The Worm Ouroboros by e.r. eddison

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Puanım 4/5 (%79/100)

Genel olarak beğendim ama kitabın uzunluğu ve epik fantezi oluşu beni okurken yordu. Kitap ilk 1922 çıkmış ve Eddison İskandinav mitolojisi başta olmak üzere (kitabın isminden belli) birçok şeyden esinlenmiş. Epik fantezi türünde ve bazı yönleriyle Odysseia'yı da hatırlatıyor kitap. Ama şiirsel oluşu aynı zamanda Shakespeare'e de bir gönderme olmuş. Tolkien başta olmak üzere birçok yazarı etkileyen bir kitap ve yazar. İskandinav mitolojisine ilgi duyan ve bilgili olduğunu düşünen birisi olarak ufak tefek mitolojik göndermeleri yakalamak güzeldi. Ourobos yılanı sonsuz döngüyü temsil ediyor ve kitabın başından sonuna aslında bu gözlemlenebiliyor. Kitabın sonu bu döngü temasını çok güzel işlemiş, o yüzden oldukça hoşuma gitti.

Ben bulamadım ama yazarın Merkür'ü mekan olarak seçmesini de ilginç buldum. Gezegenle bir alakası yok, tamamen fantastik bir mekan ama neden Merkür? Belki Roma tanrısı Merkür (Yunan mitolojisinde Hermes) hoşuna gittiği içindir çünkü mitolojiden etkilendiği bariz belli. Son olarak böyle detaylı bir fantastik dünya görmeyeli baya olmuştu. Kitabın sonunda tarihçe bile bulunuyor. Eddison gerçekten detaylı ve etkileyici bir dünya yaratmış ve özellikle fantastik edebiyata ilgi duyanlar ondan sonra gelenlerde Eddison'ın etkisini görecektir (bknz. Tolkien, Le Guin). Öneriyorum kesinlikle!

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AoiMemori

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

This is billed as the book that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien, & I get that. It also deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as E.R. Burroughs, with the Planetary Romance angle-- it's sort of like the lovechild of A Princess of Mars & the Silmarillion. Needless to say, I adored it. --MK

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sesami

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

I loved this when I read it 20 years ago, and I loved it all over again with knobs on when I re-read it last year to record it as a free audiobook for librivox (listen here). It's a magnificent fantasy, peopled by larger-than-larger-than-life characters who engage in impossible deeds, tumultuous wars and high adventure. It's written in prose of opulent splendour and it's a soaring, glorious and wildly original work.

On the other hand:

* The apparent protagonist is simply abandoned by the author about 50 pages in.

* It's set, oddly, on Mercury, but its habitat and peoples are perfectly Earth-like.

* The nations are eccentrically named (Demonland, Impland, Witchland, etc) even thought they're essentially all populated by humans.

* The wonderful prose style will be off-putting to those seeking a lighter read.

These little foibles do not impact significantly on this reader. It's a classic and a masterpiece. (And if you read it and agree, seek out his tragically incomplete Zimiamvia trilogy. Woof!)

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BigPPFumiya

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Originally published on my blog here in February 2001.

Often touted as a rival to The Lord of the Rings, Eddison's epic fantasy has more in common with the large scale of The Silmarillion. Eddison wrote four loosely linked novels while working as a civil servant, of which The Worm Ouroboros is the first and best known. Its subject is a war between the Demons and Witches, the latter aided by a willingness to act dishonourably and by the dread sorcery of their king, Gorice XII.

The flaws in The Worm Ouroboros are fairly obvious, particularly at the beginning of the novel. The strangest is a narrator, who is very dull and who is even forgotten by Eddison after a couple of chapters. It is symptomatic of a more general fault, which is a lack of revision. Unlike Tolkien's writing, The Worm Ouroboros is clearly not the product of years of obsessive rewriting, background notes and singleminded vision. It reads far more as though it were written down in one sitting. There are problems with details of the background. Like Tolkien, Eddison uses familiar names from folklore for his peoples; there are Demons, Witches, Imps and so on. However, with the exception of the Ghouls, these all appear to be nations of human beings, and the result is that the reader is torn between the traditional ideas conjured up by these names and the way in which Eddison portrays them. Tolkien's dwarves and elves are far more like their traditional namesakes, and this is a lead which has been followed by just about every fantasy writer since.

The whole story of the novel, we are told, is set on the planet Mercury, and this also gives a bizarre feeling; a magical realm works much metter in a mythical setting like Middle Earth.

There is one aspect of the way in which Eddison uses pieces of the real world which works extremely well. In most fantasy novels, when poetry occurs, it is usually a poor imitation of some sort of heroic sage, derived via models like William Morris and Tolkien from medieval sources. What Eddison does is to find poetry which fits with the style of his writing and the situation; this means that it is written by poets like Shakespeare and Spenser and is a pleasure to read rather than something to skip.

The Worm Ouroboros has many excellent qualities; once you get into to it, it is quite compelling. It is imaginative and literary, if a bit lacking in planning and structure. However, it did not grip the world's imagination as the less poetic Tolkien did, and so did not provide the inspiration to hundreds of imitators that The Lord of the Rings has, with the result that it remains something of a curiousity in a forgotten corner of the fantasy genre.

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will2free

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

The prose is positively ultraviolet, there are plot holes big enough to march an army through, the author has an exceedingly poor grasp on the concept that women are people, and occasionally a nasty racist stereotype hits you over the head. At a bare minimum it desperately needed another pass by a good editor. It had a certain propulsive energy that kept me reading to the end, but I don't recommend the experience.

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ILoveMFDOOM

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

The Worm Ouroboros is a fanciful, frilly and extravagant fairy tale written in an elaborate baroque style… And it is a real gold placer of the archaic and rare bookish words…
One night the romantic narrator of the saga boards a chariot driven by hippogriffs and departs to the dream world of Mercury… Straight into the castle of Lord Juss, the mighty sovereign of Demonland… And a tiny martlet – a mythical heraldic birdie – is his guide…

…and the first low beams of the sun smote javelinlike through the eastern windows, and the freshness of morning breathed and shimmered in that lofty chamber, chasing the blue and dusky shades of departed night to the corners and recesses, and to the rafters of the vaulted roof. Surely no potentate of earth, not Croesus, not the great King, not Minos in his royal palace in Crete, not all the Pharaohs, not Queen Semiramis, nor all the Kings of Babylon and Nineveh had ever a throne room to compare in glory with that high presence chamber of the lords of Demonland.

Demons are valorous and noble warriors… But there is a powerful enemy… The greatest villain – the sinister king of Witchland – perfidious and heartless… And he craves to rule the entire dream world…

A furnace glowing in the big hearth threw fitful gleams into the recesses of the chamber, lighting up strange shapes of glass and earthenware, flasks and retorts, balances, hour-glasses, crucibles and astrolabes, a monstrous three-necked alembic of phosphorescent glass supported on a bain-marie, and other instruments of doubtful and unlawful aspect. Under the northern window over against the doorway was a massive table blackened with age, whereon lay great books bound in black leather with iron guards and heavy padlocks. And in a mighty chair beside this table was King Gorice XII, robed in his conjuring robe of black and gold, resting his cheek on his hand that was lean as an eagle’s claw. The low light, mother of shade and secrecy, that hovered in that chamber moved about the still figure of the King, his nose hooked as the eagle’s beak, his cropped hair, his thick close-cut beard and shaven upper lip, his high cheek-bones and cruel heavy jaw, and the dark eaves of his brows whence the glint of green eyes showed as no friendly lamp to them without.

Villainy… Machinations… Collusions… Treachery… Carnage… The tale is a chronicle of war… The merciless war with all its horrors, sorrows, ravaging and harrying…
While the timeless and mysterious wyrm Ouroboros holds the whole dream world in mystical thrall…

“This is a great wonder thou tellest me; whereof some little part I guessed aforetime, but the main I knew not. Rightfully, having such a timeless life, this King weareth on his thumb that worm Ouroboros which doctors have from of old made for an ensample of eternity, whereof the end is ever at the beginning and the beginning at the end for ever more.”

The eternal battle of good and evil continues even in dreams.

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landyboi

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

This book has the best ending ever. Well, one of my favourites, at least.

It's only when one gets to the end of The Worm Ouroboros that one learns what the story is really all about and can glean some kind of understand thing that there are some thoughtful underpinnings to Eddison's otherwise brashly heroic tale, that's brashly modelled on a range of sources with it's overtly ornate mock-Jacobean prose, snippets of classic poetry and larger than life but strangely one-dimensional heroes and villains.

The clue is in the title, but there's a wonderful red-herring, since Eddison leads the reader to believe that the Ouroboros - the one that will be continually reborn - is King Gorice and that his evil will perhaps never be thwarted. That's partially true, but Eddison's smarter conceit is that the heroes wish for him to be reborn and that they want the fight to continue forever since without they are lost. It's only when we understand this is it possible to appreciate how the book links in with storytelling and traditional narrative and even why the Lessingham framing device is important. As readers of fantasy stories we are all wannabee heroes, like Juss, Brandoch and Goldry, desiring to read about and take part in heroic exploits over and over to the extent that, once the story is over, we wish it reborn. If what happens in the real-world is finite, what happens in stories and the imagination is potentially infinite.

There's also, of course, a less romantic reading of the ending that gives it a harsher, more cynical edge that speaks to humanities insatiable appetite for war and sees these heroes as encompassing both the best and worst aspects of our humanity. If one puts this idea alongside the other, then it muddies the concept of reading heroic narrative in a quite brilliant way.

On another level, this book is just awesome because it has fantastic prose, great scenarios, characters and battles. It's nonstop excitement that doesn't really falter from page one, with the action taken to levels beyond most - later - fantasy works through the power of Eddison's amazingly colourful descriptions that I simply never tire of reading. The book is at its height when Juss and Brandoch head out to Koshtra Pivrarcha and Koshtra Belorn to rescue Juss's brother Goldry, the narrative taking on a dreamlike, magical quality (almost hallucinogenic at one point) whioch really recalled the Arthurian quest for the holy grail to my mind. If nothing else in the story could top this, the continual descriptions of battles or in-court feuding or general sense of wonder, regardless, never ceases.

This is often described as a flawed masterpiece. That may be true, but I love it regardless and it remains one of my favourite books after re-reading it for the first time in 10+ years. The Worm Ouroboros is one of the first modern day ambitious fantasy epics - even though it has an old-school heart - and, beyond being highly influential, it's still one of the most readable and one of the best.

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AquarionLife

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Had to put it down after 150 pages. I was thrilled in the beginning with the langorous prose style and similarities to the Icelandic Sagas. That thrill wore off as Eddison spent more and more time describing physical locations and the characters took on an odd similarity to each other. There was only one engaging character and he was seen only sporadically after the first 50 pages, totally unlike the one Icelandic Saga I read (Egil's Saga) which was stuffed with unique and vibrant personalities.

Despite its troubles, Eddison was able to throw down some amazing paragraphs that really burn the brain with their brilliance. Unfortunately these scenes were surrounded by tedium.

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The Zimiamvian Trilogy #0

The Worm Ouroboros

e.r. eddison

This edition

Barganax Duke Of Zayana

Horius Parry Vicar Of Rerek

Edward Lessingham

Lady Fiorinda

King Mezentius

Gorice Xii

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About the author

e.r. eddison

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