The Weird of the White Wolf
core novel 1977 The Eternal Champion
Record
| First published | 1977 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.92 (11,564 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780879972868 |
| Internal chronology | 5 |
Synopsis
The Weird of the White Wolf is the fifth book of the Elric Saga in reading order, collecting stories that follow the destruction of Elric's home city of Imrryr. Elric, the albino emperor of Melniboné, has already lost Cymoril, the woman he loved, to his own cursed sword Stormbringer during his war against his usurping cousin, and his allies have perished in dragonfire during the city's fall. Left with only Stormbringer as a companion, Elric wanders the Young Kingdoms as a mercenary, searching for some structure of meaning to replace what he has lost. His path leads him to pursue the Dead God's Book, hoping that it holds answers about the true order of the cosmos, even as each new discovery only deepens his sense of loss.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Eternal Champion
- Series: The Elric Saga core; position 5 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 5 of 12: previous The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (1976) · next The Bane of the Black Sword (1977)
- Internal chronology, within The Eternal Champion: position 18 of 30: previous The Bull and the Spear (1973) · next The Oak and the Ram (1973)
Sources
- Moorcock's Miscellany
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elric_of_Melnibon%C3%A9
- https://reactormag.com/elric-reread-weird-of-the-white-wolf/
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