there they escape to Yel, and are transported to a far distant land that they discover to be Amarekh. Sailing down a river on a raft (a post-apocalyptic fantasy is one of the last places I’d expect to find a Mark Twain reference, but there you go) , they are captured by pirates but are soon rescued and make their way to the city of Narleen. When their rescuer is kidnapped by the league of pirates, Hawkmoon and D’Averc vow to rescue him and break into the pirate’s lair. Hawkmoon manages to secure himself another artefact; The Sword Of The Dawn, a weapon that also generates an army of warriors to fight alongside its wielder. Aided by The Warrior In Jet And Gold again, they defeat the pirates and set off on the Warrior’s instructions to the ancient city of Dnark.
The fourth and final book, The Runestaff (1969), takes us back to Granbretan again. Meliadus and his allies are plotting to take the throne and install a figurehead monarch on it. This plot takes up several chapters before we are returned to Hawkmoon and D’Averc who are trying to disobey the Warrior and sail for the Kamarg. However, incident ensues and they find that they have no choice but to travel northward to Dnark, a mysterious city of massive buildings, one of which is home to the Runestaff. After a battle with another army of Granbretanians, Hawkmoon secures the Runestaff and returns to the Kamarg to a joyous welcome, only to almost immediately fall victim to a new weapon of the Granbretanians that can shatter the Soryandum device (it was constructed around the design of the rings stolen by Tozer who managed to escape Castle Brass and return home).
This then leads to a final, catastrophic battle against the Granbretanians, which is wone, but at great cost…
But as with many of Moorcock’s writings, there were sequels. Several years later he wrote a trilogy entitled The Chronicles Of Castle Brass which followed Hawkmoon’s adventures after the History. These are wildly different to the earlier books and struggle to maintain the same momentum, but they contain more realistic and gripping plotting, as well as tying up some loose ends that existed in the saga of the Eternal Champion at the time, which has since been expanded further on by Moorcock. The first two books have rather superb cliffhanging endings, but as the climax of a universe-spanning series of several dozen books it lacks the gravitas that you might think it could have, but it’s also a rather wonderfully intimate portrait of a hero coming to terms with all the aspects of their existence.
There have also been several graphic novel adaptations of the story as well. The first of these was published in 1978 and was created by James Cawthorn, a long-time collaborator and friend of Moorcock’s. It’s a lavish volume that covers the first book (there was also a second that covered The Mad God’s Amulet). Cawthorn’s art is superb when he is portraying landscapes and battle scenes but he is somewhat less confident with portraits and close-ups. I cannot comment on the further adaptations that appeared later, but I am told they are rather good as well.
These are books that you can best describe as being a lot of fun. Michael Moorcock himself described them as “an entertainment.” He wrote them during a period of great creativity for himself, when he was becoming one of the more prolific authors on the UK British SF scene. He would later say that he would think about the novels for some time, germinating ideas and planning storylines, then write them in bursts of around three days or so. Given the slight length of them – my omnibus edition of all four novels comes in at 573 pages, or around 140 pages per book – it’s not an altogether unbelievable claim. The structure of them also slightly echoes that of his other books in the Eternal Champion series, being a collection of linked adventures with an overarching plot holding them together, which is what many of his books are, although the early novels in the Elric series are a sequences of novellas put into chronological order.
This claim also holds true when you think about some of the plotholes that arise in the story: for instance, in Sword Of The Dawn, Elvereza Tozer claims to have two magical rings that are promptly taken from him by Hawkmoon and D’Averc. During The Runestaff, it’s claimed that he stole back his rings and escaped from the parallel world he was being held captive in… HOW? His two rings were stolen and were being used in another dimension. A simple line like “He must have had a third ring we didn’t know about,” would have fixed things quite easily. There’s also the matter of D’Averc finding an ancient bullet while exploring ruins in Yel and explaining to Hawkmoon how it worked. He puts it away and then mentions it again a few chapters later. And then it’s never mentioned again. This is just sloppy plotting.
There’s also the idea of Hawkmoon just collecting enough plot coupons so he can send away for a victory against his enemy: all of the artefacts he collects – the Runestaff, The Mad God’s Amulet, the Sword of the Dawn – can be argued as just being a character building up an armoury against his enemies but it does smack a little of making us believe that Hawkmoon can only defeat his enemies if he has the “full set” of magical items.
But I don’t really care: I can invest belief in D’Averc carrying insurance for something that doesn’t happen; I can believe that Tozer might have had a spare ring up his sleeve that he used to escape.
Because the world of the Runestaff is quite fabulous: it contains some wonderful images and features that linger in the memory for a long time. My own personal favourites are the Silver Bridge that spans the English Channel, a literal bridge made of some ridiculously flimsy but incredibly strong substance that connects Granbretan to Europe, and Count Brass’s war flamingos, large birds that his soldiers ride into battle, and that Hawkmoon begins his quest to Hamadan riding on. The books are filled with wondrous imagery that defies the senses, as well as some low satire that dates the books to their time of publication, unfortunately (Jhone, Jhorg, Phowl and Rhunga as gods of the pre-Tragic Millennium times, anyone?). And it’s a constant game (albeit a sometimes irritating one because it distracts you from the tale at hand) to work out just what all the place names are in the story in our real world.
However, the worldbuilding is what lifts it above a lot of the contemporary tales that were being told by other writers. Moorcock not only gave us a rather extravagant portrait of a world damaged and wild, and largely untamed or feral, but he also gave us a portrait of the Granbretanian society that explains why they are so degenerate and decadent. In his descriptions of the technologically advanced and magically enhanced land the Granbretanians inhabit, we get a portrayal of a society led by the insane and enforced by the ruthless. They are a society that lives only for war and have risen in just a few short years to become the major power in the known world.
It’s a picture that would ring suspiciously true to a lot of people who were reading it at the time of publication: 1967 to 1969. Many of Moorcock’s fans would have still had vivid memories of the second World War and the apparently sudden rising of Germany as a superpower that crumpled opposition ruthlessly as it advanced across Europe.
Moorcock’s revisiting of that conflict – except with a German as the hero and his island kingdom home as the villains of the piece – initially strikes the reader as wildly satirical, but drives home the message that corruption can strike at any point in a nation’s history and only be recognised by those being oppressed by them.
Interestingly, the choice of a German hero was a reaction by Moorcock to the ethnocentrism of genre fiction of the time. It’s telling that he was replacing a European hero with another European hero and thinking himself as being quite revolutionary, when now, almost sixty years later, there are swathes of writers trying to utilise fantasy based on cultures other than European as a way of striking out and being original. I would regard it as a measure of just how far we really have come, which is a tonic when you think about how much of a reaction there has been from some elements as a reaction to lesser-known cultures becoming prominent in genre fiction.
And many critics today think of Hawkmoon as being quite two-dimensional and dull, preferring D’Averc as their favourite character. D’Averc is the best-written character in the story, being shown with depth and compassion, as well as the contradictions we expect of a man forced to live among those he despises as he does when we first meet him. But Hawkmoon has more character than you might think: when we first meet him, he’s suffering from what we recognise as PTSD: Meliadus and his associates worry that he might not be fiot to carry out his mission. Later, as he meets and falls in love with Yisselda and develops his old hatred for the Granbretanians he becomes a fairly one-note character, but we see him becoming homesick on his travels when he thinks about Yisselda and the Kamarg or worrying about what has happened to his homeland. There’s also moments where he has some sort of existential doubt, or where he feels restless because he is forced into inactivity. And he feels pangs of loneliness when he watches D’Averc flirting with a young woman at one point.
He’s not a complex psychological study or work of art but he does have more to him than some people are willing to see.
Sometimes, that’s all a hero is: a person equipped only to do what they can, using just the tools they have.
You can find out more about Michael Moorcock at https://moorcography.org/
