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 -
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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