My planned review of The Worm Ouroboros became an unreadably long compendium of the book's entire contents, viewed from multiple angles and dissected far too much detail, and I still had far too many TODOs open that I felt I had to include to do it justice. It was madness, so I hereby scrap it all and instead of any of that I give you this: An exhortation to read the book itself. It's a marvelous work, and existing reviews and summaries do not do it justice. You can also read it or listen to it entirely for free, in all its wholesome faux-17th-century Scots-English glory. The language of the book might appeal to me personally because much in it that might seem archaic to an anglophone simply sounds roughly German to me. And the plot too has a German quality - it is gracefully straightforward.
HTML Text:
- https://sacred-texts.com/ring/two/index.htm
- https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67090/67090-h/67090-h.htm
Ebook:
Audiobook, read and quite excellently read by one Jason Mills:
The Worm Ouroboros is a novel. It is usually called a romance or fantasy, neither of which is wrong. Some point out that it is in the tradition of norse sagas, which I cannot judge. In my opinion it is above all an epic, and while many reviewers express puzzlement at the presence of the Greek pantheon on a fantastical Mercury, I think it makes perfect sense - what other gods would homeric heroes worship? It is, in my unqualified foreigner's opinion, a beautiful book, written with prodiguous excess of skill and care. It contains so much, and yet I wish there were more of it, and then again I suppose its author already gave a great gift and more cannot be asked. I have many, far too many things to say about it, and am stumbling over myself trying to express them all at once. So instead I will cut myself off right now and return to the only statement I think I am qualified to make:
If you haven't read the book, please read it.
If you have read it, please read it again.
Then come back here and tell me what you think.
As for myself, I just read it twice back-to-back. C.S. Lewis asked for a copy of The Worm Ouroboros when he went to a nursing home, and I might understand him - it is a book I would not mind reading as my last. Its world and characters are beautiful, and beautifully described. E.R. Eddison's other books are less known yet than this one, but I intend to give them a look next.
To aid you in your reading, please take the following.
Map of Mercury:
Map of Demonland:
And now off you go. I hope to hear back from you.
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Notes -
It's an amazing work, and the perfect lead-in to the Zimiamvian Trilogy. You'll know whether this work is to your taste and if not, then don't bother. Eddison definitely had his own view of the perfect life and how it should be lived, and it's not really a Christian one but pagan. But it's fantastic world-building and genuinely both familiar and alien.
And everybody loves Lord Gro! I love Lord Gro! Even Tolkien liked him, though he didn't like Eddison's worldview:
Yeah. Having concluded my second read-through of TWO, I'm now getting started on Zimiamvia. I picked Mistress of Mistresses at random, feel free to correct me on that and point me at a better starting point.
Lord Gro deserves the attention. He's the perpetual outsider, someone who clearly does not fit into the world he inhabits, yet fulfills vital roles (seriously, look at any major Witchland campaign and somewhere there's a "and by the by it was Lord Gro who came up with the winning move" in there), and gets ground up between these two aspects. He himself and the narration make that very clear - he serves a higher principle, not earthly masters, but in the end he's still human and craves human contact and status and romance and, having thoroughly ruined his prospects at those, he implodes. It's a tragic story, but couldn't have gone any other way, with such a character in such a world.
Everyone can see a bit of Gro in themselves. Every time some personal idiosyncrasy goes against the current of the world, or when one chooses to turn from the noise of society to walk into nature instead, or when one tries hard to contribute to the commons but either fails directly or fails to be appreciated for it, one can feel a little Gro. At least I often do; Lord Gro certainly resonates with me, even as the ideals I try to live up to are more like Lord Corund. That those two are friends and share a lot of scenes together seems fitting; almost opposites as they are.
Gro is such a complex character! He definitely has parts of his psyche that are quite happy to be "ends justify the means"; he would use assassination and ambushes against the Demons and not be concerned. But he also has finer and higher qualities. Whatever his fatal flaw is, that he naturally goes for plots and schemes and treachery, he doesn't do it for his own personal glory and profit.
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I read The Worm Ouroboros a while back and really enjoyed it. Obviously haven't had a chance to reread it yet, but maybe this post is a good excuse to do so!
I've sometimes toyed with the idea of turning the setting into a tabletop RPG. The only issue comes in how to depict the various ethnic groups on Mercury. I might be misremembering, but it really seemed like they're all essentially human beings, despite names like "demons", "pixies", "goblins", "witches", etc.
There's a lot of great sections, like the Sending (which was awesomely described), the manticore (especially loved the brief lapse into even more archaic language for its description), and the moment when one of the characters insults another by "thou"-ing them instead of "you"-ing them.
You mentioned people being confused by the Olympian gods being on Mercury, but I found it delightful. I was especially enchanted by the concept of a "fosterling of the gods", since I feel like it has a lot of storytelling potential in itself.
I also think that all the names of characters and places have a certain charm to them, even if they're clearly a little more haphazard than, say, Tolkien's names.
Oh, yeah. Except the Demon Lords have horns, and I think the Imps are smaller than the other races. But that shouldn't be too much of a problem, and you can always put your own flourishes on them. And Spitfire literally breathes fire, what's not to love?
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Please do. I'm eager to discuss it in entirely excessive detail.
That might be a better idea than mine, which was to make a Mount & Blade mod based on the setting. The format seemed a perfect fit - shifting forever wars between various distinct cultures in a medieval setting just is what M&B is. But I scrapped it because in the end, TWO lives on language and characters, not on the action alone. A TRPG would be a much better idea, now that I think about it.
As for the peoples of Mercury - it's not clear! Demons have horns, this much we know. The ruling family of Demonland is described as "brown" or "dark", but that might just be tan because they're outdoorsy. Gro the Goblin has eyes described as "large and liquid". But on the other hand, Demons and Goblins and Witches and Pixies can interbreed, apparently without problems. And most descriptions of the various characters have them as humans for all practical purposes. So much for biology.
The cultural differences are much clearer. We get a good look mostly just at Demons and Witches, and a much smaller one at Goblins, and the other races only appear as one or two characters if at all, so let's focus on the main guys.
The even more archaic language is used whenever a character reads out a written message. The two standout pieces are indeed Gro's report on the journey to Zimiamvia, and Corsus' report on the initial invasion of Demonland. This stylistic shift implies to me that the characters, even if they be prolific writers, are barely literate. Which some of them state outright!
Overall the language of the book is just magnificent. I so far fail to tire of reading it.
Other highlights of the book, to my taste, are the manifold descriptions of landscapes, skies, and lighting used to set the scene and mood. And the dialogues themselves, of course - the characters verbally sparring with each other, in friendly or unfriendly fashion, sometimes attempting conversational jiu-jitsu, sometimes failing hilariously at it, and sometimes just going right for the throat, in accordance with their personalities. There's a lot of variety, and it's a joy every time.
Queen Sophonisba is a very funny character, in my opinion. She may have lived for centuries, have a magical kingdom and mythical beasts for servants and the Gods are so smitten with her that they grant her every wish on top of immortality, but as she says - in truth she's still just a teenage girl, traumatized by the wars of an earlier King of Witchland, and completely out of touch with the world. Other characters that fail to conform to the social expectations of Mercury, like Lord Gro and the Red Foliot and Duchess Zenambria, are mercilessly mocked for their lack of martial attributes. But Sophonisba can get away with it because she is, as you said, the Fosterling of the Gods, and she's perfectly allowed to spend half a chapter just not understanding the Demons and their love for war, at all, even when they repeatedly explain it to her.
Supposedly they're childhood inventions that Eddison couldn't bear to part with. Which makes them all the more appealing to me - if true, then they really are a whole life's work. And you do get used to them very quickly. But yes, on the other hand Eddison seems to have done little to no worldbuilding beyond what served the plot, entirely unlike Tolkien where the worldbuilding came first.
Also, admission of shame: It took me my entire first reading of the book to get a handle on who's who between Corsus, Corund and Corinius.
I think that's more to do with Eddison's philosophy of what the perfect life/afterlife would be - Valhalla, not Heaven. Warriors need war to prove their valour and win glory, see how depressed Juss and the other Demons are about the ending where they have beaten their foes and the prospect of peace is before them. I don't think Eddison means us to see the Demons as going around starting wars just so they can fight, but his world (Mercury, and Zimiamvia even more so) are worlds not of peace but where there's always a chance of a low-level conflict going on, where lords fight among themselves and where nations fight other nations for power, status, and influence (but mostly for the love of war and glory).
His is not a world of the common man, the ordinary soldier who gets dragged off to fight in these eternal battles; it's the world of the heroes, the mighty lords winning renown in battle. The Demons don't go to war for anything so vulgar as territorial advantage or resource extraction, they are the heroes of sagas and the Iliad and other such epics.
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