The Knight of the Swords

(c) 1971



While reading Michael Moorcock’s The Knight of the Swords, a couple of big-picture opinions began bouncing about my brain. Not about the characters, the plot, the dialogue, the exposition. But about the type of story I was reading. The whole package, so to speak.

Before I get to that, let me just comment briefly on the characters, the plot, the dialogue, the exposition.

They were good.

Not earth-shattering, not great, not inspiring, not enough to make me seek out other books in the series. However, it all was good, and that means it was a profitable investment of time. Well, perhaps that’s an overstatement. What I mean is, there are lots and lots of worse ways I could’ve spent those three hours.

Without giving too much away, The Knight of the Swords is a traditional quest tale of the Swords & Sorcery variety. It had a lot of interesting ideas: a pair of species more evolved than man, normal man as barbarian world destroyers, pantheons of gods of all shapes and sizes, shapeshifters, travel through astral planes, sorcerers, queens, castles, and, of course, clanging swords and swinging battle axes. There’s that quest for the hero to redeem himself and avenge his people and save the woman he loves. There are physical obstacles and enemies to overcome, and no one’s word can fully be trusted.

(In a sentence, our hero must steal the literal, actual heart of the demigod antagonist, the Knight of the Swords, and all else will fall into place.)

One bone of contention I had was with the Nouns in the story. In any fantasy tale, the Nouns play such a huge role in making the setting come to life. The names of the characters, of peoples, cities and lands, gods and goddesses, give personality and shading to the story. It goes back to Tolkien, He Whose Tales Are The Measure of All Fantasy Stories. Anyway, Moorcock’s choice of Nouns, to my amateur ears, had the ring of some crazy blend of Welsh and Arabic. The Welsh was interesting, the Arabic not so much so, but far too many Nouns were silly-sounding.

But the big picture thought I had with The Knight of the Swords is similar to one I had reading one of Lin Carter’s Sword & Sorcery tales. It was this: I could only imagine what someone like George R. R. Martin would do with this as source material. Swords clocks in at a lean 136 pages, 23 six-page chapters. George R. R. would bang out a 1,200 page, three-inch-thick novel delving deep into the men and mythologies, the traditions and philosophies, the tragic and ironic twists of local and distant histories, of a dozen lands and peoples, all while putting our hero through an almost inhuman crucible to reach his objective.

Reading Swords I had the impression of reading the Cliff Notes to some work now lost for the ages. While I’m no expert on Moorcock, it is my understanding that throughout the 60s and 70s he was very prolific and very productive, so perhaps he needed to churn out product to make a living and couldn’t afford to take, say, the two to four decades Tolkien took ruminating over ideas. I get that and understand that. I don’t fault The Knight of the Swords for being short and sweet. But I think it could have been better with a little more length and depth.

Though I’m not a big fan of Michael Moorcock, I will still continue to read his works every now and then. I’m still searching for one book of his I read as a lad, but memories are sketchy, so the search is open-ended.