Here’s the way Moorcock describes Elric in the first chapter of the initial book of the series:<\/p>\n It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’d probably have a more substantive blog post if I’d gone with my other possible “E” choice: Edgar from David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle<\/em> (and I’d have probably thrown in the dog, Almondine, in as well), but in the in lieu of that, here’ s Michael Moorcock’s sometime-band Hawkwind, doing their song “Eric the Enchanter” off their Elric concept album, The Chronicle of the Black Sword<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n Next week: \u201cF\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n You can find all the AlphaBooks entries to-date at the AlphaBooks tumblr:\u00a0http:\/\/alphabooks.tumblr.com<\/a>. You can also follow many of the entries as they\u2019re posted in real-time by following the #AlphaBooks hashtag on Twitter<\/a> on Mondays.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" These AlphaBooks drawings are skewing far heavier toward fantasy and SF than my actual reading habits–I guess because they make more interesting subjects visually. Anyway, here’s this week’s “E” entry, from a series I read ages ago: E is for Elric – From\u00a0Elric of Melnibon\u00e9 by Michael Moorcock With my last few entries, I’ve written … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Elric.jpg\" "\\"Elric\\"")
<\/a>With my last few entries, I’ve written a bit about the book the character was from and even occasionally cited some favorite passages. I haven’t got much on that front this go ’round, I’m afraid; I’ve not read the Elric<\/em> series since maybe high school and I can’t really remember much about it other than just the basic premise behind the character itself. “Kept alive with drugs and magic,” etc. That’s one thing that people often seem to gloss over when doing visual interpretations of the character, actually: He’s ill, and physically frail as a result. (Moorcock originally had the character taking some sort of drug to stay alive. He later changed that to “herbs.”) I tried to keep him pretty scrawny here to reflect that.<\/p>\n