The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison. 1922. Ballantine Books, Apr. 1967. [My version: First printing, Apr. 1967]
This essay is part of Ballantine Adult Fantasy: A Reading Series.
Table of Contents
E.R. Eddison and the Road to Ballantine
Reading The Worm Ouroboros
On Lessingham and the Induction
On Style and Narrative Form
On Heroes and the Ouroboros
Dreaming in the Lotus Room
Reading E.R. Eddison is a daunting prospect.
Responses to Eddison are incredibly split, but not in the way you might expect. Folks seem simultaneously drawn to Eddison, impressed by what he’s doing, but not always able to say they “like” Eddison, and yet I have found few who explicitly dislike his novels. He seems to both alienate and attract, in large part because of his mixing of decadent prose mimicking Elizabethan and Jacobean language with a fantasy world that is both simple and larger-than-life, that has much in common with sword and sorcery fiction of the American pulps, narrative-wise, and with the Norse sagas, too, and which conjures a deep sense of (invented) place, history, and symbolic depth that characterizes the best Tolkienian fantasy.
In other words, for those reading Eddison from the Ballantine era onward, he reads like an odd admixture of fantasy’s major genealogies, though he wrote his first novel, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), a decade before sword and sorcery really emerged and decades before Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. And after listening to a recent episode of the incredible podcast A Meal of Thorns about Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses, I was both excited and perturbed by just how much Eddison my Ballantine Adult Fantasy reading series would have me tackling (all four books this year!).
Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros is a novel for those who would fain read the odd and the arcane—and if you’re reading this essay series, that’s probably you! The novel is, I was happily surprised to find, a swift read in spite of its 520 pages and, despite my lack of interest in most of the plot (except where Lord Gro, Lady Prezmyra, and Lady Mevrian are concerned), a critically compelling one. Eddison is a masterful stylist, a wonderful artist in words. His archaized prose is not at all difficult to read and in fact invokes its own unique rhythms; the language and its play with historical style is fun, pleasant, and affecting, all the more so when he quotes from lengthy letters or tomes, which are written in a wholly different, doubly archaized style that mimics the non-standardized, figure-it-out-as-you-go spellings of early modern English writers (examples below). Characters are larger than life, simplified, hyper-symbolic figures from heroic sagas; they are not particularly interesting as characters but their adventures and the symbolisms written into their stories and storyworld are.
It is easy to see in The Worm Ouroboros the outlines of influence in later authors, whether actual or coincidental, from Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft on down to Michael Moorcock, Glen Cook, and George R.R. Martin, each of whom embodies the morally grey cynicism and bleakness—what Tolkien thought of as arrogance and cruelty, but which is I think an unfair reading, even if I understand where he’s coming from—of Eddison’s novel in diverse directions. For his influence alone, Eddison is worth reading, but I think The Worm Ouroboros is valuable as a literary work in its own right and, as its reprinting among the “preface” novels of the BAF series suggests, the novel has a lot to say about things that will become very important to the emerging fantasy genre. As such, it remains a critically and theoretically important text for fantasy studies today.
E.R. Eddison and the Road to Ballantine
E.R. (Eric Rücker) Eddison (1882–1945) was a near-contemporary of Inklings Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield, but a decade-ish older and a little shorter-lived, and an almost exact contemporary of Charles Williams. Along with Tolkien, George MacDonald, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, and scant others, Eddison is often classed as from the “literary” lineage of British fantasy that was spun into the larger canon of fantasy in the postwar period alongside American sword and sorcery, transatlantic children’s fantasy, and Arthuriana. Today, he has a small but dedicated fanbase, as evidenced by the maintenance of an “official”(?) E.R. Eddison website. Eddison was a childhood friend and classmate of children’s author Arthur Ransome, educated at Oxford, and a distinguished civil servant who spent most of his career at the Board of Trade, where he played a major role in inter-commonwealth trade policy between 1906 and his retirement in 1938. He was also a dedicated scholar of Norse literature and, in addition to his fantasy writing, translated the thirteenth-century Egil’s Saga.
Like many of the books published by BAF, The Worm Ouroboros was a republication of an earlier novel—this one first published in 1922 in England by Jonathan Cape and in 1926 in the U.S. by Albert & Charles Boni, both hardcovers, both with exquisitely enticing covers featuring an image of a dragon/worm/wyrm. The British edition also included numerous black-and-white line illustrations by its cover artist, Keith Henderson. The novel was republished in the U.S. in hardcover by E.P. Dutton in 1952 and again, this time in mass market paperback, by Crown Publishers in 1962, before appearing from Ballantine Books in April 1967 as part of their attempt to build on Tolkien’s success by trying to find more books that fit—and could be used to define—the “adult fantasy,” “imaginative worlds” mold.[1]
The Worm Ouroboros was Eddison’s first novel. He followed it with a historical fiction novel, Styrbiorn the Strong, in 1926—a novel inspired by references to this minor character in several Norse sagas. He spent the remainder of his life writing the Zimiamvian trilogy: Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958), published posthumously following his sudden death in 1945. Eddison’s fantasies were much praised in their time on both sides of the Atlantic and sold modestly well, even garnering an introduction in the first American edition (sadly not reprinted by Ballantine!) by James Branch Cabell, an author who BAF would come to regularly reprint. All of Eddison’s fantasies were republished in the run up to BAF’s official launch in 1969, and the Ballantine edition of The Mezentian Gate was the first American edition of the novel in print.
The Worm Ouroboros was in fact Ballantine’s first follow up to the Tolkien event of 1965 and indicated the publisher’s desire to see whether this fantasy thing could be a success with other authors, other visions of imaginative worlds for adults. The novel’s paratexts go hard at putting The Worm Ouroboros in conversation with Tolkien, making it clear right in the center of the front cover: “An epic fantasy to compare with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings,” followed by a blurb from NYT book reviewer and noted literary curmudgeon Orville Prescott: “A literary event of the first importance.” Here, the term “epic fantasy” is somewhat inappropriate to our contemporary genre sensibilities, since the novel has less in common with The Lord of the Rings than with, say, Robert E. Howard, but the term’s use here has more to do with the fantasy’s relationship to epics and to ancient heroic literature, than necessarily to the high fantasy subgenre we easily label today and take Tolkien to be the paragon of. (I’m anxious to attend to the deployment and changing meaning of fantasy subgenre terms and classifiers throughout this BAF reread, since Lin Carter regularly used and defined terms, in better and worse ways, across his various introductions and nonfiction books.)
On the back cover, Ballantine printed: “The Worm Ouroboros is the first book of a vast fantasy fully as rich and strange as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings,” anticipating their subsequent release of Mistress of Mistresses (Aug. 1967) and A Fish Dinner in Memison (Feb. 1968) as the next two “preface” novels to BAF. The Mezentian Gate followed in April 1969 as the final pre-BAF novel, with seven novels (and two books of Tolkien miscellanea) published in the meantime (see the reading series index for the full list). It is not exactly right that The Worm Ouroboros is the first in a “vast fantasy’ series, but it’s not exactly wrong, since the Zimiamvian trilogy takes place on the other side of the world from The Worm Ouroboros, the side of the world where the novel’s heroes imagine live the spirits of the great heroes and the gods themselves; the other connection is Lessingham (a lot more on him later). It’s also entirely likely that Ballantine simply misunderstood the relationship between The Worm Ouroboros and the first two Zimiamvian novels, since on the inside blurb they explicitly describe it as “The first of three related but independent books”—three, not four. Because The Mezentian Gate had not been published in the U.S., they might simply not have known about it yet. More to this point, they might have seen Eddison’s first three fantasy novels as a trilogy (or at least understood they could be sold as such) and, after Tolkien, thought that readers might be keen on the expansive trilogy format. Not for nothing, they followed up these first three Eddison novel’s with Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. What we see Ballantine doing here is laying the groundwork to establish that there are other grand fantasy narratives like Tolkien’s, that although unique and exquisite, he is not the only jewel. In fact, as Ballantine’s front interior copy for The Worm Ouroboros makes clear, they wanted readers to think of Eddison’s novel as the “only one book with which [The Lord of the Rings] could be legitimately compared,” and further cited a Chicago Tribune review that claimed Tolkien was like no contemporary writer “except Cabell and the late E.R. Eddison” (n.p.). (For a look at other pre-1970s novels in mass market circulation that were compared in similar ways to Tolkien, see Douglas A. Anderson’s essay here).
Ballantine wanted a sales successor to Tolkien, and they imagined they had it readily in E.R. Eddison. They sought to capitalize on the literary comparisons—handily affected by newspaper reviewers—by also using the same cover artist who painted Ballantine’s Tolkien paperback covers: Barbara Remington. Remington was assigned to paint covers for Ballantine’s slapdash, but legally legit 1965 production of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit within months of Ace’s “pirate” editions, but famously had not read the books and was not given time to do so by Ballantine, resulting in covers that included elements not present in the books—though the covers are absolutely fantastic, beautiful, and unsuspectingly representative of some of Tolkien’s own artistic habits, seen especially in the neat rows of trees and the hillside featured on the cover of The Fellowship of the Ring. (See here for an interview with Remington about the covers; several years later, Remington did an incredible map of Middle-earth that was produced as a short-run poster).
Remington’s cover for The Worm Ouroboros and the next two Eddison novels published by Ballantine share a similar fantastical vibrancy with her Tolkien covers, and have potentially slightly more to do with the contents of the books than her Tolkien’s covers. Unlike many later BAF covers (four examples here), the Eddison covers are not wraparounds but rather utilize a frame element that is reduplicated, with some deletions, on the back cover. So for The Worm Ouroboros, the front cover features the design of a giant, twisting dragon/worm/wyrm wrapping around the edges of the cover, devouring its own tail at the top center of the cover. The dragon’s scales are shades of red, blue, purple, and black, and from its upper limbs hangs a discarded black cloak, torn by war and time, onto which the title, author, and main blurb are imposed in white letters. The sun gleams in the small space between the cloak and the dragon’s head, with the crablike figure of the Kings of Witchland (looking here more like a tailless scorpion) positioned in the sun. Below the cloak/title, the bottom half of the cover shows a landscape of war, with knights on horseback battling it out in the foreground, clambering around and over the great dragon’s writhing body, and in the background: mountains, a sea with warships, a dragon, a giant snake, a chimaeric creature, etc. The figures are all somewhat cartoonish, with near-comical patches of blood splashed where lances meet bodies (though Remington’s armor style is more high medieval than the theatrical armor pictured within the novel, in reprints of the original Henderson illustrations scattered throughout). The palette is largely shaded by the reds, purples, blues of the dragon’s scales and there is—despite the cartoonish simplicity of the humans and monsters—a dire, almost apocalyptic air to the scene, especially with the crablike figure eclipsing the sun and the title rendered over a torn bit of cloth, the refuse of war. The cover establishes some interesting expectations about the novel, but doesn’t reflect the tone of Eddison’s gleeful embrace of war and battle. Remington’s vision is of an unending melee of blood watched over by an uncaring, self-devouring dragon. Not what Eddison has in mind, I think (more below), but brilliant nonetheless. The back cover deletes most of the elements inside the dragon/worm/wyrm frame and replaces it with a cream white blank space for the back cover description and a lengthy blurb.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the Ballantine edition of The Worm Ouroboros includes two introductions to the book (both reprinted from earlier editions, but sadly not the Cabell one); one by Prescott mentioned above and another by Irish author and nationalist James Stephens, who published Celtic fantasy narratives. The introductions serve mostly to assure readers that the novel is good, a literary masterpiece even, and to familiarize readers with some of the many names they’ll encounter and why we’ll like them—oh, how heroic their heroism is! It’s all a bit dull, really, and one wishes a more historical and genre-aware introduction could have been supplied, but those would come later, with Lin Carter. Such introductions were commonplace in mass market paperbacks of the early postwar period, especially for literary fiction, and what they demonstrate in the case of Ballantine’s foray into fantasy is that the publisher really wanted people to know how adult, how serious, and how good fantasy—just as they were constructing its generic meaning—can be. Can you blame them? This shit is pretty awesome!
Reading The Worm Ouroboros
The Worm Ouroboros starts with an “Induction” into the world of the novel. And for many readers it is an odd beginning. For it starts not in the secondary world of the fantasy novel, but in “an old low house” in the Lake District in northwest England, sometime contemporary to the book’s writing (1). The protagonist is initially a man named, Englishly enough, Lessingham. We find him and his wife, Mary, reading George Dasent’s translation of the Icelandic Njáls Saga (Eddison even describes it as a hefty green book). As the night draws nearer, Lessingham suggests they sleep in the Lotus Room in the east wing of their house and there is quite a mysterious, perhaps even threatening, air to the prospect of sleeping in that room. When Lessingham falls asleep he (or, rather, his spirit/incorporeal self) is whisked away on a chariot pulled by a hippogriff to the planet Mercury, led there by a talking martlet. The martlet serves as a temporary narrator, bridging the interwar England of readers and the Mercurial world of fantasy, and explains the narrative’s major kingdoms and principal heroes to Lessingham. As many critics have noted—often with the thankful tone of assurance that this strange plot contrivance does not continue too long—Lessingham disappears shortly after the narrative arrives in Demonland (26; with a minor reference to him on 128). (I’ll discuss Lessingham at length in the next section.)
Now in Demonland, with Lessingham gone, the facade of the novel as a portal-fantasy trip to Mercury disappears and The Worm Ouroboros becomes what we would now call a secondary-world fantasy. The plot is lengthy and winding, but I will recount its major moves here and a bit about the experience of reading it. In briefest sum, this is the story of the conflict between the noble, heroic lords of Demonland—Juss, Goldry Bluszco, and Spitfitre, brothers and co-rulers of their realm, along with their cousin Brandoch Daha—and the powerful, power-mad King(s) of Witchland—all named Gorice (pronounced, Eddison tells us, “gore ice”)—as the latter tries to assert dominion over the former and to establish Demonland as one of many vassal fiefs. The action opens shortly after the lords of Demonland have heroically vanquished a great enemy, the villainous Ghouls, by essentially committing genocide: “slain, every soul, utterly abolished from this world” (20).
Importantly, the Ghouls, like the Demons and Witches, and later the Goblins, Pixies, and Imps we meet, who make up the major ethnic(?)/social groups of the storyworld, are not the fantastical creatures of myth and legend we might expect them to be, but humans, or “men” as Eddison regularly calls them all (Eddison does reference, once, in passing, the existence of elves (14)). Only the Demons seem to be physically different in any regard to humans like you or I, in that they have “[h]orns […] on their heads” (10); and even that detail is only mentioned one or two other times. I haven’t read anything intelligent about this nomenclature—most critics and readers seem to find it at worst mildly annoying or at best just silly—but I’m quite curious why Eddison would do this. Why set up the obvious expectations implied by these terms? Perhaps to imply that these larger-than-life figures of his fantasy world might have migrated psychically into our world (via incorporeal travellers like Lessingham) and thereby given their names to legends and myths? But I’m not wholly satisfied by that reading.
While holding court in the castle of Juss in Galing, the lords of Demonland are visited by an ambassador from Witchland, who bears a message from Gorice XI declaring Demonland must submit to him as their “rightful overlord” (19). The Demons refuse, of course, and instead send back a challenge for a “wrastling” match between the king and Goldry Bluszco, which Goldry handily wins by throwing Gorice XI and breaking his neck (Eddison really must have liked Greek wrestling, since he describes the bout in great detail). Witchland’s throne in Carcë (pronounced “car sea”) passes immediately to Gorice XII. Where XI was a brawny warrior, XII is a sly magician and intelligent plotter, the great villain of the novel. He seeks to take down the Demons through magic, even though the use of powerful magics has led to the death of previous Gorices. With the unflappable Goblin Lord Gro, the exiled former advisor of King Gaslark of Goblinland, at his side, Gorice XII performs a great conjuring and sends a supernatural force to kill the lords of Demonland as they travel by ship home from the “wrastling” match. But the conjuring is a partial failure, for the lords of Demonland wore amulets to protect them from dark magics—only, Goldry’s somehow slipped from him and he was carried off by the conjuring, leaving his brothers Juss and Spitfire and cousin Brandoch Daha bereft. They seek revenge hastily by assailing Carcë alongside their ally, King Gaslark, but lose and are captured by Gorice XII. They are then set free when the visiting Prince La Fireez of Pixyland, a subject of Witchland and brother to Lady Prezmyra, the wife of Witchland’s greatest hero, Corund, frees the Demons (he owes them a debt for saving his life six years prior). Freed and now possessed of the knowledge that Goldry was taken by Gorice’s conjuring to the ends of the earth, beyond the wild wastes of Impland, the Demons plan an expedition to save him. And that’s just the first quarter of the novel!
With all of the major players—roughly a dozen principal characters—established, the narrative slows down a bit more in terms of sheer proliferation of twists and turns. With Spitfire returned to Demonland to guard it against further Witch attacks, Juss and Brandoch Daha go on expedition to Impland, losing thousands of soldiers in the process and emerging the only survivors (though this doesn’t seem to bother anyone; if you aren’t one of the great heroes or villains in The Worm Ouroboros, you don’t matter morally or socially to the narrative). Juss and Brandoch’s expedition to the ends of the earth in search of Goldry takes up roughly the next quarter of the novel, and includes lengthy and highly artistic descriptions of desolate lands, of mountains and mountaineering, and of the eerie, paradisiacal abode of the immortal Queen Sophonisba upon the mountain Koshtra Belorn, across from the evil mountain Zora Rach Nam Psarrion, where Goldry is imprisoned.
These chapters are pure adventure, highly reminiscent of the late Victorian adventure narratives of H. Rider Haggard and, to later readers of BAF, to the sword and sorcery stories of the first half of the twentieth century. There are the the “barbaric” Imps of Impland, ruled by corrupt and easily swayed Fazes; only one Imp is noteworthy to the narrative, Mivarsh, who is depicted as a willing follower of Juss and Brandoch Daha, but a weakling and craven by comparison—and so he meets a rude end, despite bearing with them across endless expanses no man had crossed before. There are the time-bending, supernatural forces of Impland, which have trapped three mercenary heroes in an endless search to kill one another, and the haunted castle of Ishnain Nemartra, which curses Brandoch Daha. There are the mountains beyond description, which Juss and Brandoch Daha (and forgotten Mivarsh) cross, and which mark the border between this world and the land where dwell the souls of great heroes (Zimiamvia, explored in Eddison’s Zimiamvian trilogy). There is the Edenic garden at the Lake of Ravary fed by the waters of the Bhavinan river; the unassailable, bewitched heights of Zora Rach Nam Psarrion, which can only be accessed by hippogriff; the immortal Sophonisba, rescued by the gods from her family’s destruction at Eshgrar Ogo centuries prior by an earlier King Gorice; and more. It is all very grand, and it clips along to the tune of Eddison’s breathless “and then!” style of storytelling that heaps ever greater challenges, ever stranger conflicts, ever weird turns on the two heroes (and Mivarsh). In the end, though, Juss and Brandoch Daha are unable to save Goldry when Mivarsh betrays them by trying and failing to hatch the only hippogriff egg in Koshtra Belorn (and dies falling from the juvenile beast), and so the Demon lords must return to Demonland, where hippogriffs once lived—and maybe still do.
Juss and Brandoch Daha do not return from their expedition until the final quarter of The Worm Ouroboros. The third quarter of the novel turns, then, to the internal politicking of Witchland’s lords (particularly between the families of noble Corund, greedy Corinius, and bitter Corsus, with the Goblin Gro tossed on the tides of Witchland’s shifting political seas) and the Witches’ conquest and occupation of Demonland until that conquest is overthrown by Juss and Brandoch Daha’s return. The chapters that focus on the political maneuvering among Witchland’s leaders are some of the best in the novel, and evince a wholly different literary skill to Eddison’s narration of heroic adventures in the previous section. In these chapters Eddison shows his incredible facility for interpersonal intrigue and his excellent grasp of dialogue, clearly inspired by his admiration for Jacobean theatre and especially the tragedies of John Webster. It’s really only in these chapters that focus on characters like Gro, Corund, Prezymyra, Corinius, Corsus, and Lady Sriva, and later, during the Demonland occupation, Lady Mevrian, that compellingly drawn characters emerge in The Worm Ouroboros.
In particular, this section of the novel brings to life the Goblin exile Gro and how his attempts to serve Witchland continually backfire as he is doubted, accused of trickery, and more, but always he regains the favor if not the loyalty of Witchland’s lords through his intelligence, logic, and cunning. Moreover, it is here that women characters like Prezmyra, Sriva, and Mevrian become major players in the narrative, using their wit, charm, and, in Sriva’s case, sexual prowess to maneuver on behalf of the men in their lives: husbands, brothers, fathers. It is clear that Eddison has an interest in Prezmyra and Mevrian in particular as examples of a kind of woman, almost goddess-like (epitomized in the figure of Sophonisba), who is powerful, ambitious, virtuous, and kind, and who in Mevrian’s case has no need of a husband (in contrasts to Lady Sriva, Corsus’s daughter, who is highly sexual(ized) and has affairs with both Corinius and Gorice XII). Gro, too, who might be Eddison’s most sympathetic and certainly his most likable character in The Worm Ouroboros, aligns himself increasingly not with the lords of Witchland but with Prezmyra and later Mevrian—sister of Brandoch Daha, whose treatment by the invading Witches under Corinius causes Gro to switch sides—and sees in them a kindred intelligence, though he also deeply admires, and indeed secretly loves, both ladies. Gro emerges from the novel a tragic figure: always choosing the losing side, always doubted by those he swears allegiance to, and never requited in love. But Gro is not, like Juss or Brandoch Daha or even like the Witches’ lord Corund, a great hero; he is, in the eyes of the characters who matter—the hero-lords of Demonland—a schemer, like Gorice XII. But because their schemes bring about the titanic conflicts that allow the real heroes to emerge, they are important if not necessary to the heroic narrative all the same. But for such scheming, for seeking to win by means other than “might and main” (13), they are appropriately punished/vanquished by the real heroes.
The final quarter of the novel sees the restoration of Demonland to its ancestral lords, as Juss, Brandoch Daha, and Spitfire, now with Gro at their side, drive Corinius and the Witches out of Demonland. Then, with a hippogriff hatched from an egg found in Demonland, the Demons return on a second expedition to Impland, cross its wastes, and travel back to Koshtra Belorn, wherefrom Juss flies to Zora Rach Nam Psarrion, braves the psychical attacks of its supernatural forces, and frees Goldry Bulszco. The brothers of Demonland reunited, the Demons launch their final attack on Carcë, killing Witchland’s heroes Corund and Corinius—as well as Gro, who switches allegiance again when confronted by his old friend Corund—and pushing Gorice XII to drastic measures to defend the Witches. In his hubris, in defiance of the ancient magics which have kept the Gorices in power over Witchland, he tries another, greater conjuring of supernatural forces; but without Gro there to help him, Gorice XII falters and his own magics destroy Carcë and blot out his regnal line. This has deeper significance, too, for we learn over the course of The Worm Ouroboros that the self-devouring serpent of the title is both literal—a symbol on a ring worn by the kings Gorice—and symbolic, represented by powerful magic that rebirths a new Gorice in an already-adult body whenever an old Gorice dies (with suggestions that the new king keeps the old’s memories, but is a wholly different person(ality)). This ouroboric lineage can only be broken if kings of the line twice fail at performing great magical spells in Carcë; Gorcie XII’s failed conjuring during the Demons’ siege is the second such failure after Gorice VII’s destruction some seventy years prior, thus fulfilling the prophecy.
With Witchland and its heroes and villains blotted out, the Demons return to Demonland, where they are joined by Queen Sophonisba (it’s hinted that Juss will marry Sophonisba). The Demons, despite their success, are greatly forlorn and dismayed by the prospect of growing old in a world where there are no more great heroes to challenge them, no more dastardly villains to scheme at their undoing—no more need for thousands of nameless warriors to die in battle so that their leaders’ heroic slayings of other named characters can be sung about and remembered in ostentatious frescoes or tapestries. In a dramatic moment recalling the cursed mercenaries they met in Impland (more on that later), the lords of Demonland throw down their swords and Juss “spake and said,”
“We may well cast down our swords as a last offering on Witchland’s grave. For now must they rust: seamanship and all high arts of war must wither: and, now that our great enemies are dead and gone, we that were lords of all the world must turn shepherds and hunters, lest we become mere mountebanks and fops […]. O Queen Sophonisba, and you my brethren and my friends, that are come to keep my birthday with me to-morrow in Galing, what make ye in holiday attire? Weep ye rather, and weep again, and clothe you all in black, thinking that our mightiest feats of arms and the high southing of the bright star of our magnificence should bring us unto timeless ruin. Thinking that we, that fought but for fighting’s sake, have in the end fought so well we never may fight more; unless it should be in fratricidal rage each against each. And ere that should betide, may earth close over us and our memory perish.” (503)
Asking what they would wish of the gods, should she intercede on the Demons’ behalf to grant them a wish, Juss responds:
“Would they might but give us our great enemies alive and whole again. For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction, than thus live out our lives like cattle fattening for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants.” (504).
The gods, unsurprisingly, grant this wish and the novel ends with an ambassador arriving from Witchland, come to bring a message. The ending here uses similar—but not the same—words as before: “Lord, it is an Ambassador from Witchland and his train. He craveth present audience” (512). The original line adds some twenty-five words in two sentences before the final sentence here (15). Many have said that the novel ends where it begins, thus making the novel itself an ouroboros, a cycle never-ending (like the Gorices, like the mercenaries in Impland). But this is not exactly correct, and the distinction is important, as I’ll explore in the final section of this essay.
What the ending does tell us, however, in no uncertain terms, is that The Worm Ouroboros is a novel very much about—and completely enamored of a certain idea(l) of—heroism. It is a novel of great deeds and great clashes between the doers of those deeds; no impossible task is actually impossible to the lords of Demonland, particularly Juss and Brandoch Daha (they climb the unclimbed mountains of Koshtra Privrarcha and Koshtra Belorn twice!). These heroes stand against magic with “might and main” (13) and always win out, but in doing so, in vanquishing their enemies, render their own heroism a necessity of earlier times, and they deeply fear becoming shepherds and hunters (or “silly garden plants”; interestingly, Eddison loved gardening, even died while gardening). But their heroism is so great that even the gods are willing to grant them the ability to have another go at it all—or some new version of the conflict wrought by the supposed rebirth of their enemies in Witchland. Eddison revels in the deeds of his heroes and spends much of the final chapter recapping the accomplishments of the lords of Demonland for the newly arrived Queen Sophonisba.
Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros is a world of myth and heroic idealism, stripped largely of the moral dimension of such heroism, where being “great” and achieving greatness through legitimate means—might, main, brawn, but also mental fortitude against the psychical powers of magic—is the measure of a man. Some small sense of chivalry enters into it, with Corinius seen as a despicable cad not because he wins battles against the Demons and kills many of them, but because he trashes the beauty of Brandoch Daha’s castle after capturing it and because he threatens to sexually assault Mevrian (this is, for Gro, the last straw in his alignment with the Witches). But killing, invading, even genociding another nation (the Ghouls!) have no negative moral bearing on heroes, unless they undertake such acts out of cruelty or malice. It is a very particular vision of heroes and heroism that, as I’ve noted, likely reminded BAF readers in the 1960s of sword and sorcery heroes like Conan or Fafhrd, and which anticipates the bleak, cynical tone of grimdark fantasy (but which stands also in contrast by its emphasis on heroism and its aesthetic double, beauty). Eddison’s ideology of the hero also has much in common with the heroic sagas of the Norse that Eddison was so fond of, and the epics of the Greeks, whose influence is more clearly felt in the Zimiamvian trilogy—though such sagas and epics were not without their own criticisms of heroes, even if Eddison seems to have none.
In recounting the narrative of The Worm Ouroboros, I have paid specific attention to the way Eddison frames heroes and heroism, since this is a major feature of the novel and in fact its defining concern. While I wrote at length about how Peter S. Beagle dealt with heroism through metafantasy critique in The Last Unicorn in my earlier essay, I don’t want to spend as much time on heroism in this essay—though a whole section running to several thousand words would totally be in order; still, I can’t do everything at once—and will instead focus on some other areas of critical concern that open up The Worm Ouroboros to contemporary fantasy studies.
First, the question of what the hell is up with Lessingham and what I think Eddison might be doing with that contrivance, which has mostly been written off by critics as an awkward and unsuccessful opening. Second, the novel’s deployment of style, which is oft remarked upon in responses to the novel and which consideration of will bring us to a particularly interesting scene. And, finally, the image, symbol, or idea of the ouroboros and magic more generally in the novel, which brings us back to this question of heroism and the novel’s interest in cyclicality. An essay and more could be written on each of these topics, and there already has been a smattering of good critical work on Eddison, so I’ll leave further work to the Eddison specialists to pursue deeper and better (though I’ll—fortunately or unfortunately, I’m not sure yet—be diving back into Eddison shortly in this series), but I can’t pass up the opportunity to hazard a few interventions in the criticism on The Worm Ouroboros.
On Lessingham and the Induction
Anyone who has read The Worm Ouroboros is likely to comment on the oddness of its beginning, starting in then contemporary England, with a narrative point of view centered around Lessingham, and transporting the reader with Lessingham from the Lakes District, via a dreamlike chariot ride through space, to Mercury, only to abandon both the figure of Lessingham and the idea that the world of Demons and Witches is a separate planet to earth. In other words, Eddison starts the novel as what Farah Mendlesohn in Rhetorics of Fantasy (good overview here) describes as a “portal-quest” fantasy (though Lessingham lacks a clear quest, a purpose for being there—so it seems) and transitions it quickly into an “immersive” fantasy, or what is more generally called a secondary- or invented-world fantasy. Of course, none of this terminology existed in the early 1920s and there was only barely a sense of invented-world fantasies as a generic form in circulation (see Williamson).
Plenty of fantasies transition readers from “our” world to that of the fantasy, and this has been done in a variety of different ways over the decades, whether through dreams (MacDonald’s Phantastes), out-of-body experiences (Twain’s Connecticut Yankee), tornadoes (Baum’s Oz), or physical portals to other dimensions and lands (Lewis’s Narnia, Carroll’s Wonderland). This sort of (meta)physical transition into the fantasy world and out of our own has become strongly associated with children’s fantasy, though, and leads to the reading—by younger and older alike—that the fantasy world, as such, is not exactly “real” but either a figment of the imagination, accessible only to those who are young, or some other explanation that downplays the ontological equivalency of the fantasy world with the world of (supposedly) objective reality. I know I have often thought of such fantasies as not as interesting as secondary-world fantasies, on account of a perhaps skewed idea that if the text itself does not commit to making the fantasy world “real,” why should I take it seriously? This is a highly subjective and personal response, and not at all a critical one, but it seems worth being upfront about it: there are things in literature that, even if we defend or understand them critically, bother us personally, and it’s our duty as critics to investigate those personal, knee-jerk reactions to texts.
Indeed, perhaps because of the strong association of such frames with children’s fantasy, a number of critics have been quite put off by the opening of The Worm Ouroboros. Lin Carter, the consulting editor behind BAF, decried the awkward, unnecessary artificiality of the novel’s opening in his study of the history of fantasy, Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy, published in the BAF series in 1973. In the introduction published first in the 1952 American hardcover edition and later in the Ballantine editions, NYT critic Orville Prescott called the literary device of Lessingham one of the novels “few irksome failings,” marring a work otherwise “so noble in concept and so mighty in scope” (xiv). Prescott continues:
Since this is a romantic epic about an imaginary world Eddison felt it necessary to set his stage and explain things before launching into his story proper. This he did awkwardly, by sending an English gentleman in a magic dream to the planet Mercury to observe events there. It is a distracting and clumsy notion; but since Eddison forgot all about his earthborn observer after the first 20 pages no prospective reader should allow himself to be troubled by his fleeting presence. (xiv)
Prescott’s framing of Lessingham as being forgotten by the author, as something to simply ignore, struck me hard on first reading the introduction and before starting the novel. It is one of the oddest things to say to a new reader: “just ignore the beginning of the book!” Moreover, it’s one of the clumsiest failures of critical insight I’ve read in some time (and this introduction was reprinted with the novel well into the 1980s!). After all, Eddison was a distinguished civil servant, having been inducted into multiple British honorary orders for his work on trade policy of all things, and besides that was educated enough beyond the immediate scope of his work to also publish translations of Old Norse sagas and write multiple, multi-hundred-page novels. What is the likelihood that someone like Eddison, whose career and extracurricular successes required attention to detail, simply “forgot” about how he started a novel, the same way an unobservant reader might? Highly unlikely, which leads us to pursue the incredibly obvious question of why Eddison would start the novel with Lessingham, why he would feel the need to “induct” us into the world of The Worm Ouroboros through such a device. The heavens forbid Prescott should take a second to ask himself the same.
As noted, transitions from our world into that of the fantasy aren’t all that new or surprising, even if they are less common in the genre today precisely because of their association with children’s fantasy. No doubt both Prescott and Carter—the latter of whom was especially concerned at the prospect that fantasy fiction could be dismissed as children’s literature—had these concerns in mind. But as Helmut W. Pesch argues in a 1985 essay, frame narratives that bridge the world of the reader and the world of the novel were common in adult adventure fiction of the Victorian period, which saw the world beyond Britain, America, and Western Europe as an exotic realm. Indeed, frame narratives date back even further and were especially common in early Gothic fiction, where the (often medievalized) world of such fictions was bridged to the reader via the idea that the novel was, say, a long-lost manuscript just now being published for the first time (e.g. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)). And different sorts of frames were used in genres closer to home for Eddison, both in time and genre. For example, the planetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Barsoom books—the first, A Princess of Mars, published in 1912—transport a human to Mars via astral projection. Later books, like David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920, reprinted as a BAF preface novel in Nov. 1968) and C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (1938, 1943, 1945) use different concepts of a pseudo-physical voyage to another planet as the frame for their stories, though Lindsay’s has been more closely aligned with fantasy thanks to its association with BAF.
Needless to say, it’s not particularly surprising or weird or clumsy or whatever for Eddison to have started The Worm Ouroboros in this way, and any historian of genre fiction would or should know that (looking at you, Carter!). And Eddison did feel some apparent pressure to put the action of the story somewhere and so chose Mercury on a lark, “pure convention,” “little more than machinery for letting the reader down gently into another world,” as Douglas A. Anderson recently discovered through some archival correspondence between Eddison and a nitpicky sf fan in the early 1930s. But what is more interesting, I think, than the question of whether or not Eddison had to use any “machinery for letting the reader down gently into another world,” is that said machinery disappears (sort of). And why.
We receive, at first, an intense introduction to Demonland via the martlet that accompanies Lessingham to Mercury. Some of the narration is in the omnipotent, epical voice of the narrator, which uses the archaized language Eddison is so famous for (more in the next section), but that language also only emerges after the reader has transitioned from earth to Mercury and it is largely anticipated by the narrative voice of the martlet, who describes the architecture of Galing in great detail and introduces the four principal lords of Demonland along with their great deeds. We also see some hint at the archaized language of the novel proper (that is, the narrative on Mercury) in the passages quoted or paraphrased from Njáls Saga, which Lessingham reads aloud to Mary. The opening pages of chapter one, when we have arrived in Demonland, are a nonstop literary feast of description, emphasizing just how over the top and extravagantly wondrous this fantasy world is. Lessingham and the martlet—who go unseen, like spirits, through this world, not unlike Dickens’s Scrooge and the Christmas ghosts in their visions—drift in and out of narrative focus. After four straight pages of the martlet’s descriptions of the Demon lords, Lessingham disappears entirely between pages 14 and 24, when an entirely new chapter starts and the action of the narrative has moved from the courtly plans being laid by the Demons for their “wrastling” match with Gorice XI, to the scene of that match some weeks later and hundreds of miles away.
If Eddison had actually “forgot all about” Lessingham, the place to do that was page 14. But he doesn’t drop him when the action of the narrative proper starts, just as the ambassador from Witchland arrives to throw down Gorie XI’s gauntlet, but brings Lessingham back. And more than that: Eddison brings him to the site of the first climactic showdown between the Demons and Witches, the outcome of which sets up all the rest of the novel. And more than that: Eddison lays bare the conventionality of it all, for when the chapter starts, Lessingham is startled. The chapter opens:
“How could I have fallen asleep?” cried Lessingham. “Where is the castle of the Demons, and how did I leave the great presence chamber where they saw the Ambassador?” For he stood on rolling uplands that leaned to the sea, treeless on every side as far as the eyes might reach […].
The little black martlet answered him, “My hippogriff travelleth as well in time as in space. Days and weeks have been left behind by us, in what seemeth to thee but the twinkling of an eye, and thou standest in the Foliot Isles, a land happy under the mild regiment of a peaceful prince, on the day appointed by King Gorice to wrastle with Lord Goldry Bulszco. […]” (24)
The chapter break is quite literally experienced by Lessingham and the temporal and spatial distortion so easily taken for granted in literary narratives is explained—to Lessingham, to the reader—as part of the magical properties of the hippogriff. This meta-literary play anticipates much of the narrative’s own sense of its constructedness, of its purposeful presentation as an archaized romance of impossible heroes, of that sort of narrative’s outlandishness to the imagined reader in 1922 more accustomed to the sort of life Lessingham lived. But real it is, for Eddison does not let us as readers simply cross the barrier from chapter to chapter and pursue our unabated immersion further into the narrative, even though time and space have passed with the turn of a page. Instead, he reminds us—clumsily, Prescott might say; awkwardly, I could admit; but brilliantly, I would clarify—that we are reading even if we might have forgotten ourselves some 10 pages back when the action picked up, when Lessingham disappeared (and he seems to know he disappeared, for his reference is to the last place we saw him, in the audience chamber, but not the last place in Galing we read about before the chapter’s close), when the fantasy of the frame seemed to finally evaporate and the fantasy of the novel became “real.”
When Lessingham does leave the narrative’s explicit attention, he leaves rather pointedly. Just a few paragraphs below the quote above, the martlet worries over the arrival of one of the Demons’ great enemies:
“Behold, wonder, and lament,” said the martlet, “that the innocent eye of day should be enforced still to look upon the children of night everlasting. Corund of Witchland and his cursed sons.”
Lessingham thought, “A most fiery politician is my little martlet: damned fiends and angels and nothing betwixt for her. But I’ll dance to none of their tunes, but wait for these things’ unfolding.” (25–26).
And from here we part with Lessingham and the martlet. But it is a pointed, purposeful departure that turns us as readers not only back to the narrative, back to the impending action, but it asks us to take a critical eye to that narrative as it unfolds and to pay particular attention to how the narrative constructs its heroes, its villains, and whosoever might lie betwixt. And rightly so, for The Worm Ouroboros nowhere else suggests the idea that Corund is a villain, that his sons are “children of night everlasting”; this notion of the martlet’s is indeed fiery politics meant to woo Lessingham (and the reader) into favoring the Demons. Corund is considered by the narrative, in fact, the greatest hero of Witchland, an equal rival to the Demon lords, but not a villain like Gorice or Corinius or Corsus, for he is honorable and virtuous, and certainly not a figure betwixt villain and hero, like Gro. Lessingham, speaking to himself, and therefore only to us the readers, vows to be impartial and judge the heroes of the novel by their deeds—not to see “damned fiends and angels and nothing betwixt,” but the men (and few women) as they are (which, incidentally, is pretty much just heroes and villains and Gro). It is both a canny call to the reader to, perhaps, hold the romantic narrative of heroes at an observant distance, but more so, I think, to question the claim of an enemy’s fiendishness (enemies can be great heroes, too, and what is a villain but an enemy hero?).
Lessingham does, more or less, disappear from the narrative after this final aside at the beginning of chapter two—and how theatrical it is! He is, however, not entirely forgotten, for he is mentioned in passing much later in the narrator’s omnipotent voice (128). The moment is reflective, a pause just before Juss and Brandoch Daha lead their first expedition from Demonland to Impland and beyond in search of Goldry. It is a moment when Juss is contemplating the beautiful land he is leaving behind, and Eddison reminds us that Lessingham had once stood in this particular grassy lane lined with yews. It is contemplative and fleeting, as such moments are in The Worm Ouroboros, but it brings us back to the frame of the story, to our meta-awareness of the fantasy’s fantasy, of Demonland’s tenuous connection to the real—how could such beauty, such heroism be real, after all? And then the scene breaks, the reminder is gone, and for the next 400 pages the novel is pure heroic romance before it once again becomes self-aware and narratively invokes the ouroboric cyclicality for which it is so well-known.
Far from being forgotten, far from being clumsy, Lessingham is a rather smart figuration of the relationship between reader, author, and the novel itself. His use in the narrative acknowledges the invisible, unknown presence of the reader who is nonetheless enamored with the storyworld in the form of Lessingham, and the author in the form of the martlet who acts as the guide. This relationship between Lessingham and the martlet, between reader and author, this formal induction into the world of The Worm Ouroboros, also lays bare the way an author can play with space and time in service of the narrative flow. That Lessingham and the martlet simply… disappear into/from the narrative is a metaphor for the ways that, once fully inducted into the story(world), a reader might forget herself as reader and begin to look past the author’s particularities of style and peculiarities of craft, thereby lessening the sense of a mediation between reader, author, and novel, leaving instead just the story, the world, and the experience of them.
Eddison’s use of Lessingham in The Worm Ouroboros is brief but powerful, and I think it works really well as a theory of fantasy reading, offering a sort of Biercean conception of the “suitable surroundings” for the reading of fantasy, which obviously differ from Bierce’s own conception of reading scary stories, and is here rooted in a wholly different conception of our relationship to the magical, to the faerie, to fantasy and romance and the great sagas and heroes of old. Truly, the narrative and Eddison’s style are so engrossing it is easy to completely forget about and lose track of the martlet and Lessingham, which is perhaps why so many critics have brushed them off or simply forgotten that Lessingham is brought up again, much later. It is as if they/we were never there, unless you’re looking for them.[2]
On Style and Narrative Form
Eddison’s prose style is perhaps the most remarked upon aspect of his literary output, and it seems to be universally appreciated if not admired. In his introduction, Prescott praises “the splendor of the prose, the roll and swagger and reverberating rhythms and the sheer gorgeousness of much of its deliberate artifice” (xiv). Jamie Williamson, in The Evolution of Modern Fantasy, describes Eddison’s prose glowingly as “artificial and mannered, and its elaborate archaized Elizabethan/Jacobean constructions result in a style more difficult than those of his predecessors. It is, however, a vigorous language, rarely marked by excessive verbiage, and it has a controlled variability, ranging from the subdued and saga-like to the floridly dramatic” (148). Tolkien, in a letter to Caroline Everett in 1957, stated that he “read [Eddison’s] works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit” and judged him in another letter, of 1954, as one of the more gifted narrators of imaginary worlds (I quote from Humphey Carpenter’s 1981 edited collection of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien; my digital edition has no pages). C.S. Lewis in “On Stories,” in the 1947 volume Essays Presented to Charles Williams, suggested that the “secret” to Eddison’s perfect integration of theme and narrative, resulting in “that strange blend of renaissance luxury and northern hardness” was all down to “the style, and especially the style of the dialogue” (104).
Of particular note are Ursula K. Le Guin’s comments on Eddison in her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” initially given as a speech in 1972, reprinted as a single volume in 1973, and then again in her important essay collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1979; I quote from this volume). The essay was written at a critical moment in the history of genre fantasy’s emergence, right at the beginning of the decade that proved so pivotal to creating the modern publishing genre, and in it Le Guin reacts in real time to the development of genre fantasy largely by reference to BAF and associated preface novels (she explicitly praises Lin Carter). Le Guin’s essay is about the prose, and especially the dialogue, of fantasy fiction, and how prose style is critical to the creation of “Elfland,” that is, of a fantasy world separate from that of the reader, as a kind of paraliterary effect of the text on readers. She slyly and rather harshly uses Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni novels (three of which appeared in BAF: Deryni Rising (1970), Deryni Checkmate (1972), High Deryni (1973)) as an example of how Elfland is becoming bastardized, in her view, by a lack of fantastical vision in authors’ prose styling, compared to, say, the stylish and considered prose of Eddison, Kenneth Morris, and Tolkien that “all have the genuine Elfland accent” (87).
For Le Guin, the genre, such as it existed in 1972, is moving away from the unique, idiosyncratic experience of fantasy found in the writing of these more sophisticated writers. Le Guin analogizes Elfland to a now-overrun vacation destination that seeks to create the same cookie-cutter tourist experience for every traveller, thus making Elfland no different from what the reader might experience in the quotidian suburban, and importantly mundane, landscape of Poughkeepsie, the quintessential and cliche Hudson Valley getaway for New Yorkers. In this frame, she argues that “certain writers of fantasy are building six-lane highways and trailer parks with drive-in movies, so that the tourists can feel at home just as if they were back in Poughkeepsie” (84). The suggestion here—complicatedly and perhaps problematically framed, given the class dimensions invoked—is that much newer fantasy writing is unsophisticated, formulaic, and unimaginative; put another way, it lacks the magic that should be endemic to fantasy. Le Guin’s essay deserves greater attention today as a theoretical claim about fantasy and its relationship to prose, and also as a historical artifact of a particularly fraught moment in the genre’s emergence and newfound salience for readers.
But what is relevant here is her admiration of Eddison:
The archaic manner [of writing] is indeed a perfect distancer [between reader and the world of the novel, assuring the reader she is not in Poughkeepsie but Elfland], but you have to do it perfectly. It’s a high wire: one slip spoils all. The man who did it perfectly was, of course, Eddison. He really did write Elizabethan prose in the nineteen-thirties. His style is totally artificial, but it is never faked. If you love language for its own sake he is irresistible. Many, with reason, find him somewhat crabbed and most damnably long [this is a joking reference to a quote in the novel, where Juss refers to the quality of Gro’s prose in a travelogue he wrote about Impland (137)]; but he is the real thing. (90)
Le Guin then quotes a passage at length from The Worm Ouroboros (56–57, on the carrying of Gorice XI’s dead body to the Witches’ ship, to be borne back to Witchland), and concludes:
That prose, in spite of or because of its archaisms, is good prose: exact, clear, powerful. Visually it is precise and vivid; musically—that is, in the sound of the words, the movement of the syntax, and the rhythm of the sentences—it is subtle and very strong. Nothing in it is faked or blurred; it is all seen, heard, felt. That style was his true style, his own voice; that was how Eddison, as an artist, spoke. (90)
To be sure, Le Guin is projecting quite a lot onto Eddison. She vacillates, as others do, between claiming that the prose is artificial and that it is real, and she very much plays up the affective experience of Eddison’s prose, though I wouldn’t say she is wrong exactly about the latter. Her underlying claim follows others, especially Lewis above, in suggesting that prose style plays an important role in what we might call the reality effect of Eddison’s fantasy. Though it needs to be emphasized that Le Guin is also making a larger determinative claim about how fantasy should be written in order for it to be good, serious fantasy—and here she probably deserves some pushback and rethinking, though it is an interesting claim all the same, both for its theoretical implications for fantasy and its historical position in relation to the genre’s development. But Le Guin is not wrong in arguing that the semblance or illusion of realness, of being Elizabethan or Jacobean or Elizabethan/Jacobean (depending on who’s describing the prose), of an archaic and decidedly not-modern or at least not-contemporary prose style is absolutely key to The Worm Ouroboros and Eddison’s fantasies.
Eddison’s archaized prose (and its effects) praised by Le Guin was also an important element in many other authors’ fantasy, especially among what Williamson calls the “literary” genealogy of (mostly British) writers who were later canonized as forming (half of) the backbone of the genre’s early-twentieth-century history: William Morris, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabbell, Tolkien, and others not included in BAF, like Kenneth Morris and James Stephens. Williamson’s point is important because it underscores a shared, but not necessarily purposefully co-developed, idea about the relationship between prose style, fantasy narratives, and the actual inspirations of those narratives (e.g. Arthurian romance, Norse saga, Anglo-Saxon epic, etc.):
Another common feature of the major twentieth-century literary work resides in the carefully nuanced, artificial, usually archaized prose styles. In part, this echoes the lofty language of the “epics” and “poetical romances.” However, the tendency to mannered archaism in diction and syntax also informed many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translations of actual traditional material, with the goal, essentially, of creating an effect akin to that of reading Malory or the metrical romances. (133)
Williamson situates this trend toward archaized language in a longer tradition of translations of medieval and early modern texts and the earlier prose and poetic fantasy traditions of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He also points to the fact that each of these authors used archaized prose in vastly different ways and manners, noting “the enormous disparities between the King James rhythms of Dunsany, the Welsh syntax of Kenneth Morris, the high-flown Elizabethanism of Eddison, and the sober Anglo-Teutonic constructions of William Morris” (133). In each case, authors were engaged with earlier traditions in ways that “directly engage[d] the narrative conventions and structures of the material that served as inspiration,” often giving the suggestion that their novels are “something that has been passed down through [that] tradition in variant and imperfect forms” (133).
As the above suggests, much has already been made of Eddison’s prose style, and still more could be said, especially with regard to the way Eddison layers even deeper levels of archaized prose beyond his stylized language used for narrative and dialogue by included lengthy extracts from in-world texts, particularly letters between major characters, but also manuscripts written by characters (part of the exploratory knowledge-making practices of Eddison’s early modern world). Extended examples of such in-world, doubly archaized texts are scattered throughout The Worm Ouroboros (52, 138–140, 266–267, and elsewhere). A sample, from Gro’s travelogue of Impland:
From Morna Moruna I behelde sowthawaye two grete mowntaynes standing over Bavvinane as two Queenes in bewty seted in the skye by estimacion xx legues fro hence above meny more ise robed mowntaines supereminente. The wyche as I lernyd was Coschtre Belourne the one and the othere Koshtre Pivrarca. And I veuyed them continuallie unto the going downe of the sun, and that was the fayrest sighte and the most bewtifullest and gallant marvaille that mine eyen hath sene. (139)
[From Morna Moruna I beheld southaways two great mountains standing over Bhavinan as two queens in beauty seated in the sky, by estimation 20 leagues from hence, above many more ice-robed mountains super-eminent. The which, as I learned, was Koshtra Belorn, the one, and the other Koshtra Pivrarcha. And I viewed them continually unto the going down of the sun, and that was the fairest sight and the most beautifulest and galant marvel that mine eyes hath seen.]
The language is doubly archaized because it uses the same or similar syntactic structures and word choices that lead readers to describe Eddison’s prose as Elizabethan and/or Jacobean, but it is also written in a manner we might expect from the average early modern writer who, lacking standardized spelling rules that proliferated in our sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and not working for a printing press (the people who would have enacted those standardized spellings in print), sort of makes it up as they go along. What’s more, this doubly archaized language preserves some grammatical features that have largely passed out of use in English and that aren’t otherwise present in Eddison’s regular prose, e.g. “eyen” (the archaic plural of “eye”) or the distinction between adjectives that use adverbial modifiers to express superlativity (“most beautifullest” instead of “most beautiful”) and those that use postfixes (-est: coolest, smartest, fastest). The in-world, doubly archaized texts in The Worm Ouroboros aren’t much remarked on in the critical literature (such as it exists), but they are key to the depth and texture of Eddison’s worldbuilding at the level of prose, rendering the prose a mediator of the relationship between fantasy storyworld, the book itself, and the reader. As noted above, we might call this effect of mediation cultivated by the prose a “reality effect.”
All of this is preface to a small, but I hope valuable, point I want to make about The Worm Ouroboros. I cite Williamson’s argument above about the relationship between prose style and narrative form in the early-twentieth-century crop of “pregenre” fantasy writers, and particularly in the work of Eddison, because while scholars and critics often talk of these things in broad strokes—and we generally have no reason to doubt them!—such claims are often lacking in specifics. For example, the claim that Eddison’s prose style is “really” Elizabethan or Jacobean or whatever; I haven’t seen anyone directly demonstrate this, beyond the loose fit between Eddison’s prose and his liberal quotations from early modern English drama and poetry, but I also don’t have any reason to question such claims. That said, there is a particular scene in The Worm Ouroboros that I think nicely demonstrates the specificity of the claim about the synchronicity between narrative form, literary traditions, and prose style, and which is interesting in other ways, too.
This is the climactic Battle of Krothering Side in chapter twenty-six. The battle stages the final clash between the Witches who occupy Demonland under Corinius and the Demons now united under Juss, Brandoch Daha, and Spitfire after the former two have returned from their first, failed expedition to save Goldry Bluszco. There are multiple battles in The Worm Ouroboros, all of them frankly rather uninteresting to me; Eddison really does not excel at action scenes, with perhaps the exception of this battle, but for reasons other than its action (see Adam Roberts’s thoughts on Eddison). But this is one of those battles that is made for medieval romances and war history buffs who do things like memorize strategic choices made at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) and can tell you why that battle was so interesting, game changing, whatever. At Krothering Side, the tide turns for the Witches, their yoke on Demonland is hurled off, and the war turns against them until they are forced to their own doom when Gorice XII destroys Carcë and his own regal line. It’s the kind of battle poets write about.
Most interestingly and most uncharacteristically for Eddison, the Battle of Krothering Side is not experienced by the reader in real time, as most of the battles of the novel are, nor is it related by or to any of the novel’s major heroes, as a few of the battles are. Instead, it is told by a young man named Arnod, the son of a farmer and a conscripted fighter in the armies of Demonland against its occupiers. And it is told to his nameless farmer father and sister. While the chapter starts in the usual company of lords, this time with Corinius as he prepares to take on the Demons at Krothering Side, it cuts with a paragraph break to a scene well after the battle, to a farmer whose daughter, “a damosel, dainty as a meadow-pipit, lithe as an antelope,” sits singing about how the occupying Witch lord “grinds us all” like her hand-mill grinds their grain for flour (383). The interactions between peasant farmer and daughter continue for roughly two pages—a completely unprecedented scene in a novel like The Worm Ouroboros, which generally shows no interest in anyone but its heroes, which throws thousands to their deaths in battle after battle and never pauses to consider any but the nobles and elites of this world. The scene struck me at first, and I was enthralled, but it is purposefully and artfully chosen as an intra-narrative frame. For shortly Arnod arrives home from the battle and recounts it in glorious detail to his family, and at great length for thirteen pages (385–398). Arnod’s description includes all the elements we might expect: a listing of the heroes (the lords of various Demon manors of estates), a war council between the Demon lords that Arnod was lucky enough to be present at, explanation of tactical decisions and their outcomes, chance meetings on the battlefield with various heroes, witnessing of great deeds by martial champions, and lots of patriotic rhetoric about the valor and honor of Demons in comparison to Witches.
Eddison’s choice to frame the titanic, tide-turning Battle of Krothering Side in this manner— spoken breathlessly by a peasant conscripted to the battle, but happily so (anything for the service of truly noble lords!), and in awe of the personages he meets there, both hero and villain; and told to a rapt audience of peasant relatives kept out of the battle either by age or sex(ism), who each butt in to cry admiration for this maneuver or that hero; all of whom conspire in this telling to turn the climactic battle into legend, into the actual stuff of epics and romances, and who in doing so attach the narrative to their own patriotic feelings toward Demonland and thereby enhance their own identity as Demons in the telling (and future retelling) of the battle—is an excellent marrying of style with narrative form in service of the larger project of elaborating a fantasy world. In so doing, Eddison ties The Worm Ouroboros to both an emerging fantasy tradition (whose authors, Williamson makes clear, do many of the things Eddison is doing) and to earlier literary traditions of romance and saga well-known to Eddison, which were in fact his inspirations. Here, the process of epic-making is quite literally laid bare, as a participant in the battle frames it in much the same language that epic and heroic fantasy frames the great battles it so exalts, and which romances, sagas, and epics have devoted so much attention to for thousands of years. Eddison, as noted above, was explicitly interested in such literary traditions, particularly the Norse sagas, and infused his novel not just with their larger-than-life heroes but with imitation of their narrative form—another “reality effect” of Eddison’s fantasy at work.
In reading this brilliantly framed narrative of the Battle of Krothering Side, I can’t help but think of the anonymous, fragmentary poem The Battle of Maldon, which commemorates and describes how Vikings defeated an Anglo-Saxon army in 991 (the inspiration for Tolkien’s The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son). Eddison’s Arnod tells of a wholly different battle, with a much better outcome for its teller’s side. His sister, already rebelliously pitted against the Witches in her metaphorizing of the grain-mill as the occupier’s yoke, sees her identity as a Demon enhanced and reaffirmed in the telling. Arnod emerges as poet, legend-teller, saga-giver in the very manner we imagine oral traditions first emerged before they were written down in epics of past (mythic) heroes. With this framing, Eddison sits readers but briefly among the peasants of Demonland, at the hearth of one who has been in the midst of history, to hear the deeds of great heroes we can only ever hope to catch a glimpse of, and we read on in awe for thirteen pages as the battle unfolds, as Arnod’s narration grips us into it, and as our fellow listeners—father and sister—suggest how we should react. It’s an incredible rhetorical move by Eddison that imitates the very traditions and narrative forms, not to mention the situations and social relationships of their oral reproduction, that Eddison so deeply admires.
The Battle of Krothering Side is a moment in The Worm Ouroboros that deserves attention from any reader or critic turning an eye to Eddison’s use of archaic prose style and considering its integration with narrative form, since the scene demonstrates Eddison’s careful engagement with the fantasy, and broader literary, tradition he belongs to. The scene also gets at the heart of Eddison’s ideology—and idealizing—of the hero, which deserves greater critical attention, too.
On Heroes and the Ouroboros
To speak of heroes in The Worm Ouroboros is to speak of the ouroboros itself, for the ouroboros in Eddison’s novel is at once a powerful thematic symbol, a narrative form, and a magic artifact of the storyworld that, unsurprisingly, circles back into symbolic and narrative dimensions of the novel, and is deeply connecting to the novel’s concern with heroes and heroism. Like Lessingham and like Eddison’s archaic prose style, the ouroboros is among the most commented on aspects of the novel, in no small part due to the novel’s very name which practically begs readers and critics to consider what, exactly, the titular worm has to do with the goings on of the Demons and Witches. And which is directly provoked by the seeming suggestion—repeated by almost everyone who reads the novel—that it “ends where it begins.” I’ve suggested above that this latter contention is almost certainly wrong, at least on the surface; Eddison’s ending is much more ambiguous than the simple “ends where it begins” conclusion leads.
As enticing as such a suggestion is, The Worm Ouroboros is not as clearly circular as, say, the Macedonian film Before the Rain (1994). Slavoj Žižek’s comments on the film’s “spectacle of a timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passions [located in the Balkans], in contrast to decadent and anaemic Western life,” is relevant here, if only because the violence (read: heroism) of The Worm Ouroboros is explicitly not incomprehensible but in fact desirable, especially when enacted by heroes against villains. Moreover, Eddison’s exuberantly decadent novels of “renaissance luxury and northern hardness,” with their approach to viewing Western antiquity as a syncretic inheritance of Italic, Celtic, Germanic, and Greek literary and mythological traditions, could be read perhaps as a reaction against what he might have viewed as the anaemic quality of modernism. I’ll explore the question of the novel ending where it begins later; for now, I ask: what, in the novel, is the ouroboros?
As a literal artifact in the novel’s storyworld, the ouroboros is referenced seven times (71, 103, 235, 266, 267, 317, 510). All of the references are to the ouroboros as the secret symbol of the Kings of Witchland. Though their familial standard is that of a menacing crab, the true authority of the Kings Gorice is represented by a “great signet ring fashioned in gold in the semblance of the worm Ouroboros that eateth his own tail: the bezel of the ring the head of the worm, made of a peach-coloured ruby the bigness of a sparrow’s egg” (103). It is also a key symbol in the Kings’ magical conjurings, since it is used as the form of the magic circle drawn by Gorice XII when he performs his great conjuring that snatches away Goldry Bluszco in the first quarter of the novel (71). The ouroboros’s main symbolic power in the novel is therefore tied to the Kings Gorice and their supernaturally eternal regnal line, the relationship between which is revealed to Juss by Queen Sophonisba:
“Behold this mystery. There is but One Gorice. And by the favour of heaven (that moveth sometimes in a manner our weak judgement seeketh in vain to justify) this cruel and evil One, every time whether by the sword or in the fulness of his years he cometh to die, departeth the living soul and spirit of him into a new and soundy body, and liveth yet another lifetime to vex and to oppress the world, until that body die, and the next in his turn, and so continually; having thus in a manner life eternal.”
Juss said, “Thy discourse, O Queen Sophonisba, is in a strain above mortality. This is a great wonder thou tellest me; whereof some little part I guessed aforetime, but the main I knew not. Rightfully, having such a timeless life, this King weareth on his thumb that worm Ouroboros which doctors from of old made for an ensample of eternity, where the end is ever at the beginning and the beginning at the end for ever more.” (235)
In “Some Ouroborean Thoughts,” an essay preempting his later commentary on The Worm Ouroboros, Adam Roberts details some of the magical history behind the symbol of the ouroboros, which dates as far back as the fourteenth century BCE, and has long been invoked in spells and rituals. Crucial to Roberts’s historical and philological investigation of the ouroboros is the symbol’s shift from the ancient Mediterranean idea of a snake that devours itself, usually in the form of a spell or charm, whereby the snake disappears and takes with it whatever is written inside the coils of the snake, to the more recent use of the ouroboros as a symbol of circularity, of eternity—a radical change in meaning!
Eddison clearly invokes the eternal circularity of the more modern interpretation of the ouroboros, since for hundreds of years the Kings Gorice have maintained an unbroken, eternal life as the same “living soul and spirit” inhabiting different bodies (and behaving differently from body to body, too), maintaining an eerie continuity of oppressive power over Witchland and seeking constantly to enact their/his undying rule over all the lands of Mercury. But, steeped as Eddison was in the magical knowledge of the early modern period (demonstrated in great detail during Gorice XII’s first conjuring, 60–76), and familiar as he was with ancient Greek culture and literature (as evidenced very clearly in the Zimiamvian trilogy, which novels quote liberally from ancient Greek texts (untranslated and untransliterated!)), it is possible Eddison was aware of the more ancient and arcane ritual meaning of the ouroboros. For bound up with the eternal line of the Kings Gorice is the curse, noted above, that the line will perish and its ouroboric nature be ended should the Kings attempt and fail to perform great magical conjurings twice in the tower at Carcë. When Gorice XII tries a conjuring to defeat the invading Demon army in chapter thirty-two, and fails, it follows as the second conjuring failure in his line’s history after Gorice VII’s. And so the ouroboros becomes, rather than a guarantor of eternal renewal, a self-devouring charm, and blots out the Gorice line encircled by its draconic form (literalized by the Kings’ ring).
The ouroboros devours itself elsewhere, too, in the novel. I could speak of the many omens in the novel, which enact a sort of narrative doubling—of premonition becoming event, the possible devouring the real—, most prominently exemplified in chapter seventeen, “The King Flies His Haggard,” when the lords of Witchland, joined by King Gorice, go out falconing in the Witchland countryside. On discovering a boar, the King flies a massive black eagle (a haggard: in falconry terms: a hunting bird that was caught while an adult and is thus considered partly untamed) and instead of taking down the boar it rips out the throat of the King’s hunting hound. In his anger, the King smites the haggard, which flies away back into the wild (281). In that same chapter, the King chooses Corsus to lead the invasion of Demonland. In perfect omen form, Corsus, aged like the haggard, betrays the King’s trust and kills one of his generals to further his own power; Corsus is punished and his captaincy in Demonland replaced by Corinius. Such omens abound in The Worm Ouroboros, usually witnessed and respected by Gro, who is himself devoured by his own fate to always choose the losing side.
But the most prominent example of the narrativization of the symbol of the ouroboros devouring itself is in the case of the three mercenaries sent unto Impland a decade earlier by the Goblin King Gaslark. These mercenaries—great heroes to the Demons, given the Latinate names Zeldornius, Helteranius, and Jalcanaius Fostus—are like conquistadors sent to chart a foreign land, subdue its populations, and bring back news of it to the civilized world (entirely appropriate for an early-modern-inspired fantasy world!). They have not been heard from since their departure from Goblinland but are encountered by Juss and Brandoch Daha shortly after their first expedition into Impland. There, the Demons discover that these great figures, almost mythic to them, have been ensorcelled, trapped in an endless cycle seeking to kill one another. This discovery occurs when the Demons have stopped at a ruin in the desert of the Salapanta Hills, and, third day after third day, each of the missing captains arrives with his army, describes his betrayal by the one who came three days prior, and decamps the next day in pursuit.
Thus have Zeldornius, Helteranius, and Jalcanaius spent nine years (the ensorcellment started one year into their expedition) pursuing one after the other in hope of avenging a betrayal that never occurred and which, through the corrupting supernaturality of Impland, has sustained them in almost wraithlike condition, day after day, season upon season, year beyond year in an unholy cycle of three: three captains, three days between their armies, nine days between each visit to the Salapanta Hill ruins, for nine years. The Demons explain what they have learned to Zeldornius, who decides to break the curse on him, but only partially, for he is still convinced of Helteranius and Jalcanaius’s betrayals, and so he awaits them to do final battle. And so Zeldornius defeats his brethren, but it is not for him a victory, but instead a sour, sorry, gross accomplishment. He declares to the Demons: “I have waded in red blood to the knee; and in this hour, in my old years, the world is become for me a vision only and a mock-show” (161). He bequeaths his sword to Brandoch Daha and, as the Demons leave, “a noise as of thunder made the firm land tremble and drowned the howling of the wind. And they beheld how earth gaped for Zeldornius” and devoured him (162).
Like the ouroboros of the Kings Gorice, endless until it devours itself, the ouroboros of the mercenary captains in Impland allows them to pursue one another, perhaps eternally, until their fateful meeting when they put an end to their ensorcellment, and the lone survivor is himself swallowed up. Both instantions of the ouroboros as narrative form make clear the connection in Eddison’s novel between the power of the ouroboroi and magic, and specifically connect this with villainous magic, with Gorice and with ensorcelling by a “barbaric,” untamed land. (Indeed, the Imps who cannot rule their own land and who are easily swayed by the powerful, “civilized” lords of Demonland and Witchland, seem partly a stand in for the Shakespearean character-type of Caliban; not for nothing, it has been widely argued that Caliban was read in the early modern period as a figure of the non-British/non-European Other then being encountered in the so-called New World.) But the ouroboros in Impland has other symbolic effects, for it corrupts the heroism of three captains and, by its end, leaves the surviving Zeldornius so far from his values, having destroyed his (figurative) brothers and become more villain than hero, that he cannot call his defeat of Helteranius and Jalcanaius a victory: he gives up his sword and is swallowed by the earth in a moment that literalizes the ouroboric metaphor of self-devouring.
This brings us to the end of the novel, or to what some readers and critics say is also the beginning. Facing a world without villains against which to define their heroism, the lords of Demonland are truly bereft and see a future of nothingness, of an obscure existence as shepherds and hunters—the existence of characters like Arnod, the farmer’s son and narrator of the Battle of Krothering Side above, who exist to tell of the great deeds of heroes, not to perform them. Their only possible recourse to further heroic acts would be, like the mercenary captains, to turn on each other, brother against brother, but so doing would quickly become villains. So great (and utterly melodramatic) is their despair, which Juss even likens to Zeldornius’s own despair (though he seems to misunderstand the very different situation Zeldornius was in!), and so great their earlier heroics, that the gods grant them their wish to have their enemies restored.
We are possibly intended to read the arrival of the ambassador from Witchland at the novel’s end—a near mirror image of the earlier ambassador’s arrival (cf. 15 and 512, both described above)—as signaling that the Kings Gorice have returned, which could suggest that the eternal ouroboros of that lineage is also restored. To that end, in the appendix of dates and events, Eddison does describe the event—albeit vaguely—in nearly Christian terminology as “the marvel of marvel’s that restored the world” (518; on Juss’s thirty-third birthday no less, both a doubling of threes and the age at which Jesus was supposed to have been crucified, though there seems to be little of Christianity in this novel!). But, as David A. Oakes points out (see [2] for citation details), the situation in Demonland is not the same as before. The Demons all have complete foreknowledge of the preceding events of the novel, and what’s more, Queen Sophonisba, who was unknown at the beginning, is physically present here. Nothing that has happened has actually changed.
One possible reading of this ending is that, having been utterly trounced by the Demons and having lost most of their leaders in the final battle at Carcë, the Witches are sending an envoy to the Demons for obvious political purposes. Perhaps an envoy of supplication. Perhaps an envoy to inform them of new leadership in Demonland—a leadership that would be unlikely to provoke war with the recently victorious Demons, and so would seek peaceful ties. This seems the most logical course of events, but the tone of Eddison’s narrative runs against such logic: the lords of Demonland are doers of the impossible. Their wish was sent to the gods by Queen Sophonisba, much beloved of the gods (in fact, given immortality by them), so why would the gods not grant the Demons what we might imagine as illogical? Put another way, in the logic of this world, why would the Demons not deserve their wish to be granted? After all, they won a “[h]oly war” (515).
Given Eddison’s obsessive idealizing of the hero, I think we have to assume that the ending is not open-ended in any way that suggests the Witches have not been, as Eddison comments in the appendix, “restored” (invalidating my “logical” reading above). But The Worm Ouroboros is open-ended in the sense that it is not perfectly cyclical, it is not a complete reduplication of the start of the novel. The preceding events have not been undone. Zeldornius’s sword still belongs to Juss and therefore Zeldornius is still dead. Queen Sophonisba is no longer in Koshtra Belorn, waiting for Juss and Brandoch Daha to reach her so she can teach them how to scale Zora Rach Nam Psarrion by hippogriff. And so on. If, as the foregoing suggests, the Witch lords and the Gorice line have been restored to life, the conflict will not be the same, it cannot be the same. But we have to assume that there will indeed be new, perhaps greater battles between the Demons and their risen enemies. This was, after all, the end goal of the Demons’ wish: enemies against which to continue to define their heroism.
The novel does not, exactly, end where it begins, and this distinction is important. For although the novel is named The Worm Ouroboros, and although the novel threads the symbol and form of the ouroboros throughout, and although the scene described at the end is quite similar, at least in the words of the serving man who announces the Witchland ambassador’s arrival, the novel is also very clear elsewhere that the perfect, endless ouroboros of Gorice and the mercenary captains is a corrupting, destructive force. If we are to read the novel, in its totality, as an ouroboros in form, as both the title and the final restoration of the world (however we interpret that) suggest, how then do we square the novel-level ouroboros with the prevailing symbolism of the ouroboros throughout the novel? Simply, the final (or total, novel-encircling) ouroboros is of a wholly different nature: it is not magical or sorcerous, it is holy and divine, a product of the gods. The heroes, in essence, reforge a new ouroboros that brings forth their enemies again. The Demons’ ouroboros, at the level of the novel itself—the very book that exists to extoll their deeds—is a wish granted by the gods and is set above and against the ouroboroi of magic and sorcery.
The Demons change the meaning of the ouroboros through the intervention of the gods, not by magic, which is aligned throughout the narrative with villainy against the “might and main” of heroes (13). Though the gods are distant, mysterious figures in The Worm Ouroboros who dwell on the other side of the world, beyond Zora Rach Nam Psarrion, in the land of Zimiamvia, they will take on greater significance in the trilogy of novels that follows.
Dreaming in the Lotus Room
Let us end, cheekily, at the beginning, in that “old low house in Wastdale,” where two dreamers lay in the Lotus Room—such a mysterious place and name, evoking both the lotophagoi of Homer, who eat a fruit that causes some of Odysseus’s men to abandon their journey home, and also the lotus symbolism of “Eastern” religions, particularly Buddhism; both evocations suggest transcendence beyond the normal boundaries and strictures of Lessingham’s and the reader’s lives. Though Lessingham left us to the ouroboric narrative of the heroes of Demonland long ago, and we left behind his wife Mary even before we departed by spirit-chariot to Mercury, we will see them again, in very different forms, soon enough in the next essay in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy reading series, in E.R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses (1935; Aug. 1967).
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Footnotes
[1] Researching the publication history of The Worm Ouroboros led me, rather excitingly, to Crown Publisher’s Xanadu Library series, which I haven’t seen discussed anywhere in fantasy studies before except in one brief mention in Jamie Williamson’s book (related to this novel). Xanadu Library was a very short-lived series that republished books very similar to what Ballantine would publish starting with The Worm Ouroboros and leading to BAF in 1969. Thanks to World Enough, who has been collecting the Xanadu Library’s really obscure volumes, we know a little bit more:
Each volume described Xanadu on its back cover as “a new series of paperback books that are classics of imaginative writing. The Xanadu Library will be built around books on worlds that never were, worlds that might have been and worlds that still may be.”
This sounds a whole hell of a lot like BAF!
And the titles they published:
- James Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu (1961)
- Talbot Mundy, Om, the Secret of Abhor Valley (1961)
- James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice (1962)
- Ernest Bramah, Kai Lung’s Golden Hours (1962)
- E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1962)
- Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels (1962)
- M.P. Shiel, Lord of the Sea (1963)
BAF published both the Eddison and Bramah volumes, as well as seven novels by Cabell, and considered publishing the France novel; the others are very similar to books BAF published, were by authors familiar to Lin Carter, and might easily have appeared in the series had it continued.
Some key differences between Xanadu Library and BAF are: timing and design. These came out just before the Tolkien boom ignited a search—by audiences and publishers alike—for more books “like” The Lord of the Rings, and so seemed more like obscurantist republications; moreover, they were not tied to the sword and sorcery revival and therefore not trying to explicitly capitalize on that other, earlier interest in what would become known as fantasy (even if Mundy was well-known for his writing in the pulps). And these Xanadu editions were given boring, inert, unremarkable, and definitely unmemorable (except for their awful blandness) covers. Shiel’s Lord of the Sea was the only one with an image on the cover, and even then the image is so uncomfortably fit with the novel as to make the book worth not buying; the others just got boring typeface and lightly colored, interlocking circles. Nothing about the series recommends it to readers looking for, either, sword and sorcery or Tolkien or anything like either, and so it’s no wonder—even given the timing—that it fizzled out. Still, this early attempt to do something like BAF is exciting to know about and demonstrates that, while the late 1960s and early 1970s were the fire in which modern genre fantasy was born, the wood was already being chopped.
[2] I should note here that David A. Oakes, in a very brief 1999 article in Extrapolation (40.2, pp. 125–128), “The Eternal Circle: The Beginning and Ending of E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros,” also points out that Lessingham doesn’t disappear completely after page 26, and that it is silly for critics like Carter and Prescott to consider Lessingham clumsy or to suggest that Eddison simply forgot him. I found Oakes’s essay after writing my notes for this section, and it’s a good, if too brief, corrective to the broad consensus about Lessingham, but the essay also doesn’t elaborate on why it would matter that Lessingham is there in the first place—what exactly Eddison is doing with him.
I had read Oakes’s essay by the time I drafted the section “On Heroism and the Ouroboros,” though it had very little impact on my thinking since (1) I had already arrived at the same conclusion before discovering the essay and (2) though he discusses how the end of the novel is not (exactly) the beginning, Oakes’s commentary is short and obvious: it does not delve into the particulars and does not probe the complexities of the ending, or suggest, again, what Eddison is doing.
Hopefully I’ve offered something useful to both conversations.
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