Now that the latest season of Game of Thrones has ended, fans of the show may be wondering: What now? How do I fill the void? One could, of course, reread George R. R. Martin’s books, or check out Maurice Druon’s The Accursed Kings, a series of seven historical novels that partly inspired Martin. It might even be time to return to those familiar tattered paperbacks of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s tales of Earthsea. All perfectly reasonable ideas.
Or, instead, you could look for a copy of E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, crisply summed up by E. F. Bleiler, the leading mid-20th-century scholar of supernatural fiction, as “still the finest heroic fantasy.” Published in 1922, the same year as so many modernist masterpieces, The Worm Ouroboros combines elements of Homeric epic, Norse saga, and Jacobean drama, while its opulent style borrows the vocabulary and verve of Elizabethan English.
That style, in particular, may put off readers who expect sentences to be essentially journalistic, little more than a means of conveying information rather than things of beauty in themselves. Yet, as Le Guin once wrote of Eddison, “if you love language for its own sake, he is irresistible.” His elevated diction adds real grandeur to his novel’s heroes and their actions. By fusing what Lewis called “renaissance luxury and northern hardness,” Eddison may have even created a “new climate of the imagination.” For Tolkien, who denied any influence, he was simply “the greatest and most convincing writer of ‘invented worlds’ that I have read.”
The Worm Ouroboros—the title refers to the serpent or dragon that eats its own tail—begins on Earth when a man named Lessingham is transported through magical means to the planet Mercury. He is set down, invisible, at the 30th-birthday celebration of Lord Juss, who is, with his brothers Spitfire and Goldry Bluszco and their cousin Lord Brandoch Daha, one of the four great champions of Demonland. In a recent war they have defeated the iniquitous Ghouls, but now find themselves embroiled in a new conflict with power-hungry Witchland. Other regions of this very Earth-like Mercury include Impland, Goblinland, and Pixyland.
Let us pause here. Eddison’s names, it must be admitted, tend to sound clunky, while nearly all his characters are essentially human beings rather than what we normally think of as demons, witches, imps, or goblins. In the middle of the second chapter, moreover, Lessingham simply drops out of the action. By that point, however, the reader will have begun to adjust to the novel’s various kinds of strangeness—in nomenclature, in diction—and, more importantly, the story will have started to cast its spell.
Eddison’s particular “enchanter-quality”—to borrow a term from Nabokov—initially reveals itself in his descriptive passages. Here, for instance, an embassy from Witchland returns home from the court of the Demons:
At this point, Eddison pulls out all the stops:
Gorice XII, the new ruler of Witchland, isn’t merely a king, he is also a necromancer; in fact, there is—in some occult way—only one Gorice, constantly reincarnated. To defeat the hated Demons the latest Gorice ascends the Iron Tower at Carcë and there, assisted by his adviser Lord Gro, summons a hellish “worm of the pit,” which he sends forth against Juss and his companions. This “sending” results in the disappearance of Goldry Bluszco, though the Demons soon learn that their burly Hercules isn’t dead, only imprisoned somewhere out of time and space. While attempting to undo this foul sorcery, Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha are themselves captured, chained to a wall in Carcë, and left to die of starvation.
Needless to say, they don’t, but I shouldn’t give too many more details about the novel’s action, except to add that to rescue Goldry the Demons must eventually fight their way across the dread marchlands of the Moruna, leaving behind their familiar world for one suffused with desolation and an oppressive atmosphere of the uncanny:
On their quest, Lord Juss and his companions encounter spectral beauties and ravenous mantichores, scale peaks to rival Mount Everest, learn the history of the ageless Queen Sophonisba, and discover that Goldry can only be freed if they locate the world’s last remaining hippogriff egg. Many additional adventures test their strength and courage. But then the glory earned in fierce combat—kleos was the Greek word for this kind of renown—is what the Demons live and die for. As Daha says, “Are not all lands, all airs, one country unto us, so there be great doings afoot to keep bright our swords?” Even their metaphors are martial: Trying to identify an unknown army’s commander, Juss asks, “Was he little and dark . . . like a keen dagger suddenly unsheathed at midnight?”
While these Demon princes journey through a haunted landscape, the court of Gorice XII bristles with intrigue: Who will lead the king’s troops in the conquest of Demonland, now weakened by the absence of its greatest warriors? Will it be the scheming Corsus, the proud and lascivious Corinius, or the noble Corund? Perhaps Gorice, for all his austere, inhuman majesty, could even be influenced in his choice by feminine charms and wiles? Alone with the king, one court beauty tries to find out:
An armful of warm girl is not to be despised, yet, as it turns out, Corund’s Pixyland wife more deeply grasps the mysteries of love and sex. Lady Prezmyra explains that she would never have taken a husband without knowing that she could “give him every time I would a new heaven and a new earth, and never the same thing twice.”
In these chapters focused on the Witches, we learn more about the king’s adviser, Lord Gro, who has been a traitor to Goblinland and a traveler to the distant places of the world. “Subtle of mind he is, and dearly loveth plotting and scheming,” we are told, yet paradoxically Gro also “perversely affecteth ever the losing side if he be brought into any quarrel.” Not least, this Goblin—the most complex character in the book—is a lover of goodness and beauty, a devoted friend to Lady Prezmyra, and, in dire circumstances, the protector of Lord Brandoch Daha’s sister, Lady Mevrian.
* *
Great battles feature prominently in the later chapters of The Worm Ouroboros, but each is slightly different in character. Some we follow as they happen; others are told to us after the fact, as when a common soldier recalls his part in an ambush: “We came down on to Krothering Side like a rock-fall.” As in Game of Thrones, people we have come to admire are unexpectedly killed. Readers consequently shouldn’t think of the great war between the Demons and the Witches as one of Good versus Evil. Eddison isn’t writing a Christian fantasy à la Lewis. Lord Juss and his inner circle may be the heroes, yet many of the Witches show themselves to be men and women of worth. When Corund, against overwhelming odds, defends the entrance to Carcë, Lord Juss himself is awestruck, calling it “the greatest deed of arms that ever I in the days of my life did see.”
Such generous sentiments partly reflect the novel’s pagan character: Conducting oneself honorably and dying well are all that truly matter. Yet when Lady Mevrian praises the splendor of the armies of Demonland, Lord Gro—like Xerxes surveying the Persian host—instead reflects on life’s brevity:
Whether a gentle wistfulness, despair over the apparent meaninglessness of life, or unavoidable ennui resulting from the tedium of peacetime existence, instances of melancholy regularly surface in the quieter sections of The Worm Ouroboros. Away from the clangor of arms, Eddison can even evoke a tranquil, ethereal loveliness that seems almost Japanese:
* *
Eric Rücker Eddison (1882-1945) spent most of his life as a civil servant working for Britain’s Board of Trade. But he loved the Icelandic sagas and wrote one novel—Styrbiorn the Strong—in their style and later translated my own longtime favorite, Egil’s Saga. Starting in the 1930s, Eddison resurrected Lessingham to reveal the complexity of the character’s origins in three linked fantasy novels, usually called the Zimiamvia trilogy: Mistress of Mistresses, A Fish Dinner in Memison, and The Mezentian Gate. These track a pavane of complex love stories, in which major characters are actually emanations or avatars of the gods and our whole Earth but a bubble, easily pricked. While James Stephens—author of the Irish fantasy classic The Crock of Gold—unhesitatingly called The Worm Ouroboros “a masterpiece of English literature,” he also described A Fish Dinner in Memison as “the largest, the most abundant, the most magnificent book of our time.” (Such praise for Eddison gains added weight when you remember that James Joyce once said that if he were unable to complete Finnegans Wake, he hoped that James Stephens would finish it.)
In its inventiveness and imaginative daring, The Worm Ouroboros is one of the foundational works of modern fantasy. Nonetheless, the book’s archaisms, as I’ve said, may prove daunting to some 21st-century readers (though a 1991 Dell trade paperback edition, annotated by Paul Edmund Thomas, can be recommended for its excellent introduction and useful linguistic notes). Still, any ambitious work of art makes demands, though these, ultimately, only increase our aesthetic delight. We accept the stylistic challenges of Joyce, Gertrude Stein, or Djuna Barnes, so why not those of Eddison, their contemporary? Besides, once you’ve finished The Worm Ouroboros, you can go on more confidently to the other magnificently eccentric masterpieces of early-20th-century fantasy, such as William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist, and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus.
Michael Dirda is the author, most recently, of Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books.
