The Skrayling Tree
core novel 2003 The Eternal Champion
Record
| First published | 2003 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.61 (535 ratings, collected 2026-08-06) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780446531047 |
| Internal chronology | 11 |
Synopsis
The Skrayling Tree opens after the events of The Dreamthief's Daughter, following Ulric von Bek and Oona, Elric's daughter, as they have settled into a quiet postwar life in Nova Scotia. That peace is broken when the villain Klosterheim kidnaps Ulric, forcing Oona to pursue him across time and the multiverse into a twelfth-century version of North America inhabited by indigenous peoples and shaped by mystical forces unfamiliar to her. Aided by a native guide, and with sections of the story also following Elric himself in an earlier age, Oona's rescue mission unfolds alongside a larger threat as Prince Gaynor works toward a scheme that could unravel the entire multiverse, named for the vast, Yggdrasil-like Skrayling Tree said to bind all worlds together.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Eternal Champion
- Series: The Elric Saga core; position 11 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 10 of 12: previous The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001) · next The White Wolf's Son (2005)
- Internal chronology, within The Eternal Champion: position 29 of 30: previous The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001) · next The White Wolf's Son (2005)
Sources
- Moorcock's Miscellany
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elric_of_Melnibon%C3%A9
- http://www.stevenhsilver.com/skrayling.html
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