The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison (nonfiction book recommendations TXT) đź“•
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The Worm Ouroboros is considered to be one of the foundational texts of the high fantasy genre, influencing later authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Ursula K. Leguin, and James Branch Cabell. It is most frequently compared to The Lord of the Rings in its epic scope set against a medieval, magic-laced backdrop—a world called “Middle Earth” by Eddison, thirty-two years before Tolkien’s—and in its almost mythical portrayal of larger-than-life heroes and villains.
The plot begins simply enough: The Lords of Demonland, a group of heroic warriors enjoying a strained peace, are called upon by an emissary of the warlock king of Witchland, Gorice XI. The emissary demands that Demonland submit to the King of Witchland—but the proud Demons refuse, setting off an epic war that spans their entire world. The heroic struggles of the Demons and their allies against the Witches reflect the circular nature of human history: the snake eating its own tail of the title.
The novel is written in a purposefully archaic, almost Jacobean style. The rich, surprising vocabulary and unusual spelling are testaments to Eddison’s expertise at reading and translating medieval-era texts. To this day, it remains perhaps unique in fantasy literature in the accuracy and precision of its highly affected prose style, perhaps matched only by the out-of-time strangeness of the prose in Hodgson’s The Night Land. But where critics often find The Night Land’s prose obtuse and difficult, they have nothing but praise for Eddison’s beautiful, quotable style.
Eddison had already imagined the story and its heroes as a child, and drawings he made as a youth of events in the book are preserved in the Bodleian library. While the novel is without a doubt the work of a mature and skilled writer, and while some of the events and characters are portrayed differently in the novel than they were in his youthful sketches, the names of many of the characters and places remain unchanged. Some of his contemporaries, like Tolkien, wondered about the strange naming style; others criticized it as taking away from the more serious subject matter.
The Worm Ouroboros remains one of the most influential works in the high fantasy genre to this day, and traces of the foundation it laid can be still be found in genre books a century after its publication.
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- Author: E. R. Eddison
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So saying, she reined up her horse’s head and turned down westward towards the firth. Heming watched her an instant, his brain a-reel. Then, striking spurs to his horse’s flanks so that the horse reared and plunged, he rode away at a great pace east again through the woods to Krothering.
XXV Lord Gro and the Lady MevrianHow the Lord Gro, conducted by a strange enamourment with lost causes, fared with none save this to be his guide into the regions of Neverdale, and there beheld wonders, and tasted again for a season the goodness of those things he did most desire.
Ninety days and a day after these doings aforesaid, in the last hour before the dawn, was the Lord Gro a-riding toward the paling east down from the hills of Eastmark to the fords of Mardardale. At a walking pace his horse came down to the waterside, and halted with fetlocks awash: his flanks were wet and his wind gone, as from swift faring on the open fell since midnight. He stretched down his neck, sniffed the fresh river-water, and drank. Gro turned in the saddle, listening, his left hand thrown forward to slack the reins, his right flat-planted on the crupper. But nought there was to hear save the babble of waters in the shallows, the sucking noise of the horse drinking, and the plash and crunch of his hooves when he shifted feet among the pebbles. Before and behind and on either hand the woods and strath and circling hills showed dim in the obscure gray betwixt darkness and twilight. A light mist hid the stars. Nought stirred save an owl that flitted like a phantom out from a holly-bush in a craggy bluff a bow-shot or more down stream, crossing Gro’s path and lighting on a branch of a dead tree above him on the left, where she sat as if to observe the goings of this man and horse that trespassed in this valley of quiet night.
Gro leaned forward to pat his horse’s neck. “Come, gossip, we must on,” he said; “and marvel not if thou find no rest, going with me which could never find any steadfast stay under the moon’s globe.” So they forded that river, and fared through low rough grasslands beyond, and by the skirts of a wood up to an open heath, and so a mile or two, still eastward, till they turned to the right down a broad valley and crossed a river above a watersmeet, and so east again up the bed of a stony stream and over this to a rough mountain track that crossed some boggy ground and then climbed higher and higher above the floor of the narrowing valley to a pass between the hills. At length the slope slackened, and they passing, as through a gateway, between two high mountains which impended sheer and stark on either hand, came forth upon a moor of ling and bog-myrtle, strewn with lakelets and abounding in streams and moss-hags and outcrops of the living rock; and the mountain peaks afar stood round that moorland waste like warrior kings. Now was colour waking in the eastern heavens, the bright shining morning beginning to clear the earth. Conies scurried to cover before the horse’s feet: small birds flew up from the heather: some red deer stood at gaze in the fern, then tripped away southward: a moorcock called.
Gro said in himself, “How shall not common opinion account me mad, so rash and presumptuous dangerously to put my life in hazard? Nay, against all sound judgement; and this folly I enact in that very season when by patience and courage and my politic wisdom I had won that in despite of fortune’s teeth which obstinately hitherto she had denied me: when after the brunts of diverse tragical fortunes I had marvellously gained the favour and grace of the King, who very honourably placed me in his court, and tendereth me, I well think, so dearly as he doth the balls of his two eyes.”
He put off his helm, baring his white forehead and smooth black curling locks to the airs of morning, flinging back his head to drink deep through his nostrils the sweet strong air and its peaty smell. “Yet is common opinion the fool, not I,” he said. “He that imagineth after his labours to attain unto lasting joy, as well may he beat water in a mortar. Is there not in the wild benefit of nature instances enow to laugh this folly out of fashion? A fable of great men that arise and conquer the nations: Day goeth up against the tyrant night. How delicate a spirit is she, how like a fawn she footeth it upon the mountains: pale pitiful light matched with the primaeval dark. But every sweet hovers in her battalions, and every heavenly influence: coolth of the wayward little winds of morning, flowers awakening, birds a-carol, dews a-sparkle on the fine-drawn webs the tiny spinners hang from fern-frond to thorn, from thorn to wet dainty leaf of the silver birch; the young day laughing in her strength, wild with her own beauty; fire and life and every scent and colour born anew to triumph over chaos and slow darkness and the kinless night.
“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.”
So brooding he rode at an easy pace
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