The Bane of the Black Sword
core novel 1977 The Elric Saga
Record
| First published | 1977 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.01 (8,292 ratings, collected 2026-08-06) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780879973162 |
| Internal chronology | 7 |
Where it sits
- Universe: The Elric Saga
- Series: The Elric Saga core; position 7 of 12 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Michael Moorcock
Notes
- From the series record (The Elric Saga): 12 novels in internal chronological order (per Saga Press's current standard edition), spanning 1965-2022 in publication. At least 4 of these are fix-ups of originally separate 1961-64 magazine novelettes (The Weird of the White Wolf, The Bane of the Black Sword, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, and, hybrid, Stormbringer); the remainder are original novels. The Sleeping Sorceress was retitled The Vanishing Tower for some US editions; the database records the earlier UK title. Publication order genuinely differs from internal order and no two secondary sources fully agree on the exact publication sequence due to UK/US divergence, internal (reading) order is used here as the primary axis since it is the one Moorcock himself settled on for the modern standard edition.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Elric Saga: position 6 of 12: previous The Weird of the White Wolf (1977) · next The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)
- Internal chronology, within The Elric Saga: position 7 of 12: previous The Sleeping Sorceress (1971) · next The Revenge of the Rose (1991)
Sources
← The Elric Saga dossier · All universes
One of 3732 works in the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.