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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2313 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 5, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm adding Taylor's A Secular Age to the list. Going through the backlog slowly.

Almost done with The Worm Ouroboros. I think it is quite good overall despite its shortcomings. It's an interesting counterpoint to Tolkien's world - there's no guarantee that good will ultimately triumph and it's up to the characters to actually change the course of events, although there's a light smattering of prophecy.

I think its weakest point is the poor characterization of the good guys. Juss, Spitfire, Brandoch Daha, Goldry Bluzsco - I can't really tell you anything that distinguishes one from the other. The illustrations in the book give them all the same face, like tetrarchs (is this the point?). Maybe one is a little more impatient and another a little less. The bad guys are actually quite well characterized:

  • Corinius, the swaggering womanizer who backs down from a duel
  • Corsus, the drunk, somewhat over the hump, who sends his daughter Sriva (wily, coquettish, scheming) to seduce the king to advance his career
  • Corund, the honorable (to a fault) man who raised honorable sons (I admit I keep confusing him with Corsus due to their names)
  • Prezmyra, Corund's wife, torn between her brother who sympathizes with the Demons and her husband who will never go against the king
  • Gro, perhaps the most interesting character, also Tolkein's favorite, who constantly shifts allegiances and suggests killing the enemy through treachery at every turn, yet always manages to find a home

I guess it's a common trope that bad guys are harder to write than the good guys, but I think Tolkien managed this pretty well.

“But because day at her dawning hours hath so bewitched me, must I yet love her when glutted with triumph she settles to garish noon? Rather turn as now I turn to Demonland, in the sad sunset of her pride. And who dares call me turncoat, who do but follow now as I have followed this rare wisdom all my days: to love the sunrise and the sundown and the morning and the evening star? since there only abideth the soul of nobility, true love, and wonder, and the glory of hope and fear.”

[...]

It was now high noon. The horse and his rider were come to a little dell of green grass with a beck winding in the midst with cool water flowing over a bed of shingle. About the dell grew many trees both tall and straight. Above the trees high mountain crags a-bake in the sun showed ethereal through the shimmering heat. A murmur of waters, a hum of tiny wings flitting from flower to flower, the sound of the horse grazing on the lush pasture: there was nought else to hear. Not a leaf moved, not a bird. The hush of the summer noon-day, breathless, burnt through with the sun, more awful than any shape of night, paused above that lonely dell.

It's a great book and a great lead-in to the Zimiamvian Trilogy. If you like Ouroboros, then you'll like Zimiamvia. If not, then you won't.

Everybody loves Lord Gro! Though objectively he really is the worst of them all, he constantly betrays, switches sides, and backstabs, and has no problem recommending dishonourable/cowardly methods (like poisoning the Demon lords) to solve problems. And yet he's charming and appealing. I think it's because he doesn't do any of this for personal gain, he constantly loses by it since he switches sides to the weaker instead of sticking around to benefit from the wealth and status he would gain with the now-victorious side.

The sort of flat characterisation of the heroes is deliberate, I think. Eddison isn't interested in deep psychological exploration or subtleties of that nature. The heroes are heroic the same way Achilles is heroic: brave, skilled, handsome, wealthy, of high status, of high renown and honour, fit to do deeds of daring and extreme feats, aristoi by nature and blood, far beyond the common herd. They don't have to be developed because they're archetypes. These are the Supermen of Nietzsche.

It's a pity the Zimiamvian trilogy was never properly completed; the final novel is just some completed chapters and a lot of notes. The second book is where we learn more about the characters and about Eddison's view of what an ideal world would be like, and the first one (chronologically the last in the series) gives the most complete view of the world.

It's really a realm of the mighty dead, a hyper-version of the Elysian Fields, and is the circular history that constantly repeats itself as hinted at in the title of Ouroboros. Very much something that if you like the prose style, you'll be willing to wade through the metaphysics, but if it's too strong for you, then there's not enough going on to keep you reading.

I'm laughing internally comparing Eddison with, say, Brandon Sanderson who is, or is one of, the new High Kings of fantasy. The difference between Sanderson's functional if cardboard prose and his (very American) carefully worked-out magic system and Eddison's highly-coloured, vividly Jacobean-styled prose - !

I heard her say, faint as the breath of night-flowers under the stars: “The fabled land of ZIMIAMVIA. Is it true, will you think, which poets tell us of that fortunate land: that no mortal foot may tread it, but the blessed souls do inhabit it of the dead that be departed: of them that were great upon earth and did great deeds when they were living, that scorned not earth and the delights and the glories of earth, and yet did justly and were not dastards nor yet oppressors?”

“Who knows?” I said. “Who dares say he knows?”

Amaury said. “You see, you will not answer. Will you answer this, then: It is against the nature of you not to be rash, and against the condition of rashness not to be ’gainst all reason; yet why (after these five years that I’ve followed you up and down the world, and seen you mount so swiftly the degrees and steps of greatness that, in what courts or princely armies soever you might be come, you stuck in the eyes of all as the most choice jewel there): why needs must you, with the wide world to choose from, come back to this land of Rerek, and, of all double-dealers and secretaries of hell, sell your sword to the Vicar?”

Everybody loves Lord Gro!

His quick welcome wherever he turns is hilarious given that people either ignore his advice or take it and get doused with a literal bucket of shit.

The heroes are heroic the same way Achilles is heroic: brave, skilled, handsome, wealthy, of high status, of high renown and honour, fit to do deeds of daring and extreme feats, aristoi by nature and blood, far beyond the common herd. They don't have to be developed because they're archetypes. These are the Supermen of Nietzsche.

I think you do a disservice to Achilles and the characterization of the Greeks. It is not all sunshine and rainbows - I seem to recall an incident where Agamemnon takes Achilles's war bride and Achilles says he's going to take his ball and go home, and then later Agamemnon begs him to rejoin the fight with a very generous comp package and Achilles refuses out of spite. But I haven't read the Iliad so I won't argue too much.

The difference between Sanderson's functional if cardboard prose and his (very American) carefully worked-out magic system and Eddison's highly-coloured, vividly Jacobean-styled prose - !

We certainly live in a prose recession.

But Achilles does not have to justify why he's a hero, he just is because he ticks all the boxes. Odysseus is different, he is unheroic by a lot of the tropes of the poems (and indeed by some of our own day) but Odysseus is a much more rounded character.

Achilles versus Agamemnon is not about "but I really love my sex-slave" or "is taking women captive and passing them around like party favours justified?", it's about arguing over The Champion's Portion. Achilles has been publicly disrespected by Agamemnon and his status challenged, and thus his honour is impugned unless Agamemnon makes reparation. Agamemnon is overlord of the combined Greek forces and can't be seen to be weak or to bow to blackmail. That's why all the negotiations between them carried on via third parties.

Achilles versus Agamemnon is of the same kind as Juss versus Gorice; Gorice is attempting to exercise overlordship which the Demonlanders refuse to recognise, and the plot kicks off from there. The fact that it has nothing to do with questions of morality or the right to rule or Evil Lord versus Good Guys is demonstrated at the end, where the victorious Demon lords lament that their mighty foes are dead and so there can be no more heroic battles, and their reward is to have everything reset so that Gorice is once again alive and the entire adventure will re-start. The effect of war and invasion on the common folk? the soldiers in their armies who will die and leave behind widows and orphans? Pffft, that is not the concern of the Supermen, the Heroes!

Gro, ironically, is the only one who thinks about the losing side in all these wars, and that is why he's constantly a turncoat and mistrusted even when personally liked. Nobody trusts him too far because they know he's just as likely to switch sides and be fighting them in the morning.

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