today I learned that Tolkien had an Elric analogue character in his mythos, in material only published posthumously.

Turin Turambar is described as a dark-complected man. So that’s not a join. But here, in number 12, his death is summarized as follows:

Túrin committed suicide by impaling himself on his sentient black sword, a sword forged from a meteorite by a Dark Elf. That is metal. He did so after killing the first dragon, Glaurung. That is really metal. Unfortunately, Túrin gets points docked since the main reason he killed himself was that he realized he’d married his own sister. Granted, he’d been tricked into marrying his own sister by a dragon, but still. Accidental incest is not metal.

I mean come on. A sentient black sword from another realm. Incest and traitorous woe! Granted, MM and JRRT are looking at common sources but MM is at pains to invert, flip, remix and otherwise FSU, and the dude claims to literally hate JRRT’s stuff. And certainly he didn’t see this until something like thirty earth-human years after our beloved albino first blinked up at the light falling onto him thru a filtered scrim of leadtype and newsprint.

Anyway, so that was my mindblow for the day.