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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