Customer Reviews

The Quest for Tanelorn

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Michael Moorcock, The Quest for Tanelorn (Berkley, 1975)

The Quest for Tanelorn ends with the words "the end of the saga of the eternal champion." A quarter-century later, of course, we know the untruth of that statement; still it's tough to read.

In this last novel of Dorian Hawkmoon and his compatriots, Hawkmoon, united with his wife, goes on the search for his children. He is pulled into a land of limbo suddenly while on a journey to Londra, there to find himself with his old friend Jhary-a-Conel, and the two of them adrift in a boat. They soon work out that they are in limbo, and have been sent there for a particular purpose...

Readers of the Eternal Champion novels will no doubt remember Hawkmoon popping up in various places throughout where he doesn't seem to have ever gone before in the series dedicated to him. Well, here it all is; the battle with Agak and Gagak (and what happens afterwards, when whichever manifestation of the Champion the series in question revolves around leaves Hawkmoon and his coterie in the ruins), the boat on the seas of limbo and its odd, blind crew; the whole mess. (One point, for those who have read the Elric series; how the Runestaff itself ends up in the tower of Voilodion Gaghnasdiak is never explained.)

All in all, the series draws to a satisfying conclusion, with the events coming in the most logical time flow they ever do in the eternal champion novels, and with the final mystery of the deaths of the gods, presented at the end of the first Corum trilogy, solved. Everyone (well almost everyone) who has survived ends up happy, and all is right with the Universe. Or so we think. ****

The Quest for Tanelorn is an important volume in Moorcock's whole Eternal Champion and Multiverse cycle.

Hawkmoon's quest for his wife is over, but now he needs to find his children, and all roads lead to Tanelorn.

They also lead to the captain of the death-ship, and a large scale Eternal Champion superhero crossover, as Hawkmoon must work with Elric, Corum and Erekose to defeat a foe, and restore some balance to the multiverse at the Conjunction.

The Quest for Tanelorn one of te most adventurous stories I ever read. This book was filled with worriors, giant energy-sucking monsters, mystery and adventure. Sailing on a death-ship to a place no one ever seen except in dreams. On a journy to find his long lost children, Hawkmoon found himself sailing on this death-ship. Another destiny-driven quest he'll have to conqure...