Eternal Champion
fictional character
The Eternal Champion is a fictional character created by British author Michael Moorcock and is a recurrent feature in many of his speculative fiction works.
General overview
Many of Moorcock's novels and short stories take place in a shared Multiverse: an array of interconnected parallel universes, many-layered dimensions, spheres, and alternative worlds, spanning from the Big Bang to the End of Time and from planet Earth to faraway galaxies. All these regions of spaces and parallel timelines are given shape by two metaphysical forces which are perpetually opposed to each other: Law and Chaos, which represent perpetual stasis and ever-changing disorder. Since a clear-cut prevalence of either Law or Chaos would erase all life from the Multiverse, a third force known as the Cosmic Balance enforces certain limits on the powers of Law and Chaos, which in turn ensure the continued existence of the Multiverse. Law, Chaos, and the Balance are implied to be non-sentient, but they do manifest through god-like beings who express one facet or another of the three cosmic principles, and in turn, these deities can empower mortal creatures as their heralds and representatives.
The Eternal Champion is an appointed paladin of Balance who is bound to exist in each and every world and age of the Multiverse, so that Law and Chaos are perpetually kept in check; however, he often does not know of his role or struggles against it, never to succeed. Since he must intervene whenever either Law or Chaos has gained an excess of power, requiring him to tip the scales accordingly, he is always doomed to be surrounded by strife and destruction, although he may go through long periods of relative quiet.
All the different Eternal Champions are implied to be different facets or "incarnations" of one semi-conscious being (a platonic archetype of a sort): most of them are peerless fighters and generals and have an unbreakable bond with a sentient Chaos-aligned weapon, the Black Sword, which, in turn, takes on a different form for each Champion. Likewise, many Champions are aided by an Eternal Companion and an Eternal Consort: a sidekick and a love interest who are themselves aspects of two semi-divine figures. This recursivity through the Multiverse is further underlined by the number of Champions, Companions, and mentor-figures to the Champions Moorcock has given the J and C initials, as a form of naming fil rouge; in the same vein, many Champions and Companions belong to one branch or another of the extensive von Bek dynasty.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eternal Champion” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.