The Eternal Champion is a fictional character created by British author Michael Moorcock and is a recurrent feature in many of his speculative fiction works.

General overview

Many of Moorcock's novels and short stories take place in a shared Multiverse: an array of interconnected parallel universes, many-layered dimensions, spheres, and alternative worlds, spanning from the Big Bang to the End of Time and from planet Earth to faraway galaxies. All these regions of spaces and parallel timelines are given shape by two metaphysical forces which are perpetually opposed to each other: Law and Chaos, which represent perpetual stasis and ever-changing disorder. Since a clear-cut prevalence of either Law or Chaos would erase all life from the Multiverse, a third force known as the Cosmic Balance enforces certain limits on the powers of Law and Chaos, which in turn ensure the continued existence of the Multiverse. Law, Chaos, and the Balance are implied to be non-sentient, but they do manifest through god-like beings who express one facet or another of the three cosmic principles, and in turn, these deities can empower mortal creatures as their heralds and representatives. The Eternal Champion is an appointed paladin of Balance who is bound to exist in each and every world and age of the Multiverse, so that Law and Chaos are perpetually kept in check; however, he often does not know of his role or struggles against it, never to succeed. Since he must intervene whenever either Law or Chaos has gained an excess of power, requiring him to tip the scales accordingly, he is always doomed to be surrounded by strife and destruction, although he may go through long periods of relative quiet. All the different Eternal Champions are implied to be different facets or "incarnations" of one semi-conscious being (a platonic archetype of a sort): most of them are peerless fighters and generals and have an unbreakable bond with a sentient Chaos-aligned weapon, the Black Sword, which in turns takes on a different form for each Champion. Likewise, many Champions are aided by an Eternal Companion and an Eternal Consort: a sidekick and a love interest who are themselves aspects of two semi-divine figures. This recursivity through the Multiverse is further underlined by the number of Champions, Companions, and mentor-figures to the Champions Moorcock has given the J and C initials, as a form of naming fil rouge; in the same vein, many Champions and Companions belong to one branch or another of the extensive von Bek dynasty. Space- and time-travels through the Multiverse are in fact possible, to the point that one humanoid species called the Eldrens is spread among many different worlds and ages and interacts with many different Champions; however, cosmic laws establish that no two Eternal Champions can coexist in the same situation, or the very fabric of reality would be severely damaged. The only exceptions are cataclysmic events such as the end of a Cycle of Cycles of the Multiverse's progression, or an invasion by hostile entities from an entirely separate multiverse: in these cases, different incarnations of the Champion may join forces to thwart the impending threat, possibly by temporarily merging their individual bodies into a true demigod of immense power.

Incarnations

The following list presents all known Champions in alphabetical order, mentions their respective Swords, Companions, and Consorts, and briefly summarizes their individual plotlines and publishing history: In addition to Moorcock's own creations, a number of references through his works have stated that Ulysses and Roland have been Earth's Eternal Champions as well.

Publishing history

The Tale of the Eternal Champion

Between 1992 and 1993 Moorcock partnered with British publisher Millenium (later absorbed into the Orion Publishing Group) to print a multi-volume collection of all novels and short stories belonging to the Eternal Champion sequence, under the moniker of "The Tale of the Eternal Champion"; starting from 1994 and up to 2000, a parallel project simply called "The Eternal Champion" was undertaken by White Wolf Publishing for the North American market, but each of the two series ended up including some contents left out of its counterpart due to licensing issues, while certain works could not make into the collection whatsoever. This publishing operation represented Moorcock's first attempt to systematize his magnum opus both in terms of editorial uniformity and textual revisions. The following table and paragraph list the full contents of both the European and North American versions of the collection. It should be noticed that the Orion collection was arranged according to Moorcock's then-preferred reading order, which was altered in the White Wolf version. Both versions of the collection included Elric's saga, Corum's hexalogy, Hawkmoon's heptalogy, and the End of Time series as two-volumes sets and devoted one volume each to John Daker's trilogy, Captain Bastable's trilogy, and the von Bek duology (which was complemented by the detective short story "The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius"); Sailing to Utopia was a thematical anthology combining The Ice Schooner, The Distant Suns, The Black Corridor and the novella "Flux", and likewise Earl Aubec and Other Stories collected thirty-three works of short fiction from across Moorcock's production, among them the two short stories focussing on the Scared-Face Brooder and the short novels The Golden Barge and My Experiences in the Third World War. As for region-exclusive contents, the European-only The New Nature of the Catastrophe was an anthology of short fiction centered upon Jerry Cornelius, expanding upon the earlier collection The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius, whereas the North American-only Kane of Old Mars collected Michael Kane's trilogy. Moreover, White Wolf Publishing did secure the rights over the stand-alone science fiction novels The Sundered World, The Wrecks of Time, The Winds of Limbo, and The Shores of Death, but their inclusion came at the expense of Moorcock's preferred reading order: The Sundered World was inserted into John Daker's volume as an interlude between that character's first and second novel; Daker's third novel was moved into the von Bek volume as a coda; and The Wrecks of Time, The Winds of Limbo, and The Shores of Death were collected into the thematical anthology The Roads Between the Worlds, which interconnected the three novels through an original framing device. It is also worth mentioning that the first edition of the Second Ether trilogy was published by Millenium itself right after "The Tale of the Eternal Champion" was completed, and that while Jerry Cornelius's and Karl Glogauer's novels were not formally included in the series, nonetheless they were still being distributed in the UK by Orion under its Phoenix House imprint, together with Moorcock's non-Champion novels Gloriana; or, the Unfulfill'd Queen and The Brothel in Rosenstrasse. As a result, Jerry Cornell's duology was the only series in the Eternal Champion mythos not to be included in either collection, nor officially nor informally.

The Michael Moorcock Collection

Moorcock's second attempt to systematize the Eternal Champion corpus took place between 2013 and 2015, once Victor Gollancz Ltd (another imprint of the Orion conglomerate) secured the rights for all of his fantasy and science-fiction works and consequently reprinted them in a cohesive series, labeled as "The Michael Moorcock Collection"; as of 2021, these Gollancz editions represent the most updated versions of Moorcock's opus, due to their contents having been jointly revised by the author and his bibliographer John Davey into a definitive textual rendition. This publication included both all of the author's full-length novels and a selection of short fiction and was eventually complemented by two stand-alone series collecting the author's non-Champion sagas, the London Sequence and The Sanctuary of the White Friars. The following table and paragraph list the full contents of the collection. The Collection was further complemented by five digital-only releases: As of 2021, Gollancz has not yet acquired the rights for the Pyat Quartet, consisting of: