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 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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