E. R. Eddison, ‘The Worm Ouroboros’ (1922)
Eric Rücker Eddison, born in 1882, educated at Eton and Oxford, spent his adult life as a senior civil servant, mostly on the Board of Trade. It was a distinguished career, as these things go: he was appointed a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1924 and a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1929. But he’s much better known for the fiction he wrote in his spare time, which drew on his deep interest in Icelandic sagas, Norse myth and medieval and Renaissance heroic literature, transmuting it into idiosyncratic Fantasy. His first novel, The Worm Ouroboros (1922) concerns a war fought between heroic ‘Demons’ and wicked ‘Witches’ in a land called ‘Mercury’ — that’s the planet, towards which a 1920s Englishman called Lessingham flies on the back of a Hippogriff in the book’s opening chapter. Except that, when he gets there, we discover that this is not in any science-fictional sense the actual Mercury. Instead Lessingham, landing, walks ‘between shadowy ranks of Irish yews’ and feels ‘no touch of the ground beneath his feet, and when he stretched out his hand to touch a tree his hand passed through branch and leaves as though they were unsubstantial as a moonbeam.’ The novel drops Lessingham — he’s simply not mentioned after the first chapter — and instead immerses us in this medievalised Fantasy kingdom.
The whole is written in a synthetic Elizabethan or Jacobean English which takes a little getting used to. Deploying archaic diction and vocabulary was not Eddison’s innovation: Charles Doughty’s account of his travels through the Middle East, Arabia Deserta (1888), was written in just such an archaised style, because Doughty considered the King James Bible the high-point of English prose, and everything since a falling-away. Eddison’s style is not so full-on as Doughty’s, and because the whole novel stays, as it were, in character throughout, the style is not so jarring as Tolkien’s dipping-into archaism in the later sections of The Lord of the Rings (‘But lo! suddenly in the midst of the glory of the king his golden shield was dimmed’ and so on). Eddison’s style is like this:
Folk now began to be astir in the castle, and there came a score of serving men into the presence chamber with brooms and brushes, cloths and leathers, to sweep and garnish it, and burnish the gold and jewels of the chamber. Lissome they were and sprightly of gait, of fresh complexion and fair-haired. Horns grew on their heads. [ch.1]
The horns identify them as ‘demons’; but despite their diabolic moniker, Eddison styles this race as noble, aristocratic, heroic, essentially human. The chapter introduces the chief lords of Demonland: the brothers Juss, Spitfire, and Goldry Bluszco, plus their cousin Brandoch Daha. Here they are, in Keith Henderson’s fine illustration:
As the Demon court assembles, a dwarfish ambassador arrives to insist the Demons pay obeisance to the Witch monarch Gorice. Refusing so insulting a demand (‘“I like not the dirty face of the Ambassador,” said Lord Zigg. “If’s upper lip bespeak him not a rare spouter of rank fustian, perdition catch me”’) the matter is settled by a wrestling match between Gorice and the Demon champion, Goldry Bluszco. The account of this wrestle, or as Eddison insists on calling it, this ‘wrastle’, displays Eddison’s weakness as a writer of action, fonder as he is of static tableaux. He is excellent at detailing elaborate clothing, faces and forms, fixtures and fittings, landscapes. When something actually has to happen, we get this:
The two champions advanced and clasped one another with their strong arms, each with his right arm below and left arm above the other’s shoulder, until the flesh shrank beneath the might of their arms that were as brazen bands. They swayed a little this way and that, as great trees swaying in a storm, their legs planted firmly so that they seemed to grow out of the ground like the trunks of oak trees. Nor did either yield ground to other, nor might either win a master hold upon his enemy. So swayed they back and forth for a long time, breathing heavily. [ch.2]
Eventually King Gorice is killed, and his successor — or perhaps reincarnation, I’m not sure — is the sorcerer Gorice XII who uses dark magic, obtained from the untrustworthy Goblin Lord Gro, to imprison Goldry in an enchanted mountain prison. The lords of Demonland, believing Goldry imprisoned in the Witch capital Carcë, attack, are defeated and themselves imprisoned. They are rescued, and embark upon a series of quests, adventures, as well as fighting many more battles. The battle-writing, though, is vitiated by the same static conceptualising as the wrastling match episode:
The Demons’ battle-line most gloriously maintained their array unbroken, though the outland allies broke and fled. … In which struggle befell the most bloody fighting that was yet seen that day, and the stour of battle so asper and so mortal that it was hard to see how any man should come out from it with life, since not a man of either side would budge an inch but die there in his steps if he might not rather slay the foe before him. So the armies swayed for an hour like wrastlers locked. [ch 31]
There’s bunch of war-stuff in The Worm Ouroboros, but though I have seen the book described as ‘the Iliad of heroic Fantasy’ there’s nothing of Homer’s motion and grace, his kineticism, the heft and momentum of battle-writing in Eddison’s narrative.
We could, I suppose, make the case that this static quality figures as a commentary upon the stalemate in the trenches 1914–18. But I don’t think so. Eddison did not fight in the war, and — unlike Tolkien (who did) — he views battle as a glorious game, heroes in lovingly detailed chivalric armour hewing and smiting:
In one short while had my Lord Brandoch Daha three times a horse slain stark dead under him, yet gat never a wound himself, which was a marvel. For without care he rode through and about, smiting down their champions. I mind me of him once, with’s horse ripped and killed under him, and one of those Witchland lords that tilted at him on the ground as he leaped to’s feet again; how a caught the spear with’s two hands and by main strength yerked his enemy out o’ the saddle … His highness swapt him such a swipe o’ the neck-bone as he pitched to earth, the head of him flew i’ the air like a tennis ball.
Yerked is a lively sort of word, but ‘swapt him such a swipe’ is lame, and the tennis ball analogy, though licensed I suppose by Shakespeare’s Henry V, is misjudged. Even the motion in battle-description reads like a frieze, a sequence of poses.
I don’t mean to be too harsh. Eddison is weaving a verbal tapestry, not actually writing a novel, much less, directing a Hollywood blockbuster. The Worm Ourboros’s five hundred plus pages are generously supplied with wonders, monsters, magical artefacts, challenges, hippogriff eggs — and full-grown hippogriffs, with rainbow coloured wings — crystal balls, dangers and strangenesses. Heroes fight monsters, villains plot and scheme, Lord Gro (the most compelling character) wavers between good and evil. There’s plenty to enjoy.
Gro smote and cut off the left leg of the evil wight, easily, as it were cutting of butter. But from the stump came forth two fresh snakes a-writhing; and so it fared likewise with the right leg, but the King shouted, “Smite and cease not, or thou art but a dead dog!” and ever as Gro hewed a snake in twain forth came two more from the wound, till the chamber was a maze of their wriggling forms. And he said, panting between the strokes, “O King, I have made him many-legged as a centipede: must I make him a myriapod ere night’s decline?” [ch 4]
Eddison’s prose is playful, after a fashion, and there are various moments of rather stiffly articulated levity in the writing; but he also takes his world and his idiom terribly seriously. He commits to it, absolutely, and whilst that does generate a genuine verfremdungseffekt, a mannered nobility of otherness, it also sometimes throws up inadvertent Carry-On-style double-entendres. ‘Corund with fifty men took the Goblins mightily in the rear’. I mean, that’s a real sentence, that Eddison really wrote, in his book.
The idiom does sometimes enable striking and vivid writing: ‘he rolled his eye upon her with such a gorgon look that her blood ran back with a great leap towards her heart’ [ch 16] — her blood ran back with a great leap towards her heart is excellent. But Eddison can’t seem to tell when he is expressively avoiding cliché and when he is just being distractingly odd: ‘Corund leaned on the parapet and shaded his eyes with his hand that was broad as a smoked haddock’ [ch 7]. Haddockhand? ‘Brandoch Daha took [Corsus] prisoner on Lormeron field and despitefully used him, stripped him stark naked, shaved him all of one side smooth as a tennis ball and painted him yellow and sent him home with mickle shame.’ [ch 17]. Tennis balls again? Mickle shame indeed.
A figure stole out of the deep shadow of the buttress nearest the archway. He leapt up and was first in the gate, blocking it with open arms. “Ah,” he cried, “so titmice roost i’ the shade, ha?” [ch 15]
There’s altogether too much of this creaky Jacobean stage-comedy banter i’ faith.
Then there’s the business of the names. Good grief, the names. Bonkers, bonkers names. Tolkien, though he admired and in some respects imitated this novel, wrote sternly in 1957: ‘I thought his nomenclature slipshod and often inept’. Characters are called La Fireez, Fax Fay Faz, ‘Volle and Vizz and Zigg’, Gaslark. There are surely readers with the maturity to encounter a name like ‘Gaslark’ and not immediately think of somebody lighting their own farts, but I am not one such. There’s Dekalajus, which is a name or perhaps an adjective (‘how are you enjoying chapter ten?’ ‘It’s dekalajus!’). Every time I came across Brandoch Daha — and he’s a major character — I found myself imagining Alan Partridge shouting out his surname. Many names seem constructed in order to max-out Scrabble scores: ‘Maxtlin of Azumel’; ‘Ojedian’; ‘Prezmyra’.
When Lord Juss says ‘for out of this sea is no sea-way for ships but only by these Straits of Melikaphkhaz’ he could be describing a feature of the landscape or he could be rounding off his statement with a hefty sneeze, it’s hard to tell. There’s the ‘Land of Ar’, disappointingly not the home of pirates, and there’s ‘Erp the king of Ellien.’ Could you take a king seriously if his name were ‘Erp’? Erp. Erp. Come on Ellien/Oh, I swear (what he means)/At this moment/Just renaame your king.
Though the battle scenes, quest scenes, and courtly tableaux occupy most of the story, there are occasional love-story moments too, although these are written more on the awkward and indeed Erpward than the erotic side of things. Here’s Lord Corinius, wooing the Lady Sriva.
His lips fed deep on her lips, his strong and greedy hands softly mastered her against her will, till with a little smothered cry she embraced him, bruising her tender body against the armour he was girt withal … When he was departed, Sriva remained in the shadow of the alcove to set in order her hair and apparel, not a little disarrayed in that hot wooing. [ch 31]
Coincidentally, Hot Wooing is the name of my new band. We play uptempo disco covers of Barry White songs.
“Though it be very rhubarb to me,” said Corund, “shall I say nay to thee this tide, my queen?” [ch 31]
Was ever a man more romantic? Truth is, Eddison is much happier describing the bed than he is anything that might happen in the bed.
Wondrous fair was the great four-posted bed of the Lord Juss, builded of solid gold, and hung with curtains of dark-blue tapestry whereon were figured sleep-flowers. The canopy above the bed was a mosaic of tiny stones, jet, serpentine, dark hyacinth, black marble, bloodstone, and lapis lazuli, so confounded in a maze of altering hue and lustre that they might mock the palpitating sky of night. And therein was the likeness of the constellation of Orion, the stars whereof, like those beneath the golden canopy in the presence chamber, were jewels shining of their own light, yet with a milder radiance, as glow-worms’ sheen or dead wood glimmering in the dark. For Betelgeuze was a ruby shining, and a diamond for Rigel, and pale topazes for the other stars. The four posts of the bed were of the thickness of a man’s arm in their upper parts, but their lower parts great as his waist and carven in the image of birds and beasts: at the foot of the bed a lion for courage and an owl for wisdom, and at the head an alaunt for faithfulness of heart and a kingfisher for happiness. On the cornice of the bed and on the panels above the pillow against the wall were carved deeds of derring-do. To the right of the bed stood a table with old books of songs and books of the stars and of herbs and beasts and travellers’ tales … Windows opened to the west and south, and on each window-ledge stood a bowl of palest jade filled with white roses; and the air entering the bed-chamber was laden with their scent.
Some bed! Rest assured, my Tripadvisor review will score this rental highly.
The titular worm is not a monster that appears in the story, so much as a description of the story. After initial setbacks in their war against the Witches, and various adventures and quests, the heroic Demon princes rally and finally defeat their foe in a great final battle. Many die in the process, but when victory is finally achieved and the Witches utterly destroyed, the Demons are not happy. The beautiful and immortal Queen Sophonisba, whose magic helped the Demons triumph, is amazed:
On a sudden Lord Brandoch d’AHA!! stood up, unbuckling from his shoulder his golden baldrick set with apricot-coloured sapphires and diamonds and fire-opals that imaged thunderbolts. He threw it before him on the table, with his sword, clattering among the cups. “O Queen Sophonisba,” said he, “thou hast spoken a fit funeral dirge for our glory as for Witchland’s.” And Lord Juss spake and said, “We may well cast down our swords as a last offering on Witchland’s grave. For now must they rust: seamanship and all high arts of war must wither: and, now that our great enemies are dead and gone, we that were lords of all the world must turn shepherds and hunters, lest we become mere mountebanks and fops, fit fellows for the chambering Beshtrians or the Red Foliot. O Queen Sophonisba … weep ye, and weep again, and clothe you all in black, thinking that our mightiest feats of arms and the high southing of the bright star of our magnificence should bring us unto timeless ruin. Thinking that we, that fought but for fighting’s sake, have in the end fought so well we never may fight more; unless it should be in fratricidal rage each against each. And ere that should betide, may earth close over us and our memory perish.”
The Queen replies: ‘Strangely it soundeth in mine ear to hear you mourn and lament your worst enemies, at so great hazard of your lives and all you held dear, struck down by you at last.’ Can’t they, she suggests, take ‘enjoyment and noble deeds of peace for you all your days, who are young and noble and lords of all the world and rich in every treasure and high gifts of learning, and the fairest country in the world for your dear native land.’ Or fight other foes: ‘And if your swords must not rust, ye may bear them against the uncivil races of Impland and other distant countries to bring them to subjection.’ But the Demon princes aren’t having any of this:
Lord Goldry Bluszco laughed bitterly. “O Queen,” he cried, “shall the correction of feeble savages content these swords, which have warred against the house of Gorice and against all his chosen captains that upheld the great power of Carcë and the glory and the fear thereof?”
And Spitfire said, “What joy shall we have of soft beds and delicate meats and all the delights that be in many-mountained Demonland, if we must be stingless drones, with no action to sharpen our appetite for ease?”
And so the magical queen gives the Demon lords what they wish for: she folds back time such that they can fight their war against the Witches all over again. Eddison pulls a very nice twist here, with the novel ending at the place it began: ‘the serving man returned with startled countenance, and, bowing before Lord Juss, said, “Lord, it is an Ambassador from Witchland and his train. He craveth present audience.”’
The great Worm of time bites its own tail. An appendix gives us a calendar from which we learn that ‘the action of the story covers exactly four years: from the 22nd April 399 to 22nd April 403 a.c.c.’, where ‘A.C.C.’ stands for Anno Carces Conditae, a play on the Roman dating convention Ab Urbe Condita (that is, ‘from the founding of the City’). Eddison’s Latin, by pluralizing ‘condita’, tells us that Carcë has been founded not once but multiple times. Round and round we go, from Spring to Spring. Erp! Erp!
