'.perhaps my main inspiration came from a later novelist and poet, Henry Treece. Blackmore, Maurice Baring, Jeffrey Farnol, Rafael Sabatini 'and all those others who made brigandry and piracy seem such attractive careers'. Continuing this trend of Anglophilic extrapolation, the first Corum sequence draws from the rural color and Celtic/Cornish mythology of southwest England, inspired by the author's memories of childhood days in the region as well as a more recent holiday in Cornwall, ensconced with a Cornish-English dictionary.Īside from these sense-memory impressions and reference texts, Moorcock also drew inspiration absorbed from adolescent readings of authors such as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Daphne Du Maurier, R.D.

The worlds of the earlier Eternal Champions each seemed to have parallels with some historical aspect of Great Britain: Elric's Melniboné echoes the end of the British Empire after a century of global imperialism, John Daker comes from an apparently passionless, domesticated modern London, Hawkmoon's world is a portrait of a future Great Britain dominating the world in a drunken, post-apocalyptic frenzy of debauchery and oppression. A second trilogy, collected as The Chronicles of Corum, followed several years later. His first trilogy sequence, often collected in one volume as The Swords Trilogy, The Coming of Chaos, The Prince in the Scarlet Robe, or The Swords of Corum, consists of The Knight of the Swords, The Queen of the Swords, and The King of the Swords, all initially published as individual novels in 1971.

This ended up being Corum Jhaelen Irsei, the 'Prince in the Scarlet Robe' (whose name also happens to be an anagram of 'Jeremiah Cornelius', iconic adventurer from The Final Programme, etc). With the continuation of Erekosë's saga a success ( Phoenix In Obsidian/The Silver Warriors), Moorcock saw fit to create a new heroic fantasy world in which another incarnation of the Eternal Champion could be explored.

Corum the knight of the swords