In fact, The Black Sword, a central motif in Moorcock’s giant experiment with motifs and how they work dubbed The Eternal Champion Saga, is also a central motif in music’s relationship with Moorcock’s work. Ah, The Black Sword! That dastardly weapon appears early in our tale and that is no coincidence.

This relationship started with his contribution to the band’s In Search of Space, passed through the band’s arguably most famous album, Warrior on the Edge of Time, and finally culminated in a live show/retelling of Moorcock’s own literature in the form of The Chronicle of the Black Sword. Like the wave of metal that Moorcock is most associated with, the author and his relationship with music actually start in the very late 60’s/early 70’s with what is perhaps Moorcock’s most famous contribution to music: Hawkwind. The fact that Moorcock and genres like heavy, power, and thrash metal coincided in their ascendancy is probably no mistake. Hmmm, I wonder what other artistic genre was reaching a fever pitch during those years? Indeed, much of his sword and sorcery style died in the late 80’s, enjoying its Golden Age sometimes between the mid-70’s and the end of that ill-fated decade. While Moorcock is incredibly influential and famous, it appears that his name recognition has declined drastically ever since the 90’s. If you’re unfamiliar with the name, don’t beat yourself up about it. Oh, that’s right: the subject of this, the second, delayed iteration of Maps of Meaning is Michael Moorcock. This is doubly true for this iteration’s subject, by the way, as a few ( really good) lists of bands that evoke or directly reference Michael Moorcock’s literature already exist on this wonderful, broken thing we call The Internet. Nor is the idea of this column to merely shoot off a list of recommendations that all revolve around a certain author or setting and call it a day.

Oh, in case you don’t remember (which, considering the two year delay, who can blame you?), the entire purpose of this column is to go deeper into how literature has influenced metal (and, in this case, vice versa) beyond just the usual examples that come to the mind of every metalhead when the two terms are mentioned in the same sentence. Regardless, I don’t think I’m going to promise any sort of regularity to this column (I mean, come on what was I thinking when I tried to make this a monthly thing?) but I do want to start using it more regularly to look at the ties between literature and metal. Excuses? Literature is hard? The world burns around us? General procrastination and anxiety? Take your pick. Well, it has been two years plus a few days and I am now sitting down to write the second installment in this supposedly “monthly column”. When I wrote the introduction to the first entry in the Maps of Meaning column, I used the word “monthly”.