It's true role is basically to act as the story's 'McGuffin'. This object does enable Hawkmoon to accomplish some fantastic deeds, but At one, it's a source of order, on another, a source of disorder, in that human nature is inclined to make an awful lot of trouble just to get hold of it. It's similar to the Holy Grail in a lot of it's characteristics. However, a fantasy narrative still needs a quest-object, and here that role is here filled by the mysterious Runestaff: In fact, Dorian's German background hardly plays any kind of role at all, and it almost seems that the real stars are the 'baddies' of Great Britain's 'black mirror', Granbretan. However, I think the novelty of the Hawkmoon books lies not so much in its pseudo-Gallic heroes, but more in its premise of our own world twisted into evil. Hawkmoon himself was supposedly inspired by the Germanic folk hero Dietrich von Bern, a version of the historical Goth “barbarian” Theoderic the Great (also featured in stories such as the Nibelunglied (The 'Ring' saga) and the Old Norse Thidrekssaga). In some ways, the Hawkmoon books feature some of Moorcock's most straightforward heroic archetypes. Lancer 1960s, Gray Morrow/Jeff Jones/Jack Fargasso 'The Genesis of Hawkmoon', MM on Tor.com, 2010 Something like ‘Hey, we’re not always the good guys’.

Those days addressing an Anglophone audience, and wanted to say Some relation to my own and my contemporaries’ experience of the real Though in all important ways essentially escapism, always has to have Relate at least to a degree to the contemporary world. Of vague ‘time before time’ and, if you like, Europeanise it, make it

I was determined to move my fantasy away from some kind Hero a German and his base as the Camargue in France was to try to cutĪcross some of the ethnocentric elements you found in what littleįantasy fiction there was at the time and was found in genre fiction in Satire, relating to politics of the 60s, but the main reason I made my In the Hawkmoon books you find some fairly thinly-disguised political Post-war, a typical fantasy narrative might envision a resurgent, utopian Britain, but Moorcock as usual gives things a more cynical spin and makes the hero of his saga a defeated German Duke, and Britain the inhuman oppressors. Prior to World War II, Great Britain actually was the most powerful nation on Earth. This sequence is fascinating because is posits a post-nuclear world where Great Britain has succumbed to its darkest, most imperialistic tendencies and placed a yoke on all of its rivals.

Dorian hawkmoon