Elric of Melniboné[1] is a fictional character created by English writer Michael Moorcock and the protagonist of a series of sword and sorcery stories taking place on an alternative Earth.

Moorcock's doomed albino antihero is one of the better-known characters in fantasy literature, having crossed over into a wide variety of media, such as role-playing games, comics, music, and film.

From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone.

Because of Elric's introspective self-loathing and hatred of Melnibonéan traditions, his subjects find him odd and unfathomable.

[4][5] In the same dedication, he cited Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions and Fletcher Pratt's The Well of the Unicorn as similarly influential texts.

Moorcock has referred to Elric as a type of the "doomed hero", one of the oldest character-types in literature, akin to such hero-villains as Mervyn Peake's Steerpike in the Titus Groan trilogy, Poul Anderson's Scafloc in The Broken Sword, T. H. White's Lancelot in The Once and Future King, J. R. R. Tolkien's cursed hero Túrin Turambar, and Jane Gaskell's Zerd in The Serpent.

[6] John Clute considers Elric to be a deliberate parody of Robert E. Howard's Conan.

Besides Elric, Kullervo has been proposed as having influence on Poul Anderson's 1954 novel The Broken Sword,[citation needed] and J.R.R.

[11] Elric's albinism appears influenced by Monsieur Zenith, an albino Sexton Blake villain whom Moorcock appreciated enough to write into later multiverse stories.

Two anthologies of works by other authors set in the Moorcock multiverse have been published: The Elric saga has also been adapted for comics and graphic novels several times: A video game based on Elric was in development by Haiku Studios and to be published by Psygnosis for the PlayStation during the late 1990s.

Writing for NPR, Jason Sheehan calls Elric "far and away the coolest, grimmest, moodiest, most elegant, degenerate, drug-addicted, cursed, twisted and emotionally weird mass murderer of them all".