I've read Elric!, where now?

[hellbender]

Hmm, I've read a good 90% of Moorcock's books, but never really got the feeling he had a distain for Tolkien. Is that something from some of his biographical material? I do know that he was very much an "Angry Young Man" especially when he was writing the Elric books and that Elric was specifically designed to be the opposite of your classic "Conan" style, strong mighty hero.

I can see him writing in rejection of the classic archtypes, that is essentially the source of Elric's origin. However I doubt that the Christian propgandizing in especially CS Lewis's stuff was much of a motivation. I suspect it was far more a case of simply wanting to smash that which had gone before as was such a motivation for so many others in the 60's.

I am curious though where your information comes from, I have never done much biographical research on Moorecock, so my gut feelings may well be entirely wrong.

Here is a direct quote from Moorcock in the introduction of Tales of the White Wolf, page VII:

'...but I had little time for the likes of Tolkien and Lewis, whom I regarded as bad popular children's writers whose moral attitudes were highly questionable...'

I have read a good deal of Moorcock and I am afraid he has a much sketchier moral attitude to me than Tolkien or Lewis. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, admitted in an essay to having added Christian elements to the Lord of the Rings and then later to the history of Middle-Earth. In the end, it doesn't matter, I enjoy the writing of them all.

hellbender