imperatives, no concessions to cause and effect, only the elegant truths of the higher calling of myth. Characters traverse distances and decades in the blink of an eye; worlds take shape, spawn life, evolve through billions of years, and are destroyed, all during a dinner of fish. These are dreams made flesh by a dreamer extraordinaire.
‘There was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old low house in Wastdale …’ Thus The Worm Ouroboros introduces Lessingham and his lady, Mary, the first glimpse of the tragic romance that will haunt the Zimiamvian novels. Lessingham retires, alone, to the mysterious Lotus Room, a place of contemplation and opiate calm – there to sleep, perchance to dream. ‘Time is,’ speaks a little black bird, and a shining chariot, drawn by a hippogriff, arrives to fetch Lessingham to Mercury. His destination is not the first planet from the sun, but a medieval Norseman’s nightmare of our own Earth, ‘all grey and cold, the warm colours burnt to ashes’, save one: the crimson of blood. It is a grim world, peopled by Demons and Witches, Imps and Pixies, Goblins and Ghouls – all of them human, and all of them at war. Swordplay and sorcery and Machiavellian intrigue are the order of the day; vengeance and feuds, betrayal and bloodletting, as common as the dawn.
The heroes of this majestic Romance are the Demons, ruled and captained by the three brothers – Lords Juss and Spitfire and Goldry Bluszco – and their cousin Brandoch Daha. Valiant in war, courtly in speech and stance, these are heroes in the classical sense, superhuman, violent, passionately alive, with the ferocious good looks and fate of fallen angels; if there is a single certainty, it is that those who befriend them will die. The Demonlords are demigods who struggle for a kind of savage nobility, forever pursuing a sentimental, romantic code that places word before deed, death before dishonour. Their trials are many, and painted brightly with blood.
Arrayed against the Demonlords are the Witches of Carcë, purveyors of a blackness ‘which no bright morning light might lighten’. Their king is the crafty warlock Gorice XII, an egromancer ‘full of guiles and wiles’. Skilled in grammarie, he lurks forever in his citadel, which stands ‘like some drowsy dragon of the elder slime, squat, sinister, and monstrous’. At his side are his warlords: brave Corund, the bearish Corsus, the insolent Corinius, and ‘the landskip of iniquity’, the renegade Goblin Gro – philosopher, schemer, and traitor by nature. No blacker and more dastardly crew of scoundrels could be found; yet Eddison’s passion for them is obvious and intense.
The struggle between the Demons and Witches is nothing less than epic; the battles of this modern Iliad rage on land, sea, and air, taking us from the ocean depths to the lofty pinnacles of heaven. Among its finer episodes are the ‘wrastling for Demonland’, which pits Goldry Bluzco against the King of the Witches and sets an entire world aflame; the fog-clouded siege at Eshgrar Ogo; the harrowing ascent of Koshtra Pivrarcha and the struggle there with the beast mantichora; the bloody battle at Krothering Side; the flight of the hippogriff to the gaunt peak of Zora Rach; and the playing of the final trumps at the dark citadel of Carcë.
Eddison’s prose is archaic and often difficult, an intentionally affected throwback to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His characters are thus eloquent but long winded; they speak not of killing a man, but of ‘sending him from the shade into the house of darkness’. In his finest moments Eddison ascends to a sustained poetic beauty; listen, for example, to the haunting premonition of the Goblin Gro:
‘in my sleep about the darkest hour, a dream of the night came to my bed and beheld me with a glance so fell that the hairs of my head stood up and pale terror gat hold upon me. And methought the dream smote up the roof above my bed, and the roof yawned to the naked air of the midnight that laboured with fiery signs, and a bearded star travelling in the houseless dark. And I beheld the roof and the walls one gore of blood. And the dream screeched like the screech-owl, crying, Witchland from thy hand, O King!’
At other times the reader is virtually overwhelmed with words. Palaces and armoury were Eddison’s particular vices; he describes them with such ornate grandeur that page after page is lavished with their decoration. The reader should not be deterred by the density of such passages; like a vintage wine a taste for Eddison’s prose is expensively acquired, demanding the reader’s patience and perseverance – and it is worthy of its price. These are books to be savoured, best read in the long dark hours of night, when the wind is against the windows and the shadows begin to walk – books not meant for the moment, but for forever.
The Worm Ouroboros inevitably has been compared with J. R. R. Tolkien’s later and more popular Lord of the Rings trilogy; apart from their narrative ambition and epic sweep, the books share little in common. (Eddison, like Tolkien, disclaimed the notion that he was writing something beyond mere story: ‘It is neither allegory nor fable but a Story to be read for its own sake.’ But, as the reader will no doubt observe, he proves much less convincing.)
If comparisons are in order, then I suggest Eddison’s obvious influences – Homer and the Icelandic sagas – and that most controversial of Jacobean dramatists, John Webster, whose blood-spattered tales of violence and chaos (from which Eddison’s characters quote freely) saw him chastised for subverting orthodox society and religion. The shadow of Eddison may be seen, in turn, not only in the modern fiction of heroic fantasy, but also in the writings of his truest descendants, such dreamers of the dark fantastique as Stephen King (whose own epics, The Stand and The Dark Tower, read like paeans to Eddison) and Clive Barker (whose The Great and Secret Show called its chaotic forces the Iad Ouroboros).
Eddison would have found this line of succession, like the cyclical popularity of his books, the most natural order of events: the circle, ever turning – like the worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail – the symbol of eternity, where ‘the end is ever at the beginning and the beginning at the end for ever more’.
You hold in your hands a masterpiece.
DOUGLAS E. WINTER
1990
IT IS thirty years since The Worm Ouroboros was first published in England and twenty-six since I first succumbed to its potent magic. Since then I have reread it several times, always finding new evidence for my belief that this majestic romance is an enduring masterpiece, although a peculiar and imperfect one, and that Eric Eddison is a great master of English prose and a greatly neglected one. His rediscovery is long overdue. Perhaps it will come with the republication of this book.
E. R. Eddison was a successful English civil servant, the author of several minor works and of three of the most remarkable romances in the English language, The Worm Ouroboros, Mistress of Mistresses and A Fish Dinner in Memison. When he died in 1945 he left uncompleted a large fragment of still a fourth [The Mezentian Gate, published after this Introduction was written]. The three completed novels are loosely linked together as separate parts of one vast romantic epic; but the connection of The Worm Ouroboros with the others is remote. And it is unique in the simplicity of its theme, which is heroic adventure. The other two books have double themes, heroic adventure and the symbolical presentation of a moderately abstruse philosophy. For this reason it is best to read The Worm first. It makes an easier introduction into the splendid cosmos of Eddison’s imagination. And anyone who has once savoured the rare delights to be found there will not be content without exploring the uttermost reaches, metaphysical as well as fanciful.
What are the reasons for considering this flawed masterpiece (so noble in concept and so mighty in scope and yet marred with a few irksome failings) worthy of the attention of
