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While these elder races fall into a kind of intellectual ossification, mankind, also known as the Mabden, begin to develop into the dominant civilization, with some tribes being fairly progressive, and some oppressively barbaric. The first book of the Corum series, The Knight of the Swords, begins some time after a great war has been fought between the Vadhagh and the Nhadragh, leaving both races decimated and scattered over the region. On the other hand, the Nhadragh, a related race of antiquity (as old as "a million or more years"), devote themselves to studies of sorcery. In the Swords Trilogy, the Champion Eternal known as Corum is a member of the Vadhagh, a somewhat effete race in which fortress fiefdoms devote themselves to introspective study of science and culture within isolated castles. Many of the stories of the Eternal Champion begin with his role as an outsider of his own race, which itself is frequently on the verge of extinction (due to the rise of mankind, or at least Granbretan). In fact, despite the Celtic window-dressing, this sequence is probably more meaningful to fantasy/SF readers as a further solidification of Moorcock's own multiverse concept, and contains links both to the past and to the future of Moorcock's more than half-century long literary corpus. With all that said, it's probably worth noting that it's really not necessary for readers to be familiar with Cornish lore in order to enjoy the stories (I certainly wasn't when I first read them). Corum: The Coming of Chaos, Omnibus Introduction 1995

With Graves’s The White Goddess, Mackenzie’s Myths and Legends of the Celts and Padraic Colum’s The King of Ireland’s Son, Treece’s books are the greatest influence on these particular stories." He was the first author I ever read who made Arthur a living Celtic prince with human needs and ambitions. For me his stories of Celtic and Dark Age Britain remain the very best of their kind and include such wonderful novels as The Golden Strangers and The Great Captains. ".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.