One is a black-haired barbarian with volcanic blue eyes and the build of a heavyweight boxer. He fights his way from thief to pirate to king through nothing but steel and will. He distrusts sorcerers, bedding their women and splitting their skulls with equal enthusiasm.
The other is an albino emperor with crimson eyes and the constitution of a consumptive poet. He was born on a throne he never wanted, depends on a sentient sword that feeds him stolen souls, and watches helplessly as that sword murders everyone he loves.
Conan the Cimmerian and Elric of Melnibone. Between them, they define the entire range of sword and sorcery — and the story of how one created the other is one of the best in fantasy history.
The Barbarian: Robert E. Howard’s Conan
In December 1932, a 26-year-old Texan named Robert E. Howard introduced a character in Weird Tales magazine that would change fantasy forever. “The Phoenix on the Sword” dropped Conan into the world fully formed — not as a young adventurer, but as a brooding king sitting on a stolen throne, already weary of civilization.
Howard would write 21 Conan stories over the next four years. Seventeen were published in his lifetime. The last, “Red Nails” — a claustrophobic lost-city tale many scholars consider his best work — was mailed to Weird Tales in July 1935 and published posthumously. Howard took his own life on June 11, 1936. He was thirty years old.
Thirty. And in those thirty years, he built something that would outlast almost every “serious” writer of his generation.
The Knock on Howard (And Why It’s Wrong)
The lazy take on Howard is that he was a pulp hack who wrote action scenes and nothing else. This is historically illiterate, and it collapses on contact with the actual text.
Here is Conan, speaking to the pirate queen Belit in “Queen of the Black Coast” (1934):
“Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”
That is a complete existential philosophy compressed into a few sentences — and it predates Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus by nearly a decade. A pulp writer from Cross Plains, Texas arrived at something remarkably close to absurdism eight years before a French Nobel laureate.
Stephen King — not exactly a lightweight — put it plainly in Danse Macabre: “In his best work, Howard’s writing seems so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks.”
Howard wasn’t just writing action. In “The Tower of the Elephant,” the barbarian encounters a tortured alien creature, Yag-kosha, weeping from sightless eyes. Conan stands before it “as if the guilt of a whole race were laid upon him.” That’s moral depth. In “Beyond the Black River,” he wrote what may be the tightest, most mature adventure story of the 1930s — a frontier horror tale where the heroes achieve, at best, a pyrrhic victory. No pulp magazine was publishing endings like that.
Lovecraft, in his obituary for Howard, said of “Worms of the Earth”: “Few readers will ever forget the hideous and compelling power of that macabre masterpiece.”
The man could write. He just did it in the pulps instead of literary quarterlies, and snobbery has been catching up ever since.
The Emperor: Michael Moorcock’s Elric
Twenty-nine years after Conan first appeared in Weird Tales, a twenty-one-year-old Englishman named Michael Moorcock introduced Elric of Melnibone in the pages of Science Fantasy magazine. The story was called “The Dreaming City.” The date was June 1961 — the same year Fritz Leiber coined the term “sword and sorcery.”
And Elric was, by Moorcock’s own admission, built as the antithesis of Conan.
Not “anti-Conan” — that’s a label fans and critics attached later. Moorcock himself described Elric as “kind of the antithesis of Conan the barbarian, or a typical heroic knight, being sickly, a sorcerer, and part of a decadent empire that was crumbling.” Every choice was a deliberate inversion.
Where Conan is a barbarian who claws his way to a throne, Elric is an emperor who throws his away. Where Conan’s power comes from within — raw muscle, iron will, hard-earned skill — Elric’s comes from Stormbringer, a sentient black runesword that drinks the souls of those it kills and feeds their stolen vitality to its wielder. Conan fights sorcerers. Elric is one.
And where Conan loses lovers and companions with a survivor’s resilience — mourning, then moving on — Stormbringer has “a particular taste for the souls of those he loved most.” Elric’s beloved cousin Cymoril dies on the blade of his own sword. He doesn’t survive his own story. In the final scene of the saga, Stormbringer drinks Elric’s soul too, transforms into something inhuman, and flies away. Total annihilation.
The core inversion is devastating in its symmetry: Conan’s physical supremacy grants him freedom. Elric’s supernatural power enslaves him. Conan acts. Elric is acted upon. Conan’s vitality is inherent. Elric’s is parasitic.
The Philosophy Behind the Pale Emperor
Moorcock didn’t just flip Howard’s character sheet. He imported an entire cosmological framework — and then transformed it.
The foundation came from Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953/1961), which introduced the idea of Law versus Chaos as cosmic forces. In Anderson’s version, the framework was essentially Christian: Law equals good, Chaos equals evil, and the hero fights for the right side.
Moorcock borrowed the scaffolding and knocked out the moral floor. In his version, Law and Chaos are amoral cosmic forces. Excessive Law means tyrannical stasis — a frozen, lifeless universe of pure order. Excessive Chaos means anarchic destruction — a seething void where nothing holds shape. Neither is good. Neither is evil. The Cosmic Balance between them is the only thing worth fighting for.
Elric serves Arioch, a Lord of Chaos — but he isn’t evil. He’s a pawn of forces that transcend morality entirely. This is what Moorcock meant when he called his approach “positive nihilism”: the only thing lending existence meaning is willpower and the desire to create something that matters, even knowing it will be destroyed.
And Stormbringer? Moorcock was blunt about it. In a 2015 New Statesman interview, he said: “The whole point of Elric’s soul-eating sword, Stormbringer, was addiction: to sex, to violence, to big, black, phallic swords, to drugs, to escape.”
If you ever wondered why Elric was the patron saint of the 1970s counterculture, there’s your answer.
What Moorcock Actually Thought of Howard
Here’s where it gets interesting — because the relationship between these two writers is more complicated than “Moorcock hated Howard and wrote the opposite.”
Moorcock respected Howard. In Wizardry and Wild Romance, his 1987 study of epic fantasy, he wrote that Howard “brought a brash, tough element to the epic fantasy that did as much to change the course of the American school away from previous writing and static imagery as Hammett, Chandler and the Black Mask pulp writers were to change the course of the American detective fiction.”
That’s not faint praise. That’s Moorcock comparing Howard to Dashiell Hammett — saying Howard did for fantasy what the hardboiled revolution did for crime fiction.
In his foreword to Two-Gun Bob, a centennial study of Howard, Moorcock went further: “The ability to paint a complex scene with a few expert brushstrokes remains Howard’s greatest talent, and such talent can’t, of course, ever be taught.” He called Conan Howard’s best creation, “created from whole cloth, with a nod to Natty Bumppo and Tarzan of the Apes.”
And here’s the detail that reframes everything: in 1959, two years before he created Elric, a young Moorcock wrote to L. Sprague de Camp asking if he could write a Conan pastiche. He wanted to play in Howard’s sandbox. When he couldn’t, he built his own — and populated it with Conan’s mirror image.
That’s not contempt. That’s an artist so engaged with another artist’s work that he spent decades in conversation with it.
What Moorcock did take issue with was the Tolkien school of cozy, pastoral fantasy — the hobbits-and-fireside-comfort tradition. His famous 1978 essay “Epic Pooh” savaged Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. But Howard? Howard never made Moorcock’s enemies list. The pulp vigor, the raw energy, the refusal to comfort the reader — those were qualities Moorcock shared, even as he channeled them into something darker and more philosophically complex.
The Crossover That Proved They Were Equals
In March 1972, something extraordinary happened. Conan and Elric met.
Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian #14, “A Sword Called Stormbringer!” brought the two characters together for the first time in any medium. Roy Thomas wrote the script; Moorcock himself co-plotted it with his longtime collaborator James Cawthorn.
Moorcock later recalled: “When Roy got in touch with me to draft an Elric/Conan story for the Conan series, I thought it was a great idea but didn’t have a lot of time…” He handed the heavy lifting to Cawthorn, who produced a plot synopsis so dense that Thomas had to split it across two issues.
The result is a landmark of the genre’s self-awareness — two characters who defined the poles of sword and sorcery, meeting on the page, written by the creators of both. Thomas later noted, with characteristic understatement, that “Michael Moorcock has always told me he forgives us” for the tall hat they drew on Elric.
Two Doors Into the Same Genre
So which is better — Conan or Elric?
Wrong question. They’re not competing. They’re the two endpoints of a spectrum that defines one of the great genres of imaginative fiction.
If you want fiction that grabs you by the belt and drags you headfirst into a savage, vivid world where a man’s survival depends on his own strength and cunning — where life is short and brutal but lived with absolute intensity — Conan is your door.
If you want fiction that takes you to the same savage world but forces you to reckon with the cost of power, the horror of dependency, and the possibility that the sword in your hand is more alive than you are — Elric is your door.
Both are adventure-first. Both refuse to comfort you. Both trust you to draw your own conclusions from what happens on the page. That’s what sword and sorcery does at its best — it gives you the experience and lets you decide what it means.
Moorcock and Howard never met. Howard died twenty-three years before Elric first appeared in print. But they’ve been in conversation for over sixty years now — through their characters, their worlds, and the millions of readers who’ve walked through both doors.
The tradition lives because both doors stay open. Keep walking through them.
Where to Start
For Conan: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Del Rey, 2003). Edited by Patrice Louinet, illustrated by Mark Schultz. Howard’s first thirteen stories in the order he wrote them, in their original unedited versions — stripped of the de Camp and Carter rewrites that muddied earlier collections. This is Howard as Howard wrote him.
For Elric: You have three good options.
- Elric of Melnibone: The Elric Saga Part 1 (Saga Press, 2022) — the 60th anniversary US omnibus collecting four novels, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. If you want to go deep, start here.
- Elric of Melnibone and Other Stories (Gollancz, 2013) — the definitive UK collected edition with a foreword by Alan Moore and illustrations by James Cawthorn.
- Elric of Melnibone (1972) — the original novel that expanded the short stories into a full origin narrative. Pure, undiluted Moorcock.
Read both. Read Conan first if you want the foundation. Read Elric first if you want the subversion. Either way, you’re walking into the heart of what sword and sorcery is — and what it can do when a great writer commits fully to the genre.
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