![]() Moorcock’s most famous fantasy creation was Elric of Melniboné, an albino warrior conceived as a kind of ‘anti-Conan’ – indeed, an antihero more generally. Moorcock wrote a number of popular fantasy trilogies like this, churning out many of their constituent novels in as little as three days, among them two enjoyable trilogies about Corum Jhaelen Irsei, a prince inhabiting a world based on Cornish mythology, and including my favourite feline in all of fiction, the little winged black-and-white cat belonging to Corum’s companion, Jhary-a-Conel. ![]() And many of Moorcock’s early novels, written rapidly in the 1960s and early 1970s, were high fantasy trilogies which loosely followed the triple-decker publishing model set by The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s (owing to paper shortages after the Second World War, oddly enough: this was the only reason this long novel was initially published in three volumes, reverting to the Victorian model of chopping up a Dickens novel into three chunks for Mudie’s circulating libraries). Moorcock is often – somewhat lazily – labelled ‘the anti-Tolkien’, but of course it was the cult-like popularity of Tolkien’s work in the 1960s counterculture that helped pave the way for the fantasy boom. ![]() Indeed, it was Michael Moorcock who wrote the most famous denunciation of The Lord of the Rings in his essay, ‘ Epic Pooh’. ![]()
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